artisanal thinking

And at present, the status of chocolate making is and must remain a hobby. A couple friends had previously extended proxy offers from their mothers to sell my chocolate at work, but I didn’t exactly view that as commerce on, say, the Wal-Mart scale. However, there was a stuggle last week in which business, attacking on three fronts, attempted to overtake avocation.

The first offensive was mounted by a fresh new local stretching studio, Amara Yoga & Arts, who asked me to supply their Mala Yoga Day event—the centerpiece of which was the performance on the part of the participants, of one hundred eight sun salutations—with some excessively refined Daniel Harry Schreiber Chocolate, for postsalulatory salivatory stimulation. I originally heard of the Mala day at a potluck about a month ago where one of the yoga organizers said she had heard about my chocolate operation and was really interesting in involving it in their event. I was still on my second or third batch, and so I was extremely flattered that my name was already being passed around. In addition, I had not yet begun to sell any bars, so when they said that they were a new studio and probably couldn’t pay for chocolate, in a passionate moment, I agreed to donate whatever they needed.

I have to admit that later, I was a little worried about my rashness. As I mentioned at the end of an earlier post, I’ve been in the red for almost all of my batches so far, and am still red overall. Though chocolate making is a hobby, not a business, I’d still like to sustain whatever it is, which implies that I cannot lose money indefinitely. In any case, I got scared and reneged on part of my offer, explaining I couldn’t donate to Amara more than a small amount. They graciously agreed to buy the rest for a reasonable price.

So on Sunday, September 20th I set out with several pounds of chocolate, a plate and silver tea tray for presentation, and plenty of newly printed, hand drawn and scanned business (or hobby?!) cards for distribution. At 9:30 I arrived and broke up one and one quarter pounds of chocolate into tasting squares, following which at 10am I and about 15 other loosely clothed semi-limber folks embarked on a century plus eight journey with no purpose but to welcome the sun. Our guides, Maggie Taylor and Lauren Quinn led us wonderfully and kept count of each salutation by moving a bean from a cup to a bowl. Every 27 iterations, we paused to catch our breath and reflect, and after about 2 hours, we saluted our last. Tous le monde was ready for chocolate at that point, and judging from the girl who filled her cupped hand with pieces of Panamanian product, I did not disappoint.

I was happy, everybody was happy, needless to say, I recommend that you put your yoga hat on here. At Amara, the boss, Theresa Brandabur told me that she was interested in future yoga and chocolate interactions and even selling some bars at the studio! Extremely flattering and excellent to know, this adds fervor to the coup being forged by business.

A Harvest of Bacon and Nibs

To the veggies reading this blog: skip this section!

Several months ago I received a kickstart from a man I’ve recently gained a high respect for—Champaign’s local meat tenderizer, our sausage stuffer and pork puller—Laurence Mate of This Little Piggy. In exchange for his generous donation, I offered him a quarter pound each of Panamanian and Peruvian nibs. Not content to nibble, he opened his mouth wide and surprised me by crafting these ingredients into cacao-covered bacon! Bacon is often described as meat candy, but Laurence’s maple-cured, orange zest and cinnamon spiced, sweet/salty/smoky slabs are most definitely more delicious and refined than any Snickers or Newman-O I’ve ever tried. I would prefer to call this symphony of complex cacao rashers downright meat ecstasy.

But, what do theobromated-porcine anomalies have to do with my industrial conflict? Nothing really, except that when Laurence sent me an email last week describing the cure of his bacon, he mentioned that Mohammed, who runs my favorite olive emporium, World Harvest, was interested in tasting my chocolate…with possible commercial applications. I still haven’t gone over to chat with them, but again, I was very flattered, though getting a little nervous that interest in this biz was reaching a peak, and I wasn’t ready to respond to it. I plan to go there on Monday, and I’ll be sure to post (eventually) about what happens.

Acknowledgment of Legitimacy, or the Other Side of the Equation?

The most exciting offer came from Lisa Bralts-Kelly who sent me an unexpected email after sampling some chocolate I cold-sold to another farmer’s market denizen—Urbana’s public arts coordinator, Anna Hochhalter (I’ve been teasing Anna that I am writing a blog post about her, I don’t know if she’ll be disappointed, but she is a really good sport about this and being approached with chocolate, so I highly recommend you check out her official public arts website). Lisa described my chocolate as ‘WHOA’, and asked whether I would be interested in selling at the market next season! I thought this was unbelievable and I relished it as an acknowledgment of the legitimate interest in what I am doing. When retelling this story at a Computer Science party, one entrepreneurially minded CSer suggested that maybe her interest lay not so much in selling my product, but in selling me hers…however, this cynicism I refuse to accept!

Déjà vu, I was extremely flattered by Lisa’s offer, yet for multitudes of reasons, I am not currently a professional chocolate maker. But I do like theory. So I’ve recently been exploring in my mind what it would take and what it would mean to scale production and process to a point where it is not just extremely fun, but even when counting my labor, it is economically viable to make and sell chocolate.

This blog post is long overdue, so I won’t post right now about the exciting labels I’ve been collaborating with several designers on or other interesting chocolate aficionados I’ve been interacting with, but I’ll leave you with two challenges to professional chocolate. One way of scaling production is to gather multiple tens of thousands in investments and buy a set of equipment suitable not for the hobby-chocolate-maker, but the small-scale-artisanal-chocolate-maker. Conversely, my preferred method of escalation is to think, ‘I’m craftier and smarter than that,’ take my low thousands of dollars, head to the store to buy pvc pipes, shop vacs, heat lamps and thermostats, and see if we can build a winnower and incubator. These machines do not seem to be that complex, I think with experimentation and some mechanical engineering expertise, construction is possible.

Besides the trial of capital or craft in procuring more serious equipment, the second hurdle is to find a space to do this stuff in. My room, basement and kitchen can moonlight as a chocolate factory for only so long. There is the hard constraint that to legally sell to the public (and obtain, say, a farmer’s market booth), one must produce one’s food products in a health certified kitchen. I just promised to wait for another post, but I’ll say that I’ve been exploring and talking to people about restaurant kitchens, coop kitchens or other upstart food factories that could lend a hand (or a permit!).

Indeed, and when at 5pm I arrived at home to find a lumpy burlap sack containing 50kg of fair-trade, organic, Panamanian cacao from the Cooperativa de Cacao Bocatorena sitting inconspicuously on my porch, I giggled and felt the commencement of my attack on Hershey, Nestlé, Cargill and all producers of industrial crap. I refuse to be bound by girlfriend, spouse, even pets…but so happily committed to the idea of chocolate, I am, that I recited my vows by investing in a $650 sack of fermented, dried seeds. I have no idea how the UPS guy got this thing up the steps and onto my porch, but I chuckled again that something so valuable was sitting outside for all the cacao-snipers and ruffians of Urbana to haul away and process themselves…perhaps an unfounded concern. But I see the beauty in this object, and girding my loins, I squatted down, wrapped my arms width-wise ’round this sweet smelling babe, then waddled up the stairs to my second-floor cacao storage chambers set her down heavily and sighed with relief.

I had forgotten to bring a camera with which to preserve and encase my excitement in bit-form, but mindfully I noted my fugacious fervor. While racing my bike back to work, I noticed that I’d been shed on, my bear hug with the cacao bag had left a jute imprint on my chest. When I returned to Siebel and told all of the new member of my family, I took a proud picture of the only chest hair I’ve ever known…or at least what hadn’t blown off while on the bike.

I feel a little ridiculous, but maybe it is not as uncommon as I think for sacks of beans to be delivered to student apartments…coffee roasters? I also feel ridiculous because I don’t really know what to do with this sack. I’m not sure how I’m going to store it, how to handle and take beans from it, and whether I really will make it through this thing. I worry that the tectonic pressure will build, and in some period of trouble with my chocolate making process, I’ll slip into some moment of clarity with the thought, ‘You’re a student. What do you hope to accomplish with 110lbs of cacao?’

In any case, the batch of Peruvian chocolate I molded on Sunday will, for the near future, be my last from that origin. Assuming my current rate of consumption, I am de facto an maker exclusively of Panamanian chocolate for the next 18-20 weeks. I have some plans for this cacao—one particularly exciting prospect is to make some Nutella which is not 50% sugar and 22% crappy-for-you fat. I plan to post recounting my research on pasta gianduja soon, but I will say that the main impediment to this experiment is to locate some bulk (but not 50lb bulk) quantities of whole milk powder. Attaining that would also open the doors to milk chocolate, white chocolate, ev’ry kinda chocolate!

This sack is a sea change and I am giddy yet nervous, but I hope the progress of our cacao, upon which all else chiefly depends, is now as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, I venture to predict kgs upon kgs of theobromian artisanry.

Lab Report

Yes, I am out of Peruvian cacao, finishing a small final batch last weekend. I took the opportunity to test a couple ideas, both of which were low on the success scale, which of course made them good experiments. The first was a chili and cinnamon bar that I’ve been putting off after my earlier troubles with mixing things into melted chocolate. As a friend was eating scrap fondue, he asked what was the red-brown powder sitting next to him, and I shared my plans for the spicy bar. I was again going let discretion overtake valor and defer this powder to another day, but prodded, I decided to try incorporating the powder as I had been doing nuts and sprinkled some cinnamon and Tiny Greens chilies onto the back of a bar I was molding. I tried to press the mixture into the chocolate a bit so that it would stick, but that doesn’t really work for tiny peppers and powders. I haven’t actually tasted this bar yet, but the presentation is not quite what I was going for and most of the cinnamon fell of the bar when I demolded it.

For my next amazing experiment I wanted to try making some kind of peanut butter bar, and I don’t mean like these. I’m not exactly sure what would happen if you mixed peanut butter and chocolate before molding, but I think the high fat content of peanut butter would inhibit the cocoa butter in my chocolate from crystallizing correctly, and we would end up with something squishy rather than snappy—not really a bar, more a spread. I had some other ideas, but I ended up just seeing what would happen if I dropped globs of peanut butter in the bottom of a mold and then pouring chocolate on top. I ended up with some kind of swiss-cheese bar, where the peanut butter (big surprise!) did not magically firm up and attach to the bar, but when demolding, it sat stubbornly in the mold and I held in my hands a greasy peanut cratered chocolate bar. Embarrassed, I put the bar back in the mold and resolved to deal with it later. I think I’ll just scrape out the peanut butter and eat it with the chocolate, which should taste really good, but, I need to go back to the drawing board for a peanut butter infused chocolate bar.

Call for Participation

With an open source ethic, I try to involve people in chocolate making when I can, and share all the information and recipes otherwise. I certainly don’t have all the creativity when it comes to interesting things to stick in chocolate, so I happily solicit the opinions of the readers of this blog as to what they’d like to see in the back of a bar. Share!

I’m happy to report a partial solution to my earlier troubles with tempered, cooling chocolate. The ceramic baking dish I grabbed for $2 from homeworks is reatining enough heat to successfully mold almost all of a 6lb batch. When there is only about 8 ounces of chocolate left in the dish, it cools quickly just because of its small volume, but prior to that, my chocolate remained workable for up to an hour, sufficient time to do my work. I think a melamine or thick plastic bowl would be even better, but ol’ blue is fine until I find something else on the cheap. Truly, my 7th batch, Panama again, tempered and molded well, and I celebrated by: in the morning—inviting people over to scrape the scrap chocolate in our grinder with bread and apples. In the evening—inviting more over to share wine and food (and chocolate!), followed by a wrapping party assembly line featuring me cutting foil and waxed paper, Phil wrapping bars in foil, Jay and Juan cutting and wrapping with colored paper, finally Leonardo, Minas and Keihly labeling the bars with designs of their own inspiration. Fondue and wrapping parties are really fun and since the process is returning to its groove, I will continue partying at the end of each batch.

My groove is shallow and imperfect, but it is what I am currently capable of. What can we do to further improve the process and our bars of chocolate? Some primary concerns right now are the physical molds I have, the way molded chocolate is cooled and what we do with bars after they come out of the molds. There are two grades of molds one can buy, ‘hobby’ and ‘professional’. Hobby molds are made from PETG, a copolymerization of PET plastic, the stuff soda bottles are made of. The main issue with these molds is that they are thin, they flex—when I fill a tray of molds with chocolate, the middle mold will sag a bit. The bars I’ve been producing, then, are not rectangular boxes in 3d, they are the bases of extremely shallow parabolae. I’ve also read that the final chocolate hobby molds produce is not as glossy-shiny as molds from more rigid, higher grade plastic. You may recall that well-tempered chocolate contracts slightly as it cools, and as a result, most of the area of every bar pulls away from the mold. Then when turned over, they just fall out. In my case, there are usually a couple of concentric rings where perhaps because of sagging and thus increased pressure in a region of the mold, the chocolate does not contract and cool away from the mold, but is flush and has a ’stuck on’ look in contact with the mold. When I demold, these rings stay slightly more matte than the rest of the bar, a flaw.

For the serious and respectable chocolatier, molds come in only one variety, ‘professional.’ These thicker molds are made from polycarbonate, a durable substance which can be used to make bullet-proof glass, cds or the case of the previous generation of apple laptops. When using polycarbonate, there would not be any parabolic geometry, there should not be my matte-finish rings, and possibly there would be an even higher sheen overall, perfect for creating chocolate … mirrors. The advantage price-wise, as in all things, goes to the hobbies. A tray of molds holds close to three-quarters of a pound, making my collection of 9 molds enough for 6 pounds of chocolate, about my current batch size. I spent about $50 buying hobby molds from the home chocolate-maker supply store—I could have gotten away even cheaper if I had ordered from the mold manufacturers. Unfortunately, to upgrade all these to professional versions would be in the hundreds of dollars.

I was recently chastised for not coming up with enough areas for improvement in the technique of chocolate making, referring instead to polycarbonate molds, holding tanks, grinders… the never ending supply of upgradeable toys that can consume any hobby. I feel slightly as a photographer with chipped lens, that a new Leica would be an objective improvement and justifiable upgrade, but what we’ll actually do is try to give my equipment some more love. A simple solution to my saggy-molds would just be a stack of paper used as a shim to support the underside of the mold—I intend to put my molds on a pedestal, elevating them and the quality of the bars.

Subtleties in Handling Any Equipment, Hobby or Otherwise

There are more minutial concerns with how we’re cooling the molded chocolate. One must keep in mind that when it enters the fridge (or for commercial makers, ‘the cooling tunnel’), the 85F chocolate is a flowing liquid. That means that if they trays are not placed on a level surface, for instance if when trying to maximize space usage, one side of the tray rests atop a notch where the fridge rack attaches to the side…if they are not level, chocolate will flow just a bit to the lower side of the mold. Then we have not just parabolically shaped ‘bars,’ but truncated pyramid-parabolic bars, where one side is thicker, one side thinner. All of this unique geometry leads to interesting situations wrapping the bars where the paper band will only fit around the foil-wrapped bar under a specific orientation. Some gracious folks have commented that this spontaneity is what you would expect and possibly desire from an experimental craft chocolate maker, but I would at least like to refine my process, improve my technique and intimate knowledge of my tools to the point where I can choose whether to be pyramidal or rectangular.

Because we work extremely hard making well-tempered, smoothly molded, unsaggy and rectangular bars, we must be extremely careful in handling them after taking them out of the fridge and eventually demolding them. Originally I would take a couple of large plastic bags, collect my bars from the molds and then put them in little stacks 3 or 4 high filling the area of the bag. Inevitably this leads to collisions among the bars causing scratches and powder to collect on them, deglossing and mattefying the surface which through tempering and careful molding I had worked hard to achieve! For the last wrapping party, which was held six hours after I finished cooling the bars, I took the molds out of the fridge, wrapped each tray in a bag, and put those in my chocolate cellar in the basement. This way we demolded the bars just as we were about to wrap them, and we could ensure they would look snazzy. We’ll eventually start using gloves as well when we are wrapping the bars so that we don’t scuff the surface with fingerprints. When I unwrap a bar, I want it to pop, not have a powdery handprint on it!

Final Update for Now

On the business side of things, and I’ve certainly been busy…after batch #7, I took my flock to Siebel for cold storage and stacked up 26 two-ouncers, 15 one-ouncers, three licorice bars, one each of almond, nib and plain dark bars, plus some older Peruvian dark bars. Last night I witnessed a sequence of rapid-fire 20 slide, 20 seconds per slide presentations from the ‘local creative class’: Pecha Kucha. I saw some cool quilts, theoretical illustrations, thoughts on the ’stuff’ of art, stories from the knitting circle, and thoughts on hocking old stuff. My moment in the sun came during the intermissions and at the after party while I was mingling, trying to get people to try samples of my chocolate and asking for their support in the form of a mutually beneficial transaction. I made a repeat experiment in direct sales this morning at the Urbana Farmer’s Market. Sometimes, when extending my hand, shouting, “HI! I’m Dan! … Do you like chocolate?”, and reaching into my backpack for the samples bag—I give someone a good freak out…but the rest of the time, it is really fabulous fun.