artisanal thinking

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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Chocolate Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.