artisanal thinking

This might explain why I feel compelled to do something different with each batch—I certainly try to keep things interesting for you chocolate lovers! As I wrote previously, the latest idea for inclusions came in Phoenix, munching dried apricots dipped in almond butter—trail snacks leftover from the Grand Canyon. This combination goes especially well in some moderately dark (you know…80%) Panamanian chocolate, because of the complimentary notes of apricot hidden in the terroir of the beans. While I don’t want to go all the way to tiny pieces mixed invisibly into the bar, I’m not sure if my rough hand at chopping the fruit and nuts is the best, when perhaps a finer mince would lead to improved mouthfeel and more ubiquitous flavor distribution—connoisseurs of the apricot+almond bar are welcomed advise.

Experiments with the other half of Bean to Bonbon

But the prospect of making only pure dark and posteriorly placed inclusion bars no longer excites me to the extreme degree it once did. Therefore to try my hand at something new, in this batch (the 25th!) I reserved the last of my cubes of Bill’s salted caramel and a pool of chocolate for submersible purposes. I don’t own and didn’t know at the time about the proper equipment—chocolate dipping forks. So I found two skewers in my kitchen and coated the caramel on the end of my lance, a tool which unfortunately left its imprint in the chocolates in the form of miniature geysers that erupted molten as the cooling coating of chocolate warmed the contents of its belly. No matter, with the addition of a couple grains of sea salt on top, these caramels taste just as sweet.

The dip did not stop there, however, as recalling the delicious Christmas favors of my sister-in-law, I used the remaining inclusions from the Grand Canyon bar as fodder for the pool of chocolate. Trying to give the experience of the bar in a smaller package, I took one strip of apricot, sandwiched it between two almond halves and sealed the embrace with a chocolate belt. Having a great time, whole apricots were soon within my grasp, so too meeting their fate drowned in chocolate. Bean to bar chocolate production is going smoothly, so I am excited about interacting with chocolatiers more, my feeble experiments aside, and seeing where bean to bonbon leads…I hope for the first waypoint to be a custom strawberry-balsamic truffle.

Midnight

Ever since visiting Claudio Corallo (the company, not the man) in Seattle and tasting their completely cacao 100% bar, I’ve been fantasizing about seeking the pure high myself. In batch #26, I finally built up the courage to abstain from adding sugar while grinding my cacao, and even if I am the only person who eats it, I’ve now molded chocolate liquor—a confusing name for cacao bean paste—into what is usually called baking chocolate (baker’s is actually a brand, not a modifier to chocolate).

Though bake you must not! While typical 100% chocolate is harsh dusty stuff that bears more resemblance to soil than the food of the gods, with care, one can make a dry chocolate that fumes with the saturated aroma of it’s cacao. It may remind you of dirt, but it shouldn’t taste like it! Eating unsweetened chocolate, unlike eating the earth, can be a pleasurable experience. If you really want to impress me (and your friends) with some braggadocio, try a bite! I’ll salute you for it.

Daylight

It must be due to cruel fate that my dear friend in CS is allergic to cocoa powder, and can’t enjoy chocolate with any measurable amount of darkness. She is immune, however, to the combination of cocoa butter, sugar and milk powder known as white chocolate. I promised her ages ago that when I finally secured a supply of milk powder and got my first shipment of cocoa butter, that I would make something she could enjoy. That day came and went, but since I had just made chocolate on the opposite end of the spectrum–100%, I felt the time was ripe for white.

So for batch 27, I began by melting cocoa butter over the stove which surprisingly turned it from an opaque yellow-white block to a transparently viscous yellow oil. I added a pound of milk powder, returning then to a thick opaque white-yellow liquid, finally a pound of sugar and heated the mixture to 160F, trying to burn off some of the milky flavor and perhaps imparting an additional caramel note. I ground the chocolate overnight and taking care to ensure that no residual dark chocolate colored my molds, formed the inaugural DHS white chocolate.

Save macadamia nut cookies, I’ve never eaten white chocolate, so I didn’t know what to expect, but the flavor is not bad! I used ‘natural’ cocoa butter (that unfortunately, I can’t yet make myself…, but which comes FT/OG from the Dominican Republic) which in opposition to ‘deodorized’ has all its strong and intense aroma intact, but still with just a mild flavor of caramel. The finished bar has that, and it also has an interesting finish—something fresh like mint. I would have liked to put caramel in some of these bars, but I was out, and it is wiser to make this first batch pure so we can really appreciate the individual quality of white.

Expansion Plans!

Details are sketchy…and I’m tired and this blog post is way overdue…and I don’t want to ruin the surprise…and ask me in person…but plans are in the works to see how far we can go with this chocolate hobby! Under the encouragement of an entrepreneurial CS friend of mine, I’ve been writing up and revising a business plan and between myself, my partner and my friend, we’ve raised a good portion of the money I’ll need to set up a bare-bones factory space. With the permit from the health dept. that I should be getting at the end of this week or early next, things are looking to accelerate somewhat and I’m very excited to be coming soon to a natural foods store near you! My joy is almost equal to that of the group of CS students who recently constructed an igloo in the courtyard behind Siebel and I feel as if I am exiting my cold Illinois winter dwelling to a sunny factory summer of chocolate.

The role of prodigal blogger is not a new one for me, but the reason I’ve again been silent for a period is due to my experimentations as the prodigal son. After letting the idea ferment for years, I decided that I don’t want to return to my ancestral home for some time—I already know what that place looks like! I want travel to introduce me to new ideas and new scenery, so this winter I stuffed my backpack and set out to meet two friends in Albuquerque, walk a little and see the desert-y part of the world.

A Short Travelogue

We chose the Southwest because South America was too expensive and we wanted to retreat from winter. However, the numb-screams from our toes in the 12F cold outside of Winslow, AZ on the second night quickly led to altered expectations. All the more reason, then, to descend a vertical mile from the South Rim into the inner Grand Canyon where temperatures are 25F higher on average than the high desert. We came woefully unprepared, so for about the same amount one can buy a good chocolate melangeur, we outfitted ourselves with tent, backpacks, sleeping bags, stove and water filter, and lbs and then kgs of…oatmeal. We spent four days in the canyon, when because of winter, few others make the trip—leading to, midway on the hike down, a peaceful sunset and solitary trek through the star and moon-sliver lit night.

On the third day, I enjoyed a relatively flat walk up the north side to Ribbon Falls. An extremely cold shower and mud bath were my reward, then I read some passages of Walden aloud to my companion. I felt compelled by Thoreau to front only the essential facts of life, and so took advantage again of the winter solitude to execute these experiences in the most primitive clothing possible.

After thus wearing out our legs, we made tracks on Christmas Eve for Phoenix to rest with a very old friend of mine. Christmas Day, I walked to an art neighborhood of Phoenix, Roosevelt Row and saw 4 shipping containers in the form of a house, made by Upcycle Living. We relaxed in a clothing-art-library-coffee shop, Conspire where while snacking on canyon leftovers—dried apricots dipped in almond butter, I discovered a combination that must be expressed in a chocolate bar. There was a bike coop whose dirt front lawn was turned into a hangout area with couches and coffee tables and later that night we heard hip-hop at gallery-bar, The Lost Leaf. Surprisingly, all of these commercial establishments were converted single-family houses!

Leaving Phoenix, we lost one friend to Berkeley, and so the two remaining travelers set out to return to New Mexico. During our egress, we stopped at the desert botanical gardens and saw tons of hummingbirds and a surprising amount of cacti that looked like underwater sea creatures. That night we slept on the edge of eastern Arizona in a frigid dried up lake-bed near the semi-ghost town, Cochise, AZ. On our way to Cochise, through the magnificent Karst Topography of Texas Canyon, AZ, we passed about 30 miles of billboards for a ‘canonical tourist trap’ known as The Thing. Advertising 24-hr gas, Dairy Queen and unspecified but singular rarities, we were obliged to stop.

To enter the freakshow of The Thing, one must first brave the gift shop filled with all manner of knick-knacks and people with mythically bad hairdos. We each paid our $1 entrance fee and exited the gift shop through a surprisingly flimsy and unguarded painted door to a U of three warehouses surrounding what seemed to be a trailer park. Under fluorescent light, we saw old tractors, a car which transported Adolf Hitler and a stray cat (was this The Thing?). In the following outbuilding, we marveled at typewriters, figures in town-scenes carved entirely from solid blocks of wood—by a single artisan, guns dating from 1654 AD. We were shocked by the fact that the rarest item on earth was protected only by flimsy glass in southeastern AZ. Finally we stumbled into the ultimate room, the ceilings decorated by grotesque animal figures with winding, spindles for arms and legs fashioned from whole pieces of driftwood, though we knew not what desert river they drifted from. Immediately we were confronted by a mummy under glass that in the end was our best guess for The…Thing we sought. The tour gracefully wound down on a lighter note with and exhibit of a ladies side saddle that dated to 1842 B.B (before bikinis).

The stretch of I-10 through southern New Mexico (or perhaps, any highway) turns out not to intersect quaint, uncommon towns of high culture, so my initial unwillingness towards taking ‘out-of-the-way’ side trips was overpowered, as I learned that in a road-trip without a way, nothing was out of it. We followed the brown road signs to Gila National Forest, by way of a town, Silver City, which claimed to have 30+ art galleries. On the Sunday we came, only Blue Dome Gallery was open, but the large art quilt featuring a can of Bud, a woman and text beginning, “I hate you motherfucker” made the trip worthwhile. I left with a bowl made by this same artist and her husband.

We took many hikes in Gila, then in Spring Canyon State Park near Deming and in Elephant Butte State Park near Truth-or-Consequences. During these hikes, we realized that an appropriate symbol for the trip would be a snow-covered cactus…laughing, we summited mountains and looked down on snow clouds, we crossed frozen ponds whose frost reminded us of that from our breath that formed each night on the inside windows of our car, where we now slept, trying to appease our toes. We also started interacting with the authorities more…while cooking eggs on the side of the highway, a well-intentioned sheriff checked to see that I was in fact crouching over a backpacking stove, and not an unconscious man. Settling into my sleeping bag while stopped off the side of another highway, we learned directions to and the proper pronunciation of Elephant Butt park (bee-you-t)…where we were intending to camp all along.

From New Mexico quickly came Texas; El Paso, which seemed dilapidated and unremarkable, then Juarez which with its crowded joie de vivre, unconcerned litter and petrol smell reminded my companion of his ancestral home in Lahore, and surprised me with the fact that artificial borders really can restrict cultural osmosis. I don’t know if this is because of the rules changing last June, but contrary to what I heard, a drivers license is not sufficient, one does need a passport to reenter the US, even from Juarez. We got yelled at by the Customs and Border Protection officer, who made me admit my naïveté, and gave me an info sheet so that I will remember that I am noncompliant, though I’d rather say, nonconformist.

After hiking El Paso’s mountains, we made our way to marvelous Marfa, TX—a town I was hotly anticipating, yes because of an nyt article I read. But in the middle of the night, barreling down 90 just outside of Valentine, I was intrigued by an approaching square of yellow-green light, and squealed as I caught a glimpse of designer high heels in this exiled one-room outbuilding. Shit!, there is a shoe-store in the middle of the desert, I yelled, waking my sleeping companion. Turning around, we confirmed that what we saw was Prada Marfa, an experimental art installation, with unopenable door, housing 6 handbags and a gaggle of left-foot heels…god bless you, Marfa.

For a town with about 2,500 residents, the density of cool things in Marfa is incomprehensible. We visited: an art book shop with experimental poetry installation, a gallery featuring art by my favorite photog, Hiroshi Sugimoto, a vintage cowboy boot shoppe, a gas station turned pizza parlor, sardonically titled pizza foundation because of the abundance of artistic non-profits in Marfa, a screening of silent movie The Wind with live musical accompaniment (!) at local community art theatre, the Goode Crowley, with opening act by a cowboy poet (!!), and an open bar, and it was completely free (!!!), a lunch cafe run by a swiss woman whose family makes chocolates (I think not bean-to-bar) under the name, Vollenweider, finally (not really, but space….), we toured the sensational, spectacular, silvery, Chinati Foundation, which houses art by minimalist artist, Donald Judd, and his buds.

The story of artistic Marfa goes back to the 1970s when Judd, already a famous artist in NYC moved here and started purchasing old spaces, rebuilding them and filling them with world-class art. Eventually he died, and two foundations, Chinati and Judd preserve his art installations and living/work spaces respectively. The centerpiece of the Chinati tour is Judd’s 100 works in milled aluminum, two concrete artillery sheds, lined with floor to ceiling windows and filled in a checker-like pattern with 52 and then 48 boxes of equal exterior dimension but differing partitions of interior space. Of course, there is the interaction of light reflecting off the surfaces of the aluminum, but most interestingly to me were the acoustics of these spaces. Standing on one end of the shed, the conversations of our other tour participants melted into a pâté of mutterings, freeing the conversation of the arthritic boxes—slowly being heated by the morning sun, expanding and settling, they let out adagio tics and cracks elevating the inanimate almost to the plane of living beings.

From our two days in steeped in art and fine food, we drove through the night to Austin, once again making fine friends with The Man. Ask me for this story in person, but after an hour standing in the cold, receiving a warning for 72mph in night-time speed limit 65 zone, getting a sobriety test (BAC: .000 !), refusing a search and having dogs come and sniff our car, we were back on the road, cuff-less. Not one hour after that, the ominous red & blue lights flashing again, we were stopped once more, by the insane, but patriotic, border patrol. Not speeding, not anything, just driving through West Texas at 1am warrants proving your allegiance to the ol’ Uncle S, and because we’d had enough, letting them check your trunk for those dastardly and exploitative migrant laborers who villainousnessly pick our fruit to keep the economy humming…who but, the Mexicanos. The scent of guacamole in the back made them suspicious, but we were free and on the long road again to humble Illinois.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city.
Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
—Albert Camus