artisanal thinking

’twas back in old September that I first received a first burlap sack of cacao. As was mentioned last week, I’m growing geometrically, and have obtained two more sacks, now giving 300lbs of cacao at my disposal. Sneak peek—I’m working to establish a direct trade relationship with individual farmers in Guatemala to get 500kg (or more!). But the milestone passed that necessitates these new supplies is that the primary is spent—last Friday, I roasted up the last of my original Panamanian cacao!

Sep-Feb 15th is 5 months, about 21 weeks. Starting with 110lbs of cacao, I’ve been making chocolate at the rate of at least 5lbs/week, evincing my predicted production schedule. For the second set of sacks, I expect my production rate to increase proportionally with the cacao available. Therefore nearing my birthday in July, I should be rising to find the third installment of cacao and at least one more level of geometric expansion.

More so than say, the first dollar I made, this first burlap sack I’ve emptied is an emotional souvenir I’ll proudly display for years to come.

Reemergence of Paradiso Pairings

Those who’ve watched me grow from infancy will remember the samples of batches #1, 2 and bars from #3, 4 that I brought to Caffe Paradiso last August. Five and a half months elapsed with no chocolate option for the independent minded coffee drinker, but all that was remedied just two days ago, Tuesday February 16th, with a renaissance of Flatlander Chocolate on the counter of our Caffe. This time with better labeling technology, diversity of flavor and strength, increased awareness and recognition, the response was ebullient, brisk sales ensued, all were satisfied.

Tuesday, ten bars, split between Côte d’Ivoire and Dark Milk Salted Caramel, were brought in about 8am and I heard that by 11:30, none remained. Being otherwise occupied at the time, I didn’t replenish the stash with a second decemvir until 4pm, another four of which were history by the time they closed. Wednesday I brought eight bars (running low on supplies now), substituting Malagasy for Ivoire and found similar desertion in the evening. Today, finding myself lonely with a lack of salted caramel, I tested the waters with a double dark offering, Peru and Côte, this time finding a couple stragglers at 8pm when I took them home, but happy with a respectable seven sales. I will be taking a break tomorrow, as my stocks have dwindled, and I need time to replenish, but once my army regroups, we’ll return in full force to the Caffe, sacrificing ourselves, along with our sibling bean, Coffea arabica, to tongues, nostrils, and Urbana hearts.

Phatlander?

Fie, fie, how franticly I square my brand!

Not quite in an attempt to reference the 19c story of spatial transcendence, but rather to try and give what I consider a ‘true portrait of Illinois,’ I’m rechristening the brand: ‘Flatlander Chocolate’. To me, a boy who grew up in the hills and forests of California…prairie? plain? no, planes are what my region of the Midwest entails, the stamp I feel and what of it I own. For an enterprise which has as its goal, the experience of terroir, of tasting a place, through chocolate, I feel a sense of the place of production is paramount. This and a desire for transparency is the original reason I chose, ‘Daniel Harry Schreiber, Chocolate Maker of Urbana, IL’ to be my original moniker. A name which has as it’s virtue that it answers three important questions one has upon meeting a new individual—who are you? what gives you passion? where do you practice it? We hope the new still gives a sense of our motivation and origin, but more succinctly so. However, I do still plan to sign off somewhere on the bar my trio of responses, that I may be an open book to all.

Signing off, concisely, or not.
Daniel Harry Schreiber
Chief Chocophile
Flatlander Chocolate
Urbana, IL, 2010.

Commerce? Okay, I can understand that—therefore I borrowed some heart-shaped molds from my partner, Bill, and recently shaped up some sweet dark milk chocolate hearts. Besides an experimental truffle recipe that I am planning on trying out today, these hearts are the main offering this first Valentine’s day witnessed by Daniel Harry Schreiber, Chocolate Maker of Urbana, IL. A bit lackluster, I admit, but a state of affairs due to the fact that I have been too busy to consider human or chocolate heart, instead focusing on wrapping my bars in top quality works of art.

Yes, I’ve been leveraging the creativity of my friends, one, a computer scientist who wanted to experiment with Adobe Illustrator, another an art student looking for a fun side project and a venue to show off her work. A professional design team is now working on branding/logos/a unified wrapping scheme that is so great, it won’t be done incubating for some time. But in the meanwhile, I’ve been making heavy use of my other art-student friend, a Russian with a penchant for Lautrec-style-lettering and whimsical semi-psychedelic scenes. ‘Round Midnight, she draws these labels using a quill pen—her form of relaxation after a long day of studies. I scan them, sometimes re-arrange a few things or add a word with my thick black felt pen, then print & cut ‘em up. By our avocations combined, we’ve fixed labels for ‘Hitchcock’—85% Panamanian, ‘Perrito Del Mar’—salted dark milk, dark milk salted caramel, and…

Fabulous new (or returning) bean origins! La Côte d’Ivoire et Malagache. Terroir is exhibited in the earthy taste du terre d’Ivoire. I experimented roasting hot on this one, scorching them to 250F and I evaporated away much of the pleasant mossy woodsy mustiness that was described by some in November (when I had la Côte for the beer & chocolate tasting) as ‘funky’. Well this time Groovatron gave way to a drier arboreal flavor, accented by apricot fruit and conventional chocolate that at 75% was, I suppose correctly, described by my Ruski artiste as being one of the mildest chocolates I’ve made.

De l’autre côté, Madagascar provides an ass-kicking wallop of sour red fruit, raisins & wine that stands in complete contrast. The time given to conching, the slow process of massaging melted chocolate with granite rollers to somehow smooth the flavor and texture, is a variable that chocolate makers can use to affect the outcome and imprint their stamp. The island nation’s cacao has a developing reputation for complexity, and you will see many other chocolate makers using or even devoting themselves to this origin. At the recent underground tasting party, known as the ‘1000 year old food club’, that I threw—beautifully recounted here—I sampled out both my and the Mast Brother’s interpretation of Malagasy dark chocolate. They were of roughly equal bitterness, 75 and 72% respectively, the main difference being that mine was relatively unconched, while I have it on high authority that the Mast’s leave theirs in the grinder for three days. The result is a milder Madagascar that no longer fumes with odiferous acidity, but blends smoke with reserved raisin. I have no opinion, but several at the event, unawares of maker information, related that they preferred the sharp-tongue of my version, unbridled, passionate and furious.

At this point, one may wonder, what are these hearts, this beautiful art and new cacao cohorts for? We are planning to exhibit these developments in our first retail launch, this Saturday (tomorrow!) at Amara Yoga and Arts in Urbana. As reported recently in the New York Times, yoga and chocolate are natural combinations and I am especially excited by the prospect of rewarding tired yogis with pure dark. The launch is to coincide with a special Valentine yoga class being offered by Maggie Taylor—intense yoga, capped with wine and chocolate by the usual suspect. Read the flyer and sign up for the event. As wrapper designs get fixed a tich more, I’ll be entering coffee shops & natural food stores, but for now, if you eschew my weekly emails & bike delivery service, stroll on over to Amara, try a bar and find yourself in satisfied palate pose.

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.