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.

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.

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.

Executive Summary of October

Well, with doing research, assisting in the teaching (…and grading) of the most stressful class for Computer Science Undergrads, and actually making chocolate, I had to cut something out (in addition to sleep)! But that does not equate to idleness! I have:

• Found a new business partner, Bill from Mahomet. In the past, Bill was a chocolatier by hobby, but always had an interest in getting down to the roots, in making the journey from bean to bar, onto ganache and truffle. In the short time we’ve been working together, Bill has helped by making a homebrewed winnower, featured on the right. We are also combining our chocolate making/’tiering skills, with Bill making salted caramel, and me molding 70% dark Panamanian chocolate around squares of this chewy bliss, we may have created the most popular thing I’ve done yet.
• Been expanding my ever growing list of specialty chocolate making equipment. The latest is a ‘table top tempering machine‘ manufactured by the confusingly named ‘American Chocolate Mould Co’ (the flavours! the colours! bloody hell, lassie–we’re in America!). To those concerned that I am falling away from the tactile process of tempering chocolate on a marble slab, don’t worry, I still have the ability and am happy to do so, however, the main advantage and determining factor in using this tempering machine is that with its advanced technology, it can keep melted, tempered chocolate at precise temperatures I specify. Advanced technology? That’s right! This machine consists of a insta-read temperature probe for sensing, surrounded by an elevated steel bowl for holding, beneath which sit a motor for spinning, two light bulbs for heating, a computer case fan for cooling, and a microprocessor that solves NP Complete (that is—really hard) problems like ‘is the temperature greater than or equal to X degrees?’ to compute whether to turn on the light bulbs or the case fan. The ’special internet price’ for this information-age equipment is a measly $795, though I picked up a ‘barely used’ model on eBay for only $500. Thankfully, barely used, in this instance, did not mean, ‘not functional.’ I almost didn’t receive this machine, due to some snafus with paypal, the shipper, and my apartment from two years ago, but that is a story for another day.
• Finally acquired Whole Milk Powder! I learned that it is impossible to buy organic whole milk powder in anything less than 50lb quantities. Well, if I can not even settle on a girlfriend, then surely I’m not ready to be anchored by the constant needs of a bag of dry protein and fat that will go rancid if neglected for six months. Hence I sacrificed myself to the Damoclesian sword of pragmatism and bought 10lbs from an online spice merchant who claimed they got the powder from this New Jersey Dairy Operation. I am compromising on a couple levels, but in the meantime it has allowed me to experiment with:
• Nutella! Or rather, my own interpretation of that industrial sugar+trans-fat crap that puts more emphasis on the cacao and hazelnuts than on sweetness and thrift. Therefore, I reverse engineered the Nutella recipe, then promptly forgot it and forged my own path. I combined 20% hazelnuts, 35% cacao beans, 35% sugar and 10% milk powder and ground the result overnight. Nutella, or as it used to be called supercrema, contains only cocoa powder, and thus none of the crystalline action implied by cocoa butter. I thought with only 35% cacao, and over 10% non-cocoa butter fat, I would inhibit the crystals in cocoa butter from forming and in addition, eliminate the need for tempering, but this turned out to be quite wrong. What I ended up with is more precisely called pasta gianduja, a name which springs again from those early Nutellating Italians and is really a funny story, but… again fodder for another day. Needless to say, this first experiment was roughly a failure, but we will try again and we will prevail!
• Inaugural, daring, salted, Dark Milk Chocolate! Chocolate Makers don’t judge, and it is true that I enjoy seventy-five…eight-five…ninety-one…one-hun’erd-percent dark chocolate with as few as one ingredient:cacao beans—but the rich creaminess, silkiness and softness of milk chocolate is welcome any day, brothers & sisters, in our all-encompassing, non-discriminating, equal-rights for all cacao culture. Of course, we don’t mind a little darkness in our milk chocolate as well! Therefore the new word in the back-alleys of craft chocolate production is dark-milk chocolate, the best of both worlds! Complexity accompanying a higher percentage cacao content, and subtle allures of creamy, motherly milk (powder!). I molded my first batch of milk chocolate this Saturday, and with the second half of the batch, I tossed in a loving sprinkle of sea salt, and even a hazelnut or two to heighten the excitement. Observe the difference in color between a pure dark and a dark-milk, but know that dark-milk, unlike Hershey’s is more than brown (colored) sugar.
• Expanded my reach to other fabulous and sometimes frightening origins. Yes, I had to compromise again under the weight of pragmatism to settle upon conventionally farmed but fairly traded beans from Côte d’Ivoire, and nuthin doin’ Christian-conservative (that is, non-organic, non-fair trade certified) Papua New Guinea stock. But… how do they taste, you ask? Well! My tongue has almost been ripped out and smashed to pieces by the fermenty, vinegary and smoky PNG dark chocolate. Single Origin chocolate from Papua New Guinea is described like Scotch, ‘don’t drink it in pints. A sip, and you’re satisfied.’ A sip of this seems to clear my sinuses with its powerful aroma, but given the right flu, that might not be a bad thing. Though I have not yet made it into bars, the Ivory Coast nibs have been bringing a tremendously refined biscuit flavor with a little hint of fruit, but also some savory, meaty, salami quality to the party. Several people besides myself have admitted to being quite intrigued by this bean. Why did I get these when I still have a sack of about 80lbs of Panamanian cacao? What party is Ivory Coast bringing it’s flavors to? Well, these wonderful questions are explained by the fact that I am:
• Organizing a chocolate & beer (& chocolate beer) tasting party! With my great friends and fellow fermenters, the Bolts of Urbana, IL, we are holding, on Saturday Nov. 14th, 2009, the most exciting event of the century. That is correct, with >= 5 fabulous homebrews, including at least 4 stouts(!) and 5 different varieties of homemade dark chocolate, plus some NYC Mast Brother’s ‘Black Truffle Chocolate’, Missourian Askinosie’s ‘San Jose Del Tambo (that’s Ecuador, yo) Chocolate’, and Theo’s discontinued ‘Madagascar 65%’, the ticket price of $10, with proceeds to support local, underground food fetishists—The Prairie Table—is almost too trivial to mention.

As is plain to see, I have been up to so many exciting and revolutionary things that I must be forgiven this one transgression of not writing about it until now, and even then, only as a teaser of more detailed and exciting yarns to come. I will leave you now, reader, but not without the parting gift of a sneak-peak at the weekly Sunday email I have been sending out to select special supporters of DHS chocolate that provides updates (in lieu of this blog!) on my humble activities, and offers to arrange for a hand-wrapped and labeled and personally signed bar of chocolate to be bike-delivered from my doorstep to yours. You can amend my mistake of not including you in the email list by sending a note to danielhschreiber(at)gmail(dot)com
————–

Greetings and Saultations, Friends!

Sunday, a new week, a new rebirth, and an opportunity to stock your coffers with some extremely fine, extra fancy, but basically austere DHS dark chocolate. This week’s special is double!

On Thursday I took my partner’s salted caramel and combined it with 70% dark Panamanian chocolate to get something bitter-sweet, snappy, chewy and salty; delicious! As Bill’s former website ( http://www.chocolates-fudge.com/caramel.html ) makes explicit, these are the creamiest bars on the planet (still waiting for confirmation from Mars..)! Also on Thursday, I took my friend’s ‘black bacon,’ which is a molasses and rum cured traditional, artisanal bacon–I fried it in a skillet, then cut it up into slabs and molded this into Unapologetically Black Bacon, Panamanian Dark Chocolate. Unlike Vosges, who is content with ‘bits,’ us true meatheads demand nothing less than whole hunks to satisfy our hunky bodies. And like Laurence’s wife exclaims (cf: http://www.thislittlepiggy.us/2009/11/05/black-bacon/ ) this is one SEXY chocolate bar.

Hold on, that’s not yet the double-special, just Thursday’s contribution! Yesterday, Saturday, Nov. 7th, 2009, marked the inaugural Milk Chocolate of Daniel Harry Schreiber, Chocolate Maker of Urbana, IL! Blowing through all obstacles, I bravely forged a 55% Dark-Milk Chocolate, and for the last half of the batch I mixed in coarse sea salt to get my special–sultry and complex, salty and dry, Dark-Milk Chocolate. For those unawares, the 55% gives some info about the recipe (in particular, the percentage coming from cacao), which is 50% cacao beans, 5% cocoa butter, 15% dry whole milk powder, 30% evaporated cane juice. Which if I consult my calculus textbook, sums up to 100% totally awesome.

For the more traditional chocolate lover, I still have:
nib-chocolate bars;
habanero chili+cinnamon;
hazelnut+sea salt;
and of course, pure Panamanian dark chocolate.

Reply if you’d like us to bike-deliver some chocolate to your doorstep. Default is pure dark, but you can request anything else. Prices are: 1oz/$3, 2oz/$5, 4oz/$8. Note: because I’ve been experimenting so much with small batches, not everything is available in all sizes, email with your preference and we’ll work something out as close as possible

This week, I am going to grind and mold some bars from Ivory Coast beans, which, roasted, have a strong ‘biscuity’ flavor to them. In the second half of the week, I am going to try to make some Peruvian chocolate, which some of you may remember, has a very alluring soft-fruitiness to it.

Have fun!
–Daniel Harry Schreiber
Chocolate Maker of Urbana, IL

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!).

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.

On another front, a friend of mine may be interested in doing some wrapper design! It will be good for her portfolio, because the design will actually be used, good for me of course, and we will all end up with more chocolate in our coffers. For all the designers reading this blog, if such a deal would interest you too, please get in contact! Finally, many friends have been expressing interest in being involved with part of the process. Though it would be wonderful, I’m not exactly sure whether people want to sit around with me, say while waiting for beans to cool so we can crack them into nibs and then perform the somewhat labor-intensive process of winnowing… So we’ve hit upon (well stole) the idea to hold some chocolate wrapping parties. After demolding the next batch of bars, we’ll invite over friends, unscrew some beer and wine, and get together to clothe our bars in foil and love.

Concluding Projections; Now, Reflections

At a potluck yesterday, it was noted that from ‘artisanal’, we can deduce that:

as in, anal retentive—an OCD manifested in craft as: concern with detail, with perfection in process and with the quality of the outcome. A nice observation I think, which left me wondering what else this title could inspire? With some enumerative help…doggerel:

As an artisan, I, begin my poem, alias, rant. Like Dickinson, truly, I sing an aria, slant. A pall covers all, a salt rain, that is industry. The disrupting bullet, a slain art we revive. Craft! In the Satan lair we cause a anal stir, a alter sin, our crime. For, we reject standardization, diversity of flavor and experimentation, our end. We produce quality achievable only in slow, small batches: the mascot of our art, a snail. Opposite that is a liars tan, branding those obsessed with economies of scale. Of craft, I may not be a natal sir, but slow comes illumination, the will to take part in a nasal art. I, though thin, I snarl at a king. This is my artisanal thinking.

My, what a difference a week makes… For, this past Wednesday, August 12, 2009, after having wrapped them with foil, sheathing them with a paper band and labeling each bar by hand—I took my chocolate to the market. Our local Caffe Paradiso, that is, where I arranged a cardboard box with a bag of sample squares then stocked it with three small and six large bars. Truthfully, two small bars, since I had sold one to a very awesome gentlewoman waiting outside with me for the coffee house to open. The day previous to this, I had already made my first sales to friends and fellow grad students around the building…but Wednesday was a milestone achieved by taking what I consider on the path towards finished, polished bars, with taste, texture and packaging that I am proud of, and selling them on the ‘open market’ to folks who have no vested personal interest in me. In fact I satisfied a personal life goal of mine to make and sell some useful, functional product. How empowering chocolate has been in the past week!

Muralists on the Prowl at the Media, Independent

Another apex of the previous seven days was a fantastic and philosophical community art project. Chris Hampson has been preparing a medium-size concrete wall located on the back side of the Independent Media Center for a collaborative mural painting party/project. The wall was fluidly changing before finally settling down with a black background and about sixty square white ‘canvases’ arranged throughout its length. Last Friday it was a canvas—a group of citizens descended Saturday evening, with beats, buckets and brushes… naturally, I brought samples of fruity batch #2… we painted the wall frenetically, in some manners fragmented and individual, but at the same time fundamentally social, collaborative and altogether beautiful. Yesterday a friend and I walked back over to the IMC and took a sequence of pictures that I tried to stitch together into a composite photo of the completed mural. It’s not a perfect representation, especially with a car inconveniently in my line of sight, but the purpose is just to give you a taste, hopefully you will view the mural in person.

see the full panoramic image

Heartbreaking Collaborations of Staggering Genius

Layer upon layer, this week kept stacking excitement and community interaction. Returning to Paradiso Wednesday night to close out my box of chocolate, I found that all but two large bars had sold (I think people really prefer the size of the smaller bars…). I was extremely pleased with my success, being an unknown chocolate maker and inspiring people to take a chance, however, what could I do with the two that remained? I decided to give one to the marvelous people who work behind the cafe counter, and seeing my artistic friend Fred sitting outside the door, I offered him a trade. Asking Fred whether he had any pieces of art to exchange for my last squares of Panamanian chocolate, he responded that he had the perfect drawing to barter. Thus the following day I received one sixth of a larger drawing of his, ’space/time progressions’, which you see pictured to the top-right of this post—I clearly got the better end of this deal. It is also worth pointing out that this satisfies another personal goal of mine—to barter for an item with payment other than currency.

In a last triumph of Champaign-Urbana community, I later checked my email to find that one fellow who had picked up a Paradiso bar sent me a message about the chocolate he was eating! I was astounded at the feeling of closeness and directness my market experience engendered and I took some time to revel in the fudgy bite of humanity:

Very nice. I think its grain is a little coarser than I get in Lindt or Vosges or other big commercial makers, which makes for a slightly fudgier bite — I guess this is a product both of the grinding and the sugar? The beans are great, very bright and cherry-y.

I’m really glad I picked it up, and I look forward to trying more!

Most certainly I look forward to providing the populace with more chocolate. Currently I am waiting for my second shipment of beans to come in, this time 35lbs! Hopefully by the end of next week we can do this again.

Version 2. Peru: ‘The Fruity.’

At night after moving boxes and boxes of personal belongings, I roasted cacao. During the day while working in the office, I ground it for 14 hours. At 11:30pm I took the melted Peruvian chocolate from the melangeur and made my second attempt at tempering. I had noted from the first test that I hadn’t ladled enough of the melted chocolate on to the slab, I hadn’t let it cool enough, and though I had worried about my reservoir of 90F chocolate cooling too quickly and becoming solid before I even got a chance to get it into the molds. I was wrong, I had had plenty of time and viscosity—I could use that freedom more wisely this time. I also became more acquainted with the motions involved in spreading out chocolate while tempering. As if skiing down a slope, you use a spatula to carve arcs and wide circles from a pool of melted chocolate, spreading it into a 1/2 inch thick wafer covering the stone. In a symbiosis, you use a scraping tool to clean the spatula and the spatula to wipe chocolate from the scraper. Everything is smooth and fluid, save the chocolate which you nudge from fluidity to stability. Romanticism aside, I successfully cooled a third of my chocolate, and recombining it with the rest, I ended with 87F chocolate, a little cool, but it turned out fine. I ladled this into molds, cooled it in the fridge and was surprised at how easily it fell out of the molds 40 minutes later. See, when chocolate is correctly tempered, the crystals all line up and the chocolate contracts slightly from the mold, so you don’t need to lube them with anything slippery (my mistake last time)—the bars just fall out.

With a friend of mine, we broke a couple bars into pieces and wrapped them again with tin foil for more sampling (now, however, with a ’suggested donation’) at Caffe Paradiso. The flavor of this chocolate is extremely fruity, reminiscent of a banana or mango, it has a taste of wine to it, and sometimes one even detects the aromatic quality of an aperitif, some cognac! Visually it is much better than my alpha version, it is smooth and shiny, and as anyone who I’ve given a sample to knows, I’ve been taking especial pride in the strength and snap of these bars. The texture of the chocolate is an area for improvement I think. It turns out that (unless I make some modifications to my grinder) 14 hours is not enough time for refining and conching, there is still some coarseness and roughness to the chocolate that could be due either to the particle size just being too large, or we haven’t conched enough to truly coat each particle of cacao with a sheath of butter. Another current issue is packaging! I’m still just wrapping bars with (recycled!) aluminum foil from the store. Currently, I’m investigating different kinds of foil and paper with which to wrap the bars, and I need some designs for the wrapping paper. For the artists reading this blog, I’d be willing to trade some chocolate for some design work!

Version 2, Batch 3. Panama: “The Coffee/Smoky”

Excited by the relative success of my Peru Bars, I immediately started on the next batch, this time trying again to roast and grind the Panamanian beans, which posses a more traditional ‘chocolate’ flavor, with some leather notes, some earthiness and smoke flavor, and I think undertones of coffee. Because of the coarseness of batch #2, I ground these beans for a full 22 hours, from 1am to 11pm! Definitely silkier, but the mouthfeel is still not up to the snuff of high-end chocolate I’ve eaten. I think I do need to make some modifications to my grinder, increasing the pressure of the granite wheels on the slab to ensure a constant distance between the two so that it creates even and high shear on all cacao and sugar particles. I’m also considering adding some additional cocoa butter to my recipe, so that there is more available to surround each cacao particle, yielding a different, possibly smoother mouthfeel.

I also discovered, while tempering this batch, that unless one resides in a climate controlled factory, the ambient temperature and humidity can have an effect on the chocolate, and should be taken into account. Thus far, the summer has not lived up to its hot’n'humid reputation, but this last week has been getting hotter, and even though I was tempering the chocolate in the middle of the night, it was a balmy 87F in my kitchen. Of course then, it would be impossible to cool my chocolate to below this temperature! I didn’t realize this until I actually had the chocolate on the slab, and after waiting a while for it to chill out somewhat, it still read…88F. Turns out this time I wasn’t ruined since at this temperature the crystals I want will form, and even better, only those I want. So then this was actually an even better situation than normal, but if the room was warmer or more humid, it could have been disastrous. Since I didn’t need to heat back up the slabbed chocolate, and the reserved chocolate was cooling rather slowly, I put it in the fridge for a couple of minutes where it reached 90F, the temperature I wanted the final mix to be, then I recombined everything and molded the chocolate.

With such a close call, I’m on hiatus for a couple days while I wait for our climate to change a little in the negative direction. But in the meantime, I’ve been working more on finalizing some initial package designs. For this batch I wrapped all the bars individually with foil, trying to get the motions down so that the foil is smooth and uncrinkled—eventually I will start buying some pre-cut foil squares to make this job easier. I’m still at a loss for paper and designs, but today I cut some white paper to the appropriate dimensions, then made a band around the width of each bar, so that foil sticks out at the top and bottom and taped the back. I’ll write some notes on the front about the chocolate contained within, and I think the bars may look good enough to try selling over at the ol’ Caffe. If I’ve sufficiently piqued your curiosity, stop by tomorrow, August 12th and purchase the most lovingly crafted chocolate bars ever to grace the red-brick streets of Urbana, Il!