artisanal thinking

Like so many before me, I’ve neglected my blog and now must give an ‘apology post,’ covering the events of the last month and promising never to abandon my readers again (lest, feeling spurned, they drop themselves from that elite category).

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
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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

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!).

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.