artisanal thinking

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.

Once, for the Italians of Piedmont, though perhaps hard to fathom, the cost of cacao—due to World War II rations, exceeded that of a provincial achene—the Hazel! So their story goes, confronted with limited supply and unmet demand, Mr. Pietro Ferrero sought to decrease the price of and make chocolate available to the common fascista by grinding not just one seed, but two! With the inclusion of relatively cheap hazelnuts and vegetable oil, the proto-Nutella was born. Also a man of his time in using cartoon characters to market sugar to children, Pietro called his creation Pasta Gianduja, the paste of Gianduja, a role in Commedia dell’arte representing the town of Turin, where Ferrero’s pastry shop was located, prior to the war.

Because it still involved cocoa butter, which as we all know, forms the crystals responsible for chocolate’s snap, the Gianduja was not a spread like peanut butter or the Nutella we know today, conversely, because it involved a high percentage of non-cocoa-butter fat, it was not so brittle and unsliceable like pure dark chocolate. Rather, it was in between the two extremes, and though it holds together in a block, Gianduja can be easily cut to any shape desired, without snapping or making little shards like when chocolate is broken. Therefore, Gianduja was sold in loaves, the idea being to cut a slice and make some kind of dessert sandwich from it.

Apparently, bread not being a component of the Piedmont youth’s ideal form of dessert, they would toss the bread and just eat the hazelnut-chocolate—of course, such an unbalanced breakfast leading straight to mother’s dismay. To address this situation, three years after the launch of Pasta Gianduja, Pietro introduced, in 1949, Supercrema Gianduja, which, now being spreadable, could be smeared on bread, and goddammit if the kids could isolate the Gianduja after such a treatment! In fact this cheap, democratic treat even lead to a (erotic?) service known as ‘The Smearing’, where after school, children could bring slices of bread to a shop with obvious consequences. Finally, after the death of Pietro and his brother, Ferrero’s son, Michele, took control of the company and to serve Gianduja’s global conquest, he altered the name to Nutella—a graceful word emphasizing the original innovation of bottom-line bolstering nuts.

The Recipe and its Malcontents

I’m not exactly sure what the composition of Gianduja was in the 40s or 50s and perhaps neither is anyone else outside of the Ferrero family—like Coke, with its ’secret formula,’ including ingredients like ‘burger betterer’ and ‘tongue tapper’, the recipe for Nutella is claimed to be a guarded secret. These absurd claims have been aggravating even economists recently. But perhaps that we accept such disingenuous and opaque providences in our food, is explained by a youth-cultural movement known as ‘The New Sincerity’ in which the ability to understand one’s character is seen as a flaw and neither irony, nor honesty are inscrutable enough to base one’s philosophy on. Instead, we mix veracity and deception into a milieu (or a pasta?), that we declare, by the force of our conviction, represents reality.

Of course, we can always return to the grounding foundation of the ingredients label, and in the case of coke, perhaps the above mentioned secret ingredients do hide under the auspices of ‘natural flavors’…but satisfactorily enough for me, Nutella has no such dodges, and find that its recipe is roughly, sugar, partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil (or more recently, modified palm oil), hazelnuts, cocoa powder, skim milk powder, soy lecithin and artificial vanilla flavor. In addition, the percentages of the last three major (though the first advertised !) ingredients are made public. There are slight differences depending on country of origin, but the standard Nutella contains 13% hazelnuts, 7.5% cocoa powder and 5% skim milk powder. We also know the percentage of fat and sugar coming from each of the ingredients, which together with from the total amount of each constrains the problem enough for us to reverse engineer, just from the nutrition facts, that Nutella contains 50% sugar and 22% oil (soy lecithin & vanillin are negligible).

Throughout the course of my chocolate making adventure, the prospect of making a Nutella which features hazelnuts and cacao more prominently than accessories to fat & sugar has been turning in the back of my mind. I am not alone in the desire for a grown-up Gianduja: search google for ‘homemade Nutella’ and you will find countless bloggers with Cuisinarts in hand in pursuit of the same end. Most notably, Ms. Amy Scattergood brought the matter to the public attention with her write-up in the LA Times. As I, Ms. Scattergood is not attempting to emulate the ’secret’ recipe—’Making homemade Nutella isn’t really about reproducing something,’ rather the goal is, ‘homemade stuff [which] is glorious, neither as sweet as Nutella nor with that vague aftertaste that comes, perhaps, from the oils or emulsifiers.’ Her glory is tempered only in the fact that, for her, ‘the texture is grainier, as it would be without the use of an industrial machine.’

Unique Equipment and Experiment Uno

But let’s not be coarse, Amy! The cause of grit is not difference in scale, but in applying inappropriate equipment to the task. For, chopping is not grinding, and while the whirly blade of a food processor leaves large particles intact, the shearing force of granite in the Santha grinder will bring us to micron scale. I therefore feel not only the personal desire to experiment with homemade hazel-chocolate, but the civic responsibility to offer my grinding services where grinding is required.

So after a long struggle to find whole milk powder, I was finally able to make my first batch of Nutella about a month ago. The main reason for reverse engineering the recipe was to satisfy my curiosity and to figure out the amount of oil required to achieve a similar consistency—then I promptly forgot the recipe and devised one of my own. I wanted to seriously increase the flavor, so I settled on 35% sugar, 35% cacao beans, 20% hazelnut, 10% milk powder, finally one more cacao bean to tip the scales in chocolate’s favor. With 50% fat in cacao beans and 60% in hazelnuts, I had enough to compensated for the fat lost from tossing the oil.

The next thing to consider is texture. As we all know, chocolate gets it’s snap from the crystals that form in the cocoa butter, but non-cocoa butter fat will inhibit these crystal from forming as tight a structure, and if the percentage gets too high, the chocolate will temper differently, cease its snap and though still solid, it will kind of crumble. Usually this is undesirable, say in a milk chocolate, but since I am trying to emulate the texture, at least, of Nutella, I wanted something which had a lot of non-cocoa butter fats to hopefully contribute to spreadability, but still some cocoa butter so that it is not just oily, but in the balance between structure and malleability. I’ve heard that above 10% non-cocoa butter fat is the tipping point for such a transition, and with 20% hazelnuts and whole milk powder I would achieve that.

I undershot my mark, however, and what I ended up with was not in any way spreadable like Nutella but really more like the original formulation Pasta Gianduja! This makes sense, because many milk chocolates go for as low a cacao content as 33%, so what I made should be more accurately described as Milk Chocolate with Hazelnut… Another issue was that I didn’t think I would need to temper this stuff, so I poured it directly from the grinder into jars. I was disproved, however, as within a day, bloom, cocoa butter exfoliating to the surface, appeared–thankfully, only a cosmetic defect. A final problem with the first batch, being the first time I used milk powder, I didn’t really conche hot enough or long enough. At first, the Gianduja had a distinct powdery taste, which brought up memories of childhood in cash-strapped houses of a few friends…not entirely pleasant. Stangely enough, this flavor mellowed after about a week, and at the very least I’ve been content to cut slices of Gianduja from my jar and eat them in sandwiches and with bananas for the last month.

La Deuxieme: Necessity of Powder & Unexpected Oil

Looking back on the ingredients list of Nutella, I figured that if I wanted the Supercrema rather than the Gianduja, I would probably have to work mostly with cocoa powder rather than beans. Lacking (at least for now!!) a hydraulic press, I had to purchase some commercial cocoa powder. The first place I look was, of course (!), the food coop, but to my surprise they only had Equal Exchange dutched cocoa powder! We can talk about that later, but it suffices to say that dutch-process cocoa is made from lower quality cacao that has been processed with alkali to obtain a uniform sweet flavor. Not for me!—the artisan’s cocoa powder should be labeled ‘natural’. Anyways, not too far away, I found some Rapunzel cocoa powder that fit the bill.

For the second trial, losing most of the cacao beans, I needed more fat to keep the mixture smooth and free-flowing in the grinder. Therefore, I gave the hazelnuts more room and settled on a proposed recipe of, 35% hazelnut, 35% sugar, 10% milk powder, 10% cocoa powder and 10% cocoa beans. I wouldn’t dare to dispense with the beans altogether, and I thought with only 5% cocoa butter in the melange, they would not form many crystals, and may help to get my desired texture. Well, last Friday I started grinding this batch, and things were going smoothly, that is until I was halfway through adding the milk and cocoa powder. I had already put in all the beans and nuts, to get as much fat in there as I hoped I would need to emulsify the various powders, but things (including the plot of this story?) started to thicken! I hadn’t even started adding the sugar, but the wheels were having a hard time working through my Nutella mass.

In all the recipes I had found online they did add extra oil, so I didn’t panic, but reached into my pantry and pulled some canola (he LA times folks used hazelnut, but I was making do) to grease my wheels. I added a couple ounces at a time, as necessary, until I finished adding my powders and powderized sugar and with 7 ounces total of addition oil, I once again had a smooth substance. I’ve also now worked out a system where I place the grinder inside my oven, to trap more of its heat until I warm the bowl to 165F. At this temperature, sugars in the milk powder should simplify, funky powdery odors should evaporate, creamy sweetness should be all that remains.

After grinding overnight, I tasted some encouragingly hazelnutty, chocolatey spread and put it in jars to chill. Success! No bloom, no extreme-solidification, just complex, creamy, spreadable hazelnut-chocolate. Comments have included, ‘Way better than the first batch!’ and ‘MMMMMM!’. More encouragingly, my sample jars are quickly emptying, but help me kill them—I am currently offering to smear any slices of bread that cross my path!

Economic Comparison

One question that homemade Nutella attempts to answer is, ‘is it worth it?’ One 13oz jar of Nutella costs about $5 (or about $6/lb), but is half sugar! Based on retail prices for Nutella quality ingredients, I calculated that each jar contains $.25 in sugar, $.10 in oil, $.70 in hazelnuts, $.50 in cocoa powder and $.25 in milk powder giving a total cost of $1.80. Note that the son we heard of earlier, Michele Ferrero, is the richest man in Italy, with over $10 billion in assets, even more than playboy prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi! For my batch of 69 oz, I ended up using 21 oz sugar, 21 oz hazelnuts (plus one hazelnut!), 7oz cocoa powder, 7oz cocoa beans, 6oz milk powder and 7oz canola oil, which worked out to a total cost of about $25, leading to about $5 in ingredients for my 13oz jar.

I was going to finally give a nutritional comparison, but if you’re eating it at all, you don’t eat chocolate-hazelnut spread for the health value…. Well, whether there is a market for high-quality Nutella, whether it could be slightly more wholesome…these are issues for another day, all that I care about now is slathering a crust of bread with gooey-brown and enjoying food at its finest.