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.

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.

No doubt that the fallout from this momentous occasion has already become common knowledge. For instance, there was fellow culinary blogger, Jason Brechin’s post extolling, to food, of the importance of being honest. There were repercussions in the twitter-sphere, culminating in RTs by academics, Champaign’s first lady of food and even Massachutsian chocolate maker, Taza.

Of course there was also the reaction among Computer Scientists, which was slightly more skeptical. My advisor, Leonardo, in response to my statement, “grad school can be a depressing kind of place,” chided me for falling trap to the old journalist habit of casting quotes out of context in a sensational light. Apropos of same, my lab mate, Maji, laughed that I could have avoided redundancy by just saying, “grad school.”

The Century-Defining Event

If you’ve seen me around town recently, then surely you have heard me spiel about what I was referring to as the greatest event ever to be held in Urbana history. And no lie, that, for with my great friend and fellow grad student and fellow underground food artisan, Christopher, we unleashed upon the populace no fewer than six hand brewed beers, five hand made chocolates, one craft sour beer and two craft chocolates. Though their numbers matched I’m not sure we exactly paired one beer with one chocolate—being the laissez-faire-minded individuals we are. However, we did specifically get the sour-fermented de Rodenbach variëteiten van bier to pair with ‘the Men’s Club,’ Papua New Guinean chocolate named such because of its intense sour, vinegary and stale smoke notes.

Specifically for this party, Chris brewed an American Stout (technically, a hybrid of American & Oatmeal) that went well with my 85% Panamanian, mixing the roastiness of the beer with the savoriness of the chocolate. This was his first time brewing that style, but he was so pleased with it he told me he will fit it into his regular fermentation schedule. However, to really make this party and this beer special, after an initial fermentation of two weeks, Chris imparted even more chocolate flavor and aroma to his stout by letting 3oz of Panamanian nibs steep in the brew. It takes a devotion bordering on obsession, but the result this artisanal collaboration showcased was intrigue singularly achievable through the means of craft underground food.

As I’ve mentioned previously, this party also gave me the excuse to experiment with different origins, which led, thankfully, to cacao from Côte d’Ivoire. Last time I was raving about the toasted biscuity flavor of these nibs, but finally tasting the bars, I was overjoyed to discover an earthiness I had not yet known. This ‘taste of the soil,’ this terroir, was not a dry—almost chalky—dirt-iness—what I previously thought of as ‘earthy,’ rather there is a rich, full, even moist taste of decomposing wood! Though I still have not gotten anyone else to agree or maybe just admit to it, I primarily thought of something deeply mushroom-like coming from this chocolate. Whatever it is, I think my next bag of cacao may find its way to Urbana, IL via the Ivory Coast.

The Salt of the Earth

I left it out of the last post, but on the left is not a work of modern art, though the orange squares of our slightly salty caramel do make a nice portrait against the background of dark chocolate…no, this is the most popular chocolate bar I’ve made yet! The caramel is, of course, made by my partner Bill, who is a genius chocolatier in addition to being a research scientist in the atmospheric sciences department. As a result of not being as young and possibly with ‘it’ as my generation, Bill was a little conservative (in my opinion) with the salt in his salted caramel. Like a good Gouda, I wanted to occasionally crunch into a grain of salt which would release all the smoky chewy flavors his caramel had to offer. A permeating whisper of salt was there, but I’d like to occasionally hear it’s solo. Well, for the next batch of caramel, Bill heard my chorus, and doubled the salt content! I’m venturing out of my realm of expertise, but interestingly enough, Bill claims that the additional salt is affecting the way that the caramel crystallizes, and he’ll have to do some experiments to get the super-salty caramel to be chewy like normal. Sorry to those readers who crave long-winded scientific explanations, I’ll do some research and leave that to a later post.

However, the really interesting things are the amazing caramel filled chocolate truffles that Bill made with his caramel and my Panamanian chocolate. Complete with another dollop of chocolate and salt on top, we can set our sights no lower than to give Fran a run for her money as the unofficial chocolatier to President Obama. But we will have the advantage, because we have what she does not, artisan chocolate to empower artisan chocolatiers. I would rave about the complexities of these truffles for hours more, but words would be wasted, since what limited supply I had two days ago, has already been reserved or eaten up! The best I can do is leave you with another view what’s been blowing in on the winds from the West—which if you inhale deep enough, as I did on Sunday, yield hints of ginger, cloves and excitement wafting off the first experimental pumpkin truffles in Mahomet, with no end in sight (or smell).

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

I had forgotten to bring a camera with which to preserve and encase my excitement in bit-form, but mindfully I noted my fugacious fervor. While racing my bike back to work, I noticed that I’d been shed on, my bear hug with the cacao bag had left a jute imprint on my chest. When I returned to Siebel and told all of the new member of my family, I took a proud picture of the only chest hair I’ve ever known…or at least what hadn’t blown off while on the bike.

I feel a little ridiculous, but maybe it is not as uncommon as I think for sacks of beans to be delivered to student apartments…coffee roasters? I also feel ridiculous because I don’t really know what to do with this sack. I’m not sure how I’m going to store it, how to handle and take beans from it, and whether I really will make it through this thing. I worry that the tectonic pressure will build, and in some period of trouble with my chocolate making process, I’ll slip into some moment of clarity with the thought, ‘You’re a student. What do you hope to accomplish with 110lbs of cacao?’

In any case, the batch of Peruvian chocolate I molded on Sunday will, for the near future, be my last from that origin. Assuming my current rate of consumption, I am de facto an maker exclusively of Panamanian chocolate for the next 18-20 weeks. I have some plans for this cacao—one particularly exciting prospect is to make some Nutella which is not 50% sugar and 22% crappy-for-you fat. I plan to post recounting my research on pasta gianduja soon, but I will say that the main impediment to this experiment is to locate some bulk (but not 50lb bulk) quantities of whole milk powder. Attaining that would also open the doors to milk chocolate, white chocolate, ev’ry kinda chocolate!

This sack is a sea change and I am giddy yet nervous, but I hope the progress of our cacao, upon which all else chiefly depends, is now as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, I venture to predict kgs upon kgs of theobromian artisanry.

Lab Report

Yes, I am out of Peruvian cacao, finishing a small final batch last weekend. I took the opportunity to test a couple ideas, both of which were low on the success scale, which of course made them good experiments. The first was a chili and cinnamon bar that I’ve been putting off after my earlier troubles with mixing things into melted chocolate. As a friend was eating scrap fondue, he asked what was the red-brown powder sitting next to him, and I shared my plans for the spicy bar. I was again going let discretion overtake valor and defer this powder to another day, but prodded, I decided to try incorporating the powder as I had been doing nuts and sprinkled some cinnamon and Tiny Greens chilies onto the back of a bar I was molding. I tried to press the mixture into the chocolate a bit so that it would stick, but that doesn’t really work for tiny peppers and powders. I haven’t actually tasted this bar yet, but the presentation is not quite what I was going for and most of the cinnamon fell of the bar when I demolded it.

For my next amazing experiment I wanted to try making some kind of peanut butter bar, and I don’t mean like these. I’m not exactly sure what would happen if you mixed peanut butter and chocolate before molding, but I think the high fat content of peanut butter would inhibit the cocoa butter in my chocolate from crystallizing correctly, and we would end up with something squishy rather than snappy—not really a bar, more a spread. I had some other ideas, but I ended up just seeing what would happen if I dropped globs of peanut butter in the bottom of a mold and then pouring chocolate on top. I ended up with some kind of swiss-cheese bar, where the peanut butter (big surprise!) did not magically firm up and attach to the bar, but when demolding, it sat stubbornly in the mold and I held in my hands a greasy peanut cratered chocolate bar. Embarrassed, I put the bar back in the mold and resolved to deal with it later. I think I’ll just scrape out the peanut butter and eat it with the chocolate, which should taste really good, but, I need to go back to the drawing board for a peanut butter infused chocolate bar.

Call for Participation

With an open source ethic, I try to involve people in chocolate making when I can, and share all the information and recipes otherwise. I certainly don’t have all the creativity when it comes to interesting things to stick in chocolate, so I happily solicit the opinions of the readers of this blog as to what they’d like to see in the back of a bar. Share!

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.

Currently the cardinal question is how to store tempered chocolate during molding. When chocolate comes off the grind, it is at 130F and at this temperature, no crystals are present, they’ve all melted, the chocolate is raw and without its temper. The granite bottomed bowl of the Santha grinder is also at 130F, and with this amount of thermal mass, the chocolate in this container cools fairly slowly. I can take lots of time scraping all the chocolate out of the melangeur and into a holding bowl with no worries.

The story is different, however, once I temper the chocolate and by doing so, reduce its temperature to 90F. If I ever heat this tempered chocolate to above 92F, its stable β crystals will start to melt, taking the heated chocolate back to the high-entropy, dog-eat-dog world of a type I-VI crystal forming free-for-all. On the other hand, if the chocolate cools too much, below say, 82F, it will start to thicken noticeably, other crystals start to form, and it will become impossible for me to suck up this chocolate fudge into my syringe, squeeze it into a mold, and smooth it out in its tray. The chocolate may be tempered, but the bars I would mold can only be called, ‘ugly.’

Iteration #1—fail, #2-4—success! #5—return of the trouble

With this background, we can discuss numero uno problema: what kind of bowl or holding system should I use to store tempered chocolate so that it doesn’t cool too quickly for me to mold, and I don’t have to heat it back up, risking destroying the temper. For batches 1-3, when I was making 3lbs a batch, I filled to the brim the largest ceramic bowl I owned. Ceramic retains and does not conduct too much heat, and since the batch size was small, it did not take long to mold, keen. In batch #4, the first of the 7lb batches, I used a melamine bowl. Later, I was a little nervous—melamine is some kind of metabolized pesticide and was recently in the news because it has been appearing in food products from China, but apparently it is kosher to make dinnerware out of a mixture of melamine and formaldehyde (with this plate, you can kill and preserve your insects!)… This thick plastic bowl also retained heat quite well, at the end of the mold, my chocolate may have been thickening a bit, but the bars from this batch all looked good and I didn’t have to resort to hair dryer re-heating.

Batch #5 brought the trouble. I no longer had access to the melamine bowl, so I attempted to use one of the only concave objects of sufficient size that I own, a steel stockpot (with aluminum base for efficient heat distribution). What I forgot was that heat distribution was precisely what I don’t want! After molding only a couple trays of bars, the chocolate in this pot was already thickening up. A second manifestation of this same issue arose with some chocolate I had separated from the rest and mixed with nibs to make some experimental nib bars, one of which you can see on the right. Because this was only a small amount of chocolate, I could put it in a thick ceramic bowl, but again I neglected to consider that both the bowl and the nibs I was mixing into my tempered chocolate were not 90F, but room temperature. This caused nib chocolate to also cool down very quickly—after one tray, the chocolate was already non-malleable. At this point I began looking for my hair dryer, but I couldn’t find it right away, and in desperation attempted to smooth as best I could the thick chocolate in my molds. After trying this with some more of the plain dark chocolate, we were unable to draw it up in the syringe and I searched again for my hair dryer.

Finding it this time, we started giving short blasts of hot air to chocolate in the molds and to our metal pot of chocolate. I don’t recall using my thermometer to monitor the temperature of the chocolate being blasted, instead we just stirred and heated until the chocolate again began to flow. We finished by molding some, heating some, until all the chocolate was molded and cooling in the fridge. As you can see from the picture above, some of the chocolate was pushed too far and lost its temper. When using the hair dryer to heat chocolate already in a mold, it is likely that you will heat the chocolate at the surface to above 92F, untempering it, but the chocolate in the center of the bar will likely stay cool and tempered. You end up with a bar that is not as bad as molding pure untempered chocolate, but the surface still has a poor look and feel. For this batch, the final thing to note is that I made another experimental bar, this was plain dark chocolate not mixed with anything, but I drizzled some almonds, raisins and sea salt on the ‘back’ of the bar, the side facing ‘up’ from the mold. I pressed the fruit and nuts in slightly to the bar so that they would be gripped by the hardened chocolate, but still stick out of the bar for aesthetics.

Iteration #6—different solution, same problem.

I was a little disappointed with my technique in Batch #5 and I didn’t want to dignify these bars with a wrapping party. I was still rolling on towards Batch #6, however, and so I thought again about what object I could use to store my hot chocolate. I thought maybe choosing a metal pot with greater thermal mass might do the trick and I was in luck, because I have a Le Creuset dutch oven. I figured that cast iron would retain enough heat to allow me to mold. I was wrong! I experienced the same two expressions of the same single problem. I again tempered my chocolate, poured it into the dutch oven and culled some to make more nib bars. I again did not pre-heat my ceramic nib-bar-bowl, nor did I preheat the nibs, and I again ran into the same trouble molding these bars. While I was doing this I covered the pot of pure dark chocolate, and I successfully molded a tray or two of bars, but again the metal was dissipating heat too quickly and I really had to resort to the hair dryer this time.

It took me maybe two hours to mold my bars (I was up until 2am!) as I kept repeating a cycle of stirring and heating the chocolate, monitoring it with a thermometer until it got too about 91F, then I would mold a tray of bars as fast as possible and have to come back to heating the chocolate again. After iterating this several times, I began to grow skeptical that what I had in the pot was even still tempered chocolate, it seemed unlikely. If it was untempered, my labors were in vain, and I might as well heat it all up to say, 100F, be done with the molding and try again to temper and mold the next day. This is eventually what I did, but I was surprised to discover that before that point the chocolate I was working with seemed pretty good. Most of my bars, though labor intensive to mold, looked decent because of it, only after I had grown frustrated and resolved to end the process did I really get untempered bars. To the left is an example of a bar halfway through the process, it is ‘bumpy’ because I squeezed it out of the syringe in a ‘back and forth’ pattern, and since the chocolate was not so viscous, shaking the molds only smoothed the ridges so much.

On the experimental side of Batch #6, I was planning on making a cinnamon + cayenne pepper bar, but given my trouble with incorporating the nibs, I held off on this and just made more tests of the nib bar and the almond/raisin bar. It is definitely easier to use the style of pressing things into the back of the bar rather than incorporating them into the chocolate and then molding. Therefore, I may try some more experiments with dried fruit, nuts, or other pressable things, rather than powders, which must be mixed.

After these two batches I decided to take some time off, and have been considering my options. Today I biked over to the Habitat ReStore and picked up a large ceramic pot which I think should solve some of the cooling troubles. The professional solution is to buy a chocolate holding tank, like this ’small’ tank or this industrial tank. In the image you can see confusingly named fellow chocolate maker, Rogue Chocolatier with his arm on his tank. If this ceramic bowl doesn’t work, I’ll buy another melamine bowl, and if that doesn’t work, then…

I’ve also made a big plunge and put in an order for 110lbs (ie: one ‘bag’) of Panamanian beans, I would have preferred 110lbs of Peruvian, but they are not for wholesale. I’m dwindling on the stock of 35 lbs of beans I received two weeks ago, so this should last for at least… a month. I’ve also tried to become a little more business like and resist the urge to give everyone I meet free chocolate. That is not sustainable, and I still have not broken even on any batch of chocolate, but I visited the bank today to make a deposit of my sales over the last several weeks, and I think I may be in the black in a couple more weeks. Finally, blog-wise, it seems impossible to post more than once a week, but I still have more to say! I’ll post next time on process improvements and ideas in the wrapping and packaging of our bars.

My technique is improving, or at least, changing. When I first started out, I was consistently over-roasting my beans, bringing them near 300F, in the 280F range, I was getting comments on the lovely… smokiness of my nibs. Each iteration since the first, I have been lightening the roast, experimenting now with taking the beans just until the point that the husk easily peels off in my hand. As I roast less, less acidic compounds are burned off, possibly resulting in a more ‘astringent’ chocolate. We do this, however, in hopes of allowing more of the flavors and characteristics of the particular bean we’re roasting to make it through to the final chocolate.

So then, for my sixth cacao roast, I brought the beans up to only 250F, when I noticed that the husk became significantly easier to peel, and the flavor peaking at a nutty high. There were actually two batches in this roast! I’ve been scaling up my process slightly, and am now roasting about 6 pounds of cacao at a time. As an example of how we rely more on our personal sensory information than electronically sensed information, the first batch in the oven took twenty minutes to get to the point of nutty husk detachment, whereas the subsequent batch took only ten. This indicates the two roasting curves were distinct (pre-heated oven vs. not), however, since I combined the batches later, I can’t tell which makes a better chocolate!

Motivated by two ends, I again increased the length of the grind, currently at 26 hours. Since we are roasting lighter, and therefore more acidity is left in the beans, we may need more time to conche the chocolate. Recall conching is the long heating process, for me between 130-140F, that evaporates out bitter and acidic compounds from the melted chocolate. In addition, I still am getting a coarse texture to my chocolate, so I would be extending the grind anyways. Some have commented that they appreciate the earthy feelings that come from a little cacao coarseness, but irregardless, I want to know how fine it is possible for me to make chocolate. To increase the tension and shear between the granite rollers and slab of the melangeur, I bought a couple of 1″ key rings and have been using them as a shim in the hardware that holds down the rollers. The hope is to prevent ‘hard’ particles like crystals of sugar from hitting and bumping up the rollers, but by maintaining high tension, we’ll keep the rollers at a constant distance from the slab and increase grinding efficiency. Unfortunately the nut holding this assembly down is partly made of plastic, and if I go too far tension wise, this thing could break off, leaving me to have to buy a custom machined (and expensive!) aluminum replacement… The pictures above show the progression over 26 hours from more coarse to less coarse… but still coarse!

I also got some friends to come over after the grind to take a video of the tempering process, but unfortunately, the batteries in the camera I provided went dead after about 20 seconds. After tempering and demolding the bars with my would-be videographers, I invited everyone over for a chocolate wrapping party! We worked from about 10:30pm to 1am cutting foil and paper, wrapping bars in both, and labeling each by hand! A bottle of wine was passed around, and even though it was free labor, I think people really enjoyed themselves. I was also pleasantly surprised with how well the hand-drawn wrappers look, but am still planning on fixing a design and printing those in the future.

The final result—the flavor of these bars is a little more acidic, maybe more fruity and floral than the previous Panamanian batch, and I occasionally detected some caramel or dairy notes. I would venture that the slightly increased complexity was due to our different roasting technique. A friend suggested to me that we keep around a library of past bars, just so that we may make better such comparisons, but six pounds of chocolate really doesn’t last very long, ya hear?

Other Hand-Made Projects and Excitements

I wanted to use this blog to showcase other fun things made by hand. Non-virtually, I had a great opportunity to do so at last Saturday’s first Urbana-Champaign Mustache Ride, put on by cool people from The Bike Project! A couple of moths ago I heard about a great way to keep your face and neck warm while walking from yours to your neighbors shed in the middle of dreary Icelandic…or Illinoisan…winter—the ‘Beard Cap,’ by Icelandic design team Vik Prjónsdóttir! But who wants to trudge all the way to NYC and dispense with $135 buying this sardonic design? Especially if you have free time, five needles for knitting and some primo Merino Malabrigo yarn! Certainly not I. So I resolved to knit up my own version of this awesome hat (better than these other imitations!), and after a false start and some failed experiments to give the back some ‘hair-like’ texture, I finished the alpha release of Daniel Harry Schreiber, Beard Cap Maker of Urbana, IL…’s Beard Cap!

Then, while picking vegetables at the new student farm, a bike coop-er mentioned the mustache ride and I knew I had to show up with my hat. There was an alleycat race/ride, which is a sort of bike obstacle course, where locations, but not routes are given, and you have to ride to each, in any order, following your own shortest path, then at every location, you do some silly thing. The hook for this ride was that everyone must wear a real or fake mustache…with facial fiber competition before the race. As you can imagine, I was a favorite in the fake’stache competition, coming in second place behind the gent on your right. The mustache ride was great, especially because it was the perfect opportunity to show off the independently knit beard cap.

YMCA Dump and Run Finds

The final piece of excitement last week (at least in the context of this post), was the YMCA ‘Dump and Run’/free sale. The day after the mustache ride, with a new friend I had met there, I went to the U of I Stock Pavilion to see if the YMCA was offering anything of interest. To my surprise, I found several chocolate molds or things which could be used as such. The first set were two trays of plastic molds, much like what I’ve ordered online to mold my bars, but the shapes in these are special. Each slot is a circle with the bust of a cute little cat holding a Halloween pumpkin, with the lid of the pumpkin on the cat’s head—precious. I’ve been calling these the cat-moon molds, and used them both to mold some of the Panamanian batch #4. We also found some pink and yellow egg-molds which are supposed to be used for jello, but I think will work fine for chocolate. To use them, you close the two halves, and pour melted chocolate through a hole in the top, hopefully if it doesn’t stick and you get a big, solid egg shaped chocolate. And finally, we found some silicone muffin cups. I think I won’t need to use these, and I haven’t yet used the egg molds, but I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough molding capacity, these are my backups.

While walking around another part of the free sale, I found a wallet size photograph on the ground and turning it over, discovered an especially hilarious love note. This has nothing to do with chocolate, and I hope no one is offended by my posting this here, however I really feel the urge to spread not only love of chocolate, but also love of cloven-hoofed animals, especially those which provide us with such delicious milk (whose powder can be used to make chocolate!)—viva la cabra!

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!