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.

So, sorry, perhaps the time is not yet ripe for me to write about bacteria, nevertheless, I am always able to eat them. Therefore, I would like to announce an event, the first in what I hope to be a series, that will make space for myself and all the other extant bacteriophiles out there, while hopefully, with the power of fermented foods, creating some new ones. The means by which I hope to alter minds is by offering up a meal composed of foods that have been lost, are no longer eaten, or are conflated today with substitutes that bear little semblance to their original character. Though some of the food is still eaten in other countries, sometimes other states, here even, perhaps a couple generations prior…we dub this antediluvian dinner party the ‘1000 year old food club’, signaling our intention to rediscover what sustenance felt like to millenia of humans.

On the menu will be: my dairy ferments, yogurt, viili, kefir. Sourdough bread with raw milk butter, good enough for a meal itself. Raw milk, spartan, unaccompanied to showcase its bare grassy, flowery appeal. Wonderful offals, headcheese. Tongue. Now stretching the theme a tich, chocolate (at least until I learn how to make Montezuma’s xocolatl). Finally, Homebrew beer.

About pleasure and adventure, this party will showcase the best in local artisan food and the best in human cuisine throughout the ages. Join me this Saturday, Feb 6th, anytime from 5-8pm at 407 S. Birch, Urbana, IL; Earth..

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

The first offensive was mounted by a fresh new local stretching studio, Amara Yoga & Arts, who asked me to supply their Mala Yoga Day event—the centerpiece of which was the performance on the part of the participants, of one hundred eight sun salutations—with some excessively refined Daniel Harry Schreiber Chocolate, for postsalulatory salivatory stimulation. I originally heard of the Mala day at a potluck about a month ago where one of the yoga organizers said she had heard about my chocolate operation and was really interesting in involving it in their event. I was still on my second or third batch, and so I was extremely flattered that my name was already being passed around. In addition, I had not yet begun to sell any bars, so when they said that they were a new studio and probably couldn’t pay for chocolate, in a passionate moment, I agreed to donate whatever they needed.

I have to admit that later, I was a little worried about my rashness. As I mentioned at the end of an earlier post, I’ve been in the red for almost all of my batches so far, and am still red overall. Though chocolate making is a hobby, not a business, I’d still like to sustain whatever it is, which implies that I cannot lose money indefinitely. In any case, I got scared and reneged on part of my offer, explaining I couldn’t donate to Amara more than a small amount. They graciously agreed to buy the rest for a reasonable price.

So on Sunday, September 20th I set out with several pounds of chocolate, a plate and silver tea tray for presentation, and plenty of newly printed, hand drawn and scanned business (or hobby?!) cards for distribution. At 9:30 I arrived and broke up one and one quarter pounds of chocolate into tasting squares, following which at 10am I and about 15 other loosely clothed semi-limber folks embarked on a century plus eight journey with no purpose but to welcome the sun. Our guides, Maggie Taylor and Lauren Quinn led us wonderfully and kept count of each salutation by moving a bean from a cup to a bowl. Every 27 iterations, we paused to catch our breath and reflect, and after about 2 hours, we saluted our last. Tous le monde was ready for chocolate at that point, and judging from the girl who filled her cupped hand with pieces of Panamanian product, I did not disappoint.

I was happy, everybody was happy, needless to say, I recommend that you put your yoga hat on here. At Amara, the boss, Theresa Brandabur told me that she was interested in future yoga and chocolate interactions and even selling some bars at the studio! Extremely flattering and excellent to know, this adds fervor to the coup being forged by business.

A Harvest of Bacon and Nibs

To the veggies reading this blog: skip this section!

Several months ago I received a kickstart from a man I’ve recently gained a high respect for—Champaign’s local meat tenderizer, our sausage stuffer and pork puller—Laurence Mate of This Little Piggy. In exchange for his generous donation, I offered him a quarter pound each of Panamanian and Peruvian nibs. Not content to nibble, he opened his mouth wide and surprised me by crafting these ingredients into cacao-covered bacon! Bacon is often described as meat candy, but Laurence’s maple-cured, orange zest and cinnamon spiced, sweet/salty/smoky slabs are most definitely more delicious and refined than any Snickers or Newman-O I’ve ever tried. I would prefer to call this symphony of complex cacao rashers downright meat ecstasy.

But, what do theobromated-porcine anomalies have to do with my industrial conflict? Nothing really, except that when Laurence sent me an email last week describing the cure of his bacon, he mentioned that Mohammed, who runs my favorite olive emporium, World Harvest, was interested in tasting my chocolate…with possible commercial applications. I still haven’t gone over to chat with them, but again, I was very flattered, though getting a little nervous that interest in this biz was reaching a peak, and I wasn’t ready to respond to it. I plan to go there on Monday, and I’ll be sure to post (eventually) about what happens.

Acknowledgment of Legitimacy, or the Other Side of the Equation?

The most exciting offer came from Lisa Bralts-Kelly who sent me an unexpected email after sampling some chocolate I cold-sold to another farmer’s market denizen—Urbana’s public arts coordinator, Anna Hochhalter (I’ve been teasing Anna that I am writing a blog post about her, I don’t know if she’ll be disappointed, but she is a really good sport about this and being approached with chocolate, so I highly recommend you check out her official public arts website). Lisa described my chocolate as ‘WHOA’, and asked whether I would be interested in selling at the market next season! I thought this was unbelievable and I relished it as an acknowledgment of the legitimate interest in what I am doing. When retelling this story at a Computer Science party, one entrepreneurially minded CSer suggested that maybe her interest lay not so much in selling my product, but in selling me hers…however, this cynicism I refuse to accept!

Déjà vu, I was extremely flattered by Lisa’s offer, yet for multitudes of reasons, I am not currently a professional chocolate maker. But I do like theory. So I’ve recently been exploring in my mind what it would take and what it would mean to scale production and process to a point where it is not just extremely fun, but even when counting my labor, it is economically viable to make and sell chocolate.

This blog post is long overdue, so I won’t post right now about the exciting labels I’ve been collaborating with several designers on or other interesting chocolate aficionados I’ve been interacting with, but I’ll leave you with two challenges to professional chocolate. One way of scaling production is to gather multiple tens of thousands in investments and buy a set of equipment suitable not for the hobby-chocolate-maker, but the small-scale-artisanal-chocolate-maker. Conversely, my preferred method of escalation is to think, ‘I’m craftier and smarter than that,’ take my low thousands of dollars, head to the store to buy pvc pipes, shop vacs, heat lamps and thermostats, and see if we can build a winnower and incubator. These machines do not seem to be that complex, I think with experimentation and some mechanical engineering expertise, construction is possible.

Besides the trial of capital or craft in procuring more serious equipment, the second hurdle is to find a space to do this stuff in. My room, basement and kitchen can moonlight as a chocolate factory for only so long. There is the hard constraint that to legally sell to the public (and obtain, say, a farmer’s market booth), one must produce one’s food products in a health certified kitchen. I just promised to wait for another post, but I’ll say that I’ve been exploring and talking to people about restaurant kitchens, coop kitchens or other upstart food factories that could lend a hand (or a permit!).

My groove is shallow and imperfect, but it is what I am currently capable of. What can we do to further improve the process and our bars of chocolate? Some primary concerns right now are the physical molds I have, the way molded chocolate is cooled and what we do with bars after they come out of the molds. There are two grades of molds one can buy, ‘hobby’ and ‘professional’. Hobby molds are made from PETG, a copolymerization of PET plastic, the stuff soda bottles are made of. The main issue with these molds is that they are thin, they flex—when I fill a tray of molds with chocolate, the middle mold will sag a bit. The bars I’ve been producing, then, are not rectangular boxes in 3d, they are the bases of extremely shallow parabolae. I’ve also read that the final chocolate hobby molds produce is not as glossy-shiny as molds from more rigid, higher grade plastic. You may recall that well-tempered chocolate contracts slightly as it cools, and as a result, most of the area of every bar pulls away from the mold. Then when turned over, they just fall out. In my case, there are usually a couple of concentric rings where perhaps because of sagging and thus increased pressure in a region of the mold, the chocolate does not contract and cool away from the mold, but is flush and has a ’stuck on’ look in contact with the mold. When I demold, these rings stay slightly more matte than the rest of the bar, a flaw.

For the serious and respectable chocolatier, molds come in only one variety, ‘professional.’ These thicker molds are made from polycarbonate, a durable substance which can be used to make bullet-proof glass, cds or the case of the previous generation of apple laptops. When using polycarbonate, there would not be any parabolic geometry, there should not be my matte-finish rings, and possibly there would be an even higher sheen overall, perfect for creating chocolate … mirrors. The advantage price-wise, as in all things, goes to the hobbies. A tray of molds holds close to three-quarters of a pound, making my collection of 9 molds enough for 6 pounds of chocolate, about my current batch size. I spent about $50 buying hobby molds from the home chocolate-maker supply store—I could have gotten away even cheaper if I had ordered from the mold manufacturers. Unfortunately, to upgrade all these to professional versions would be in the hundreds of dollars.

I was recently chastised for not coming up with enough areas for improvement in the technique of chocolate making, referring instead to polycarbonate molds, holding tanks, grinders… the never ending supply of upgradeable toys that can consume any hobby. I feel slightly as a photographer with chipped lens, that a new Leica would be an objective improvement and justifiable upgrade, but what we’ll actually do is try to give my equipment some more love. A simple solution to my saggy-molds would just be a stack of paper used as a shim to support the underside of the mold—I intend to put my molds on a pedestal, elevating them and the quality of the bars.

Subtleties in Handling Any Equipment, Hobby or Otherwise

There are more minutial concerns with how we’re cooling the molded chocolate. One must keep in mind that when it enters the fridge (or for commercial makers, ‘the cooling tunnel’), the 85F chocolate is a flowing liquid. That means that if they trays are not placed on a level surface, for instance if when trying to maximize space usage, one side of the tray rests atop a notch where the fridge rack attaches to the side…if they are not level, chocolate will flow just a bit to the lower side of the mold. Then we have not just parabolically shaped ‘bars,’ but truncated pyramid-parabolic bars, where one side is thicker, one side thinner. All of this unique geometry leads to interesting situations wrapping the bars where the paper band will only fit around the foil-wrapped bar under a specific orientation. Some gracious folks have commented that this spontaneity is what you would expect and possibly desire from an experimental craft chocolate maker, but I would at least like to refine my process, improve my technique and intimate knowledge of my tools to the point where I can choose whether to be pyramidal or rectangular.

Because we work extremely hard making well-tempered, smoothly molded, unsaggy and rectangular bars, we must be extremely careful in handling them after taking them out of the fridge and eventually demolding them. Originally I would take a couple of large plastic bags, collect my bars from the molds and then put them in little stacks 3 or 4 high filling the area of the bag. Inevitably this leads to collisions among the bars causing scratches and powder to collect on them, deglossing and mattefying the surface which through tempering and careful molding I had worked hard to achieve! For the last wrapping party, which was held six hours after I finished cooling the bars, I took the molds out of the fridge, wrapped each tray in a bag, and put those in my chocolate cellar in the basement. This way we demolded the bars just as we were about to wrap them, and we could ensure they would look snazzy. We’ll eventually start using gloves as well when we are wrapping the bars so that we don’t scuff the surface with fingerprints. When I unwrap a bar, I want it to pop, not have a powdery handprint on it!

Final Update for Now

On the business side of things, and I’ve certainly been busy…after batch #7, I took my flock to Siebel for cold storage and stacked up 26 two-ouncers, 15 one-ouncers, three licorice bars, one each of almond, nib and plain dark bars, plus some older Peruvian dark bars. Last night I witnessed a sequence of rapid-fire 20 slide, 20 seconds per slide presentations from the ‘local creative class’: Pecha Kucha. I saw some cool quilts, theoretical illustrations, thoughts on the ’stuff’ of art, stories from the knitting circle, and thoughts on hocking old stuff. My moment in the sun came during the intermissions and at the after party while I was mingling, trying to get people to try samples of my chocolate and asking for their support in the form of a mutually beneficial transaction. I made a repeat experiment in direct sales this morning at the Urbana Farmer’s Market. Sometimes, when extending my hand, shouting, “HI! I’m Dan! … Do you like chocolate?”, and reaching into my backpack for the samples bag—I give someone a good freak out…but the rest of the time, it is really fabulous fun.

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!

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

Muralists on the Prowl at the Media, Independent

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

see the full panoramic image

Heartbreaking Collaborations of Staggering Genius

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

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

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

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

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