artisanal thinking

This blog began as a means to disseminate information about the process of making chocolate. It’s purpose was not only to share, but to provide a medium for me to think and refine my skills and process, and to plan a method of right action for the future. I have now approximately figured out how to make chocolate at a microscopic scale, therefore my recent posts have strayed from the principal aim of careful deliberation on the technical aspects of that endeavor. This again is such a wayward post, and my first true probes into the murky waters of apologia, however, the aims, though separate, are auxiliary to the original—together in a more abstract purpose, thoughts about technique and technology, which appear to me as two perpendicular axes to walk. The choice of what to become, artisan or outsourcer, is currently what I slowly ponder.

The genesis of this story was a meeting earlier tonight of this year’s Farmers’ Market vendors (and yes!, you may count me among them) where a sensitive nerve of mine received an electric pinch. This year is the first that folks with food stamps (here, they are tracked with a debit-like LINK card) can shop at the market. After the meeting, one colleague, I do not know who, asked the market director, “Has anyone raised the moral question of letting low-income people shop at the most expensive venue in town?” I wasn’t asked, so I didn’t respond, the director however, did beautifully, which I will relate in the argument below. But first, what statements are we refuting? I think the vendor was making two assertions, first, that the only place feasible or even appropriate for impoverished people to meet their dietary needs is at a ‘poor’ store like Wal-Mart. Behind this perceived necessity lurks the idea that ‘cheap food is bad food.’ The only way to eat cheaply is to eat poorly. Healthy food, in this case cast as the fresh, local and organic fruits, vegetables and grains available at the Farmers’ Market are, by nature of their quality, expensive to the point of being out of reach to one eating on a budget. The offering of such plutocratic fare to impoverished individuals the complainant finds highly offensive.

The market director’s response to the first idea was impeccable—all that is happening is that the suite of grocery options available to LINK card holders is being increased; one additional door opened. A tenet of the USA: no one is under duress to spend their money at this market. Similarly, no one should be forced to spend their money at Wal-Mart, which is what disbarring LINK from every place such as the Farmers’ Market would ensure. Viewed through this lens, the mandate that LINK be spent only at approved locations seems totalitarian and vague.

The more fundamental claim, and one that, with data, I will refute to the most bitter ends of the earth, is that the cheapest way to eat, the single option imposed by circumstances on the poor majority is to eat processed, eat the prepared food that’s offered and suffer the consequences of an unhealthy diet. To the adage, ‘cheap food is bad food’, I would agree, given the addendum, ‘to those ignorant or unwilling to prepare it themselves.’ Cheap, healthy food is within everyone’s grasp, if they take the time to make it in their own kitchen. It can be delicious too if they have a zeal for experimenting with recipes and flavor enhancers. It can be organic too, if they cook meals whose calories derive primarily from root vegetables and grain rather than meat. It can even be meat, if they buy the forgotten cuts (Jacob’s Ladder?!).

Consider Breakfast. As a processed food shopper at Wal-Mart, I’ll likely buy cereal; Cheerios cost $5/lb. I trade off between eating oatmeal or yogurt & fruit for breakfast, consider the former. Bulk organic oats and sugar cost at most $2/lb. Bulk organic raisins & peanut butter cost at most $4/lb, but at most 1/4 of oatmeal is made from these flavor enhancers, adding only $1/lb to the price of oatmeal. I can experiment with other things, spices, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom; or coffee, chocolate, apples…used in small quantities, all for similarly cheap or negligible prices. I can easily make a variety of culinarily interesting organic oatmeals for about half the price of Cheerios.

If anything should put my theory to the test, it would be the McDonald’s dollar menu. This is really bad food, but is it cheap? The best value I can find is the ‘McDouble’, which at a third of a pound, costs…$3/lb; it contains 390 calories for $1. But basing my whole 2,000 calorie/day diet on McDoubles, I would be spending $150/month on food. I beat that mark as an undergrad, can Urbana’s market?

It is getting to be early in the morning, so it is time to wrap this initial post up, but let me note that this subject is not new, and some are singing my chorus, but the adage persists. Here are two items from the Champaign landscape. First, beating me to every punch, This Little Piggy already posted about the controversy over Olympian drive and our Urbana mayor’s untactful comments which attempted to cast local purveyors of artisan cheese as out of touch with the hoi polloi who cannot afford their cheese or farmstead dinners. Behind the mayoral assertion was the assumption that their good food was in opposition to those who out of necessity ate cheaply or poorly, who ate at the food bank. Not all of the arguments, however, are reactive, responses to perceived untruths. One that gives me the greatest amount of hope is our local food coop’s ‘Food For All’ program. They actually designate specific actual food ingredients (not prepared/processed foods) in the store as ‘Food For All’, take lower margins on them, and give people the recipes to make them into meals on a low budget. One plate at a time, they give people the knowledge to assert that for them, ‘Cheap Food is Delicious Healthful Food I Just Cooked Myself!’

’twas back in old September that I first received a first burlap sack of cacao. As was mentioned last week, I’m growing geometrically, and have obtained two more sacks, now giving 300lbs of cacao at my disposal. Sneak peek—I’m working to establish a direct trade relationship with individual farmers in Guatemala to get 500kg (or more!). But the milestone passed that necessitates these new supplies is that the primary is spent—last Friday, I roasted up the last of my original Panamanian cacao!

Sep-Feb 15th is 5 months, about 21 weeks. Starting with 110lbs of cacao, I’ve been making chocolate at the rate of at least 5lbs/week, evincing my predicted production schedule. For the second set of sacks, I expect my production rate to increase proportionally with the cacao available. Therefore nearing my birthday in July, I should be rising to find the third installment of cacao and at least one more level of geometric expansion.

More so than say, the first dollar I made, this first burlap sack I’ve emptied is an emotional souvenir I’ll proudly display for years to come.

Reemergence of Paradiso Pairings

Those who’ve watched me grow from infancy will remember the samples of batches #1, 2 and bars from #3, 4 that I brought to Caffe Paradiso last August. Five and a half months elapsed with no chocolate option for the independent minded coffee drinker, but all that was remedied just two days ago, Tuesday February 16th, with a renaissance of Flatlander Chocolate on the counter of our Caffe. This time with better labeling technology, diversity of flavor and strength, increased awareness and recognition, the response was ebullient, brisk sales ensued, all were satisfied.

Tuesday, ten bars, split between Côte d’Ivoire and Dark Milk Salted Caramel, were brought in about 8am and I heard that by 11:30, none remained. Being otherwise occupied at the time, I didn’t replenish the stash with a second decemvir until 4pm, another four of which were history by the time they closed. Wednesday I brought eight bars (running low on supplies now), substituting Malagasy for Ivoire and found similar desertion in the evening. Today, finding myself lonely with a lack of salted caramel, I tested the waters with a double dark offering, Peru and Côte, this time finding a couple stragglers at 8pm when I took them home, but happy with a respectable seven sales. I will be taking a break tomorrow, as my stocks have dwindled, and I need time to replenish, but once my army regroups, we’ll return in full force to the Caffe, sacrificing ourselves, along with our sibling bean, Coffea arabica, to tongues, nostrils, and Urbana hearts.

Phatlander?

Fie, fie, how franticly I square my brand!

Not quite in an attempt to reference the 19c story of spatial transcendence, but rather to try and give what I consider a ‘true portrait of Illinois,’ I’m rechristening the brand: ‘Flatlander Chocolate’. To me, a boy who grew up in the hills and forests of California…prairie? plain? no, planes are what my region of the Midwest entails, the stamp I feel and what of it I own. For an enterprise which has as its goal, the experience of terroir, of tasting a place, through chocolate, I feel a sense of the place of production is paramount. This and a desire for transparency is the original reason I chose, ‘Daniel Harry Schreiber, Chocolate Maker of Urbana, IL’ to be my original moniker. A name which has as it’s virtue that it answers three important questions one has upon meeting a new individual—who are you? what gives you passion? where do you practice it? We hope the new still gives a sense of our motivation and origin, but more succinctly so. However, I do still plan to sign off somewhere on the bar my trio of responses, that I may be an open book to all.

Signing off, concisely, or not.
Daniel Harry Schreiber
Chief Chocophile
Flatlander Chocolate
Urbana, IL, 2010.

Beneath the city din and adjacent to hasidic curls, a craft food community is encircling the mainstream. Characterized by Einstein’s three qualities above, this informally-organized posse of brothers & sisters have been media darlings as of late; fodder enough for a self-analytical magazine. Concerns over the possibility of this popular interest being nothing more than the passionate intensity of the worst have been raised by our own sultan of speck. But fine, let them gush if they will—disregarding attitudes, let’s look at, then, goddammit, taste the substance of what these Brooklyners are making! I think one will find an underlying current, maybe even a currant, worth noting.

Therefore, after landing at JFK on Tuesday to spend Thanksgiving with my family in Manhattan, I took the scenic route through that borough-beginning-with-a-B, to taste the local food indus… artistry. As to the Dome of the Rock, a pious foodie must take a pilgrimage to the two-block stretch of Broadway, not a stone’s throw from the Williamsburg Bridge and the East River, that houses a trinity—in contrast to the overtly named restaurant Diner and its attached ’sister’ deli-pantry Marlow & Sons, yes, opposite Berry Street resides the true soraral operation: the contrarily titled butcher-shop Marlow & Daughters.

What does one find in this triad beginning with whole animals, and ending with whole meals? In Marlow & Daughters—unobstructed and in plain view—in the front of the back end of the shop, is a table surrounded by several laborers, various knives, and an unapologetic display of, on the day I came in, hunks of beef being carved into cubelets. In the glass deli case which doubled as a counter, pieces of pig freely-ranging from ‘lardo,’ ie: fatback, to ham in the form of life-sized whole thighs, to ‘trotters’, legs (with feet!), streching even to eerily uncurled piggy tails. In a cooler opposite, I was intrigued by bottles of Mother in Law’s Kimchi, instantly endearing its creator, fermentation enthusiast, Lauryn Chun, to me—live, craft fermented cabbage, of course, being one of the tunnels to my heart. Unfortunately perhaps, I didn’t leave the shop any trottier and my tail remained solely vestigial, but after befriending a bearded chap on the other side of the counter and discussing chocolate, charcuterie, and communal food, I followed his recommendation and netted myself a chunk of fennel Sopressata from Manhattan’s Salumeria Biellese.

Wending our way back to cacao, the siblings at Marlow & Sons, in addition to other fine goods, brought a fine selection of chocolate to the pantry, including: Patric Chocolate Nibs, Sun to Bar Manufacturer, Grenada Chocolate, Askinosie Chocolate… And chocolatiers including fellow salted caramel lover, Nunu and finally, an uncooked foodist! fine & raw.

The craft does not stop there! The parade of fermented vegetables does not cease yet! In Brooklyn one can also pucker at pickle and mustard maker, McClure’s Pickles, or if they don’t suit your fancy, not to worry! There are options in your local pickle provider, with Wheelhouse Pickles taking back the ferment and offering a true fermented sour pickle! It is nearly unfathomable, but at its core—fundamentally silly and even heartwarming that young people are living by Sandor Katz’s edict that ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved’!

Still! The craft does not end there! There are yet food-related-but-not-edible-food artisans in Brooklyn! Most notable there are artisan kitchen knife makers producing knives with the individual character of this bounteous borough. My last stop in the whirlwind tour was to supply-shop The Brooklyn Kitchen where I was seeking the knives of Cut Brooklyn who grinds and polishes knives in a studio here. O, how bittersweet!—They are so popular that I didn’t get to test one, since because of Cut’s 10-month backlog, they cannot even spare one knife! Clearly, even the capitalists among us must admit that what is being produced in Williamsburg is of obvious value—this is an enclave of celebrated high-quality goods and the marketplace is demanding more quantity be devoted to the production of quality! O, how joyous!

The Trip’s True Purpose

From the roughly unbounded number of artisans, the diamonds that I most wanted to see were the Chocolate Makers of Williamsburg, NY. They are two brothers named Mast, NYCs sole conductors of the alchemical transformation from bean to bar, coddling their cacao on 3rd St., two and a half blocks from the river. The Masts were of course the primary motivation for my jaunt to Brooklyn, and preparing myself for the possibility that they were too busy to take time for me, I came in with no expectations but to buy a bar of chocolate. But the warm reception, tour, exchange of knowledge and chocolate, and even camaraderie tasted almost as good as the duo’s Madagascar 72%.

After landing at JFK and meeting my friend Cyrus, our first stop was here, so we timidly strolled into their factory and piled our luggage next to the piles of cacao beans seen at left. The initial sensation upon entering the industrial-chic shop is an encompassing aroma of cacao. The scent wafts from the burlap sacks stacked on every surface, the raw beans on which their bars are displayed, the oven behind the counter that toasts the cacao, and on a work table adjacent, the nibs that were being cracked, using the same crankandstein roller mill that I have at home. Unlike the iron bridges in Chicago that smell like identically boxed brownies, this aroma was fierce and piquant, a sign of the unique acidity of Malagasy cacao and indicative of the individual attention given by the Bros.

I introduced myself to whom I recognized as Rick Mast,
one half the duo, and began to offer him and his employees samples of Dark Milk Panamanian and Peruvian Pure Dark Chocolate. Having thus established that I was indeed a member of the fraternal order of chocolate makers, we set out on a tour of their rooms with a young man named Ardo. In Urbana currently, my partner and I are mulling some purchases of equipment to scale up our operation from nano-scale to somewhere between that and micro-level, so what I was most interested in on our tour was finding out as many details as possible about the machines they employ. Cyrus was snapping pictures on his iPhone and I was trying to extract details about times, temperatures, voltages and pressures. The main room of the Mast factory is split by a sound-isolating glass wall into two halves—the front housing the oven, work tables and shop, the back containing several grinders and pictured at right, their new prototype shop-vac-powered winnower, an interaction with an aerospace engineer. From what I’ve read, the Masts used to winnow on the sidewalk, utilizing two buckets and dropping their mixture of nib+husk in front of a carefully placed box fan. Everybody grows up at some point, and this simple but clever machine works by inhaling nib/husk through a hose, moving it to a conical chamber where it turns and turns in a narrowing gyre until the nibs fall down the bottom and the husk separates through the top to a second similar chamber where it in turn is deposited in a collection bucket or sucked into the shop-vac.

Most interestingly, along the brick wall next to the winnower were four stone and steel grinders, each capable, over the course of three to six (!) days, of grinding 50 lbs of nibs into a paste palatable as chocolate. Seeing this quad justified the entire trip, since my partner and I are planning to scale up our capabilities with one of these exact grinders. That it comes with the Masts’ approval gives me confidence in the investment. One quirk is that these beasties take 220V, three-phase power, and as will I, the Masts had to modify the electrical capabilities of the building to accommodate them.

Because of their size and power, these grinders run hotter than what I currently use. Desirous not of mellowing, but for the complexities or their Madagascar chocolate to last, the Masts, astute students of Lou Reed that they are, don’t want it so fast, and employ a constantly running fan next to each grinder to cool it down. Later Rick Mast told me that left alone, they equilibrate at about 170F. While in the back room, I got Ardo to pull out his infrared thermometer, and we got a reading of about 135F, similar to me!

After the chocolate’s stead in the grinder, the Masts pour out their untempered 45lbs into a large metal chafing dish, wrap it with plastic, label and date it, then let it age for a bit while waiting for the pipeline to get around to tempering and molding. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve heard that it is common among craft chocolate makers to let their chocolate age while the flavors complete their development and mellow slightly. From my experience it is true that chocolate right out of the mold tastes much different (and in the case of Papua New Guinea, almost scarily unpalatable) from several weeks old chocolate—Because of brisk demand, I don’t have any data on anything more mature! Apparently the Masts have the same problem, since unlike Patric Chocolate’s schedule of a several months rest, the most elderly chocolate I could find was just one and a half weeks young.

When its time finally comes, a block of Mast chocolate will be taken from its rack to the final two rooms of the factory where it is tempered, measured and well…squirted in three rapid spurts into a tray of molds. Then using the machine’s built-in vibrating table, the pile of chocolate is evenly spread out and air bubbles removed. The tray of molds is passed to a second employee who sprinkles whatever inclusions will be used into the back of the bar, and once four trays fill a baking sheet, 12 bars will be set to cool and crystallize in the under-counter fridge. Following this, the Masts hand-wrap their bars in gold-and-silver foil, beautiful Florentine paper, and attach a sticker with their logo and holding the paper together on the back, another sticker with the bar info.

When I finished touring the factory’s four rooms with Ardo, I excitedly finagled Rick into showing me their specific wrapping technique, as I am a little dissatisfied with some of my chocolate origami. He illuminated the one fold equaling the difference between our two styles, and I should be able to make my bars look even more spectacular now. I just returned to Urbana, so I haven’t yet unleashed the new methodology, but in the sequel, I’ll post some before/after wrapping photos.

Finally, the Masts and I performed a craft-exchange, of course I got the better deal, leaving their building finally with Pure Dark Madagascar and Experimental Brazilian Chocolate, plus a Madagascar chocolate with maple syrup glazed pecans. I felt bad leaving them with just some Dark Milk Salted Caramel and Ivory Coast chocolate. Entering their factory nervous and expectant, I returned to the world of fur hats and peahs transformed by the Mast hospitality and willingness to share knowledge and…chocolate!