artisanal thinking

’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!

My body is addicted to the craft of chocolate making. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make chocolate, and haven’t had any personal chocolate in my possession all week. I was supposed to receive 25 lbs of Panamanian, 10 lbs of Peruvian beans, plus a needed increase in my molding capacity on Tuesday, but it seems the boxes were slow to ship, and I am only just receiving some beans today, and more molds on Monday… With proper timing, I can roast several batches of beans this weekend, begin grinding them Sunday, and be tempering as the new molds (hopefully) arrive Monday. Previously my batches have been about 3 pounds each, but with more molds, I can increase to about 6 pounds. As I scale up, each phase of the process will eventually become a bottleneck and I’ll have to augment each in turn—this weekend, I’ll be going to buy another steel bowl for winnowing, and more baking sheets for roasting.

On another front, a friend of mine may be interested in doing some wrapper design! It will be good for her portfolio, because the design will actually be used, good for me of course, and we will all end up with more chocolate in our coffers. For all the designers reading this blog, if such a deal would interest you too, please get in contact! Finally, many friends have been expressing interest in being involved with part of the process. Though it would be wonderful, I’m not exactly sure whether people want to sit around with me, say while waiting for beans to cool so we can crack them into nibs and then perform the somewhat labor-intensive process of winnowing… So we’ve hit upon (well stole) the idea to hold some chocolate wrapping parties. After demolding the next batch of bars, we’ll invite over friends, unscrew some beer and wine, and get together to clothe our bars in foil and love.

Concluding Projections; Now, Reflections

At a potluck yesterday, it was noted that from ‘artisanal’, we can deduce that:

as in, anal retentive—an OCD manifested in craft as: concern with detail, with perfection in process and with the quality of the outcome. A nice observation I think, which left me wondering what else this title could inspire? With some enumerative help…doggerel:

As an artisan, I, begin my poem, alias, rant. Like Dickinson, truly, I sing an aria, slant. A pall covers all, a salt rain, that is industry. The disrupting bullet, a slain art we revive. Craft! In the Satan lair we cause a anal stir, a alter sin, our crime. For, we reject standardization, diversity of flavor and experimentation, our end. We produce quality achievable only in slow, small batches: the mascot of our art, a snail. Opposite that is a liars tan, branding those obsessed with economies of scale. Of craft, I may not be a natal sir, but slow comes illumination, the will to take part in a nasal art. I, though thin, I snarl at a king. This is my artisanal thinking.