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!’

Theobroma cacao, the tree from which the cacao bean comes, is thought to be native to the Amazon Basin—spread throughout Central and Meso-America by early humans. We can trace the cultures that used cacao by testing ancient pottery for the presence of Theobromine, an alkaloid found in cacao. This alkaloid has been detected in delicate drinking vessels, dating to before 1400 BC, of the pre-Olmec civilization known as the “Barra”, located on the Pacific coast of Chiapas in Mexico and neighboring Guatemala. The picture at right shows another early American vessel, holding not hot chocolate, and these Cornell researchers think possibly not even the cold cacao froth popular with later American, Montezuma, but perhaps an alcoholic drink from the fermented fruit pulp of the cacao tree!

Ritualized cacao drinking among the elite classes of early American society unites the civilizations of the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs. Mayan pottery, such as the piece at left, dated to about 500AD, found in the tomb of an aristocrat at Mayan site, Río Azul, contains the two instances of Mayan Glyph for cacao, and has tested positive for theobromine. Another, known as ‘the Princeton Vase‘, dated to around 750 AD, depicts a woman pouring, from a height, a cacao drink from one vessel to another—the earliest depiction of this method of raising foam in drinking chocolate.

In addition to pictorial evidence, texts, such as the Popol Vuh, a Mayan creation myth, reinforce cacao as a fixture in early American culture. In particular, it references cacao as among the food stuffs found by certain gods used to create the body of man. No specific Mayan recipes for cacao based drinks survive, but it is likely that they combined ground cacao with ground Maize to make a gruel, and with any number of spices and flowers used as flavorings.

It was the Maya, at Guanaja, who introduced Europeans, through Columbus, on his fourth voyage, to cacao beans. Ol’ Chris may have brought some of these ‘almonds’ back to Spain, but they were initially disliked and forgotten. In America, the Aztec civilization both carried on the Mayan customs of drinking cacao and finally fixed cacao in the minds of Old World denizens. The Mayans may have drank cacao as both a hot and cold beverage, but the Aztecs were firmly cool imbibers. They too valued most the heady foam that could be produced by alternate pourings from distant vessels. Similar flavorings were used—Maize for lower class chocolate, for the lords, honey, peppery annatto, dried ground flowers and chilis, a prized flower known as hueinacaztli (I can’t find much info on this, besides what is repeated from the book I’m repeating from!), vanilla flowers, and spices similar to black pepper or anise. Much of what we know about the Aztec cacao rituals comes from Spanish observers, primarily the writings of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, but also from an unknown soldier of Hernán Cortés, who remarks of chocolate:

This drink is the healthiest thing, and the greatest sustenance of anything you could drink in the world, because he who drinks a cup of this liquid, no matter how far he walks, can go a whole day without eating anything else.

True enough, as anyone whose made hot chocolate made with actual bars of chocolate or ground cacao beans, rather than partially de-fatted cocoa powder, knows that it is an incredibly rich, almost syrupy thing, owing to the balance of fat and solids in the cacao bean. One must show temperance and take care not to drink large quantities at once, lord knows how Montezuma reportedly drank 50 cups of cacao per day(!), or feel regret later when walking all day, trying to work off the calories and indigestion from this energy a-bomb.

Garden Mulch or…

From the New World, cacao was eventually adopted, sweetened and loved in the Old. For some time it was primarily a food that was drunk, until the process of refining it into bars was perfected, but let us toss inhibition, return to that ancient tradition and experience different methods of imbibition. As I may have mentioned previously, the cacao husks that are winnowed from the nib are not used, due to their poor flavor and texture, in making chocolate, but either discarded, composted, or sold as mulch (ed: from linked website—Q: Why is cacao husk better than other types of mulch? A: Smells better!). Or…it can be made into tea!

I think I first heard the idea when seeing a bag of some Yogi tea advertising chocolate and cacao husks listed as an ingredient. Ha! that’s a byproduct, I thought, and…something I should try. I now see that other gourmet tea manufacturers use husk, and one, MEM tea is even partnering with Taza chocolate to use their husk.

So now after winnowing, I’ve been filtering out the big husk pieces with a wire mesh, and saving them in large bags to replace my afternoon Irish Breakfast. As would be expected from something that is purposefully removed because of its lack of flavor contribution, cacao tea is a fairly timid, mild beast. The flavor is reminiscent of chocolate, but it is not overpowering in any sense. Aroma, however, is where this tea is really interesting. It gives of a heady scent of the ‘baking brownies’ smell, that one gets when roasting cacao. Half the pleasure of drinking this tea is the inhale before the sip. I enjoy it in English style, sweetened with just milk and seek it when something light and thin is preferred, in contrast to the following cacao beverage (or meal!).

Thick Chocolate

About a month ago, I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was into espresso equipment, making coffee under proscribed rules in an attempt to perfect the cup and had made a pact with myself to someday get a lever-press espresso machine. Then, lo and behold! a beautiful 20-year old espresso machine was bestowed upon me, a gift from this friend who had recently upgraded his equipment. I’ve since been enjoying a cappuccino every morning, perfecting my milk foaming technique to make the perfect thick hot chocolate, feeling inspired by a recent resurgence in interest in ‘traditional’ hot chocolate, notably that coming from Bittersweet Cafe. Over in Oakland, they are making small cups of rich chocolate, from what I remember (it was three years ago that I went there), using an espresso grinder’s doser to measure cocoa powder into water or milk, a milkshake blender to stir and homogenize the slurry, then the steam wand of an espresso machine to heat and foam.

More recently, yesterday, I did have the chance to do more research and stopped into Chicago restaurant, Xoco, where I didn’t get a chance to sample their food, but did drink their chocolate. They are using similar equipment and processes to me to craft ‘bean-to-cup’ chocolate, again attempting to rediscover Mesoamerican past in thick chocolate blended with water and spice. Mine was thick, with jewels of fat on top to prove that their actual chocolate—ground cacao, rather than powder was the ingredient, but I did notice it lacking the characteristic head that our Aztec woman pictured near the top is taking such care to form.

I of course am questing to make this, and with my new espresso machine, all I needed was some chocolate and milk (I’m trying milk for now, taking the final plunge to water sometime in the future). In the past, I would clean the cacao grinder by first heating milk and running it in the mill, to loosen and dissolve the final residue of chocolate that is impossible to scrape out. Then I would pour out this authentic thick chocolate and finish cleaning it with hot water. Of course, I can’t drink the whole cup in one day, and so in my fridge I found some saved chocolate, milk with 100% Madagascar. I also sacrificed authenticity by adding a teaspoon of sugar, not sure that I wanted the straight bitter beverage. With the chocolate already in solution, I foamed the whole mixture with the steam wand of the espresso machine, and coming to 160F, had a nice thick head of foam.

I didn’t use any flavorings like chili or cinnamon, but this chocolate was delicious. Due to its percentage, the chocolate is available to taste, and due to the head, it was their to feel as well, this truly is hot chocolate, not just heated milk, as I sometimes think of thinner beverages. I did drink this in one sitting, and wanting to prolong the experience, even refilled half the cup with milk and foamed again. I think I found the perfect dish to make with extra 100% chocolate, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with water, spices, even smaller amounts of thicker chocolate, and maybe ditching the espresso machine altogether, finding a large vessel to go at it with my molinillo or find another and pour it between two, like apparently even Moroccans do with tea, to create something more than a drink, evocative of food, and good food this is, hot chocolate with head!

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.

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..

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.

A Short Travelogue

We chose the Southwest because South America was too expensive and we wanted to retreat from winter. However, the numb-screams from our toes in the 12F cold outside of Winslow, AZ on the second night quickly led to altered expectations. All the more reason, then, to descend a vertical mile from the South Rim into the inner Grand Canyon where temperatures are 25F higher on average than the high desert. We came woefully unprepared, so for about the same amount one can buy a good chocolate melangeur, we outfitted ourselves with tent, backpacks, sleeping bags, stove and water filter, and lbs and then kgs of…oatmeal. We spent four days in the canyon, when because of winter, few others make the trip—leading to, midway on the hike down, a peaceful sunset and solitary trek through the star and moon-sliver lit night.

On the third day, I enjoyed a relatively flat walk up the north side to Ribbon Falls. An extremely cold shower and mud bath were my reward, then I read some passages of Walden aloud to my companion. I felt compelled by Thoreau to front only the essential facts of life, and so took advantage again of the winter solitude to execute these experiences in the most primitive clothing possible.

After thus wearing out our legs, we made tracks on Christmas Eve for Phoenix to rest with a very old friend of mine. Christmas Day, I walked to an art neighborhood of Phoenix, Roosevelt Row and saw 4 shipping containers in the form of a house, made by Upcycle Living. We relaxed in a clothing-art-library-coffee shop, Conspire where while snacking on canyon leftovers—dried apricots dipped in almond butter, I discovered a combination that must be expressed in a chocolate bar. There was a bike coop whose dirt front lawn was turned into a hangout area with couches and coffee tables and later that night we heard hip-hop at gallery-bar, The Lost Leaf. Surprisingly, all of these commercial establishments were converted single-family houses!

Leaving Phoenix, we lost one friend to Berkeley, and so the two remaining travelers set out to return to New Mexico. During our egress, we stopped at the desert botanical gardens and saw tons of hummingbirds and a surprising amount of cacti that looked like underwater sea creatures. That night we slept on the edge of eastern Arizona in a frigid dried up lake-bed near the semi-ghost town, Cochise, AZ. On our way to Cochise, through the magnificent Karst Topography of Texas Canyon, AZ, we passed about 30 miles of billboards for a ‘canonical tourist trap’ known as The Thing. Advertising 24-hr gas, Dairy Queen and unspecified but singular rarities, we were obliged to stop.

To enter the freakshow of The Thing, one must first brave the gift shop filled with all manner of knick-knacks and people with mythically bad hairdos. We each paid our $1 entrance fee and exited the gift shop through a surprisingly flimsy and unguarded painted door to a U of three warehouses surrounding what seemed to be a trailer park. Under fluorescent light, we saw old tractors, a car which transported Adolf Hitler and a stray cat (was this The Thing?). In the following outbuilding, we marveled at typewriters, figures in town-scenes carved entirely from solid blocks of wood—by a single artisan, guns dating from 1654 AD. We were shocked by the fact that the rarest item on earth was protected only by flimsy glass in southeastern AZ. Finally we stumbled into the ultimate room, the ceilings decorated by grotesque animal figures with winding, spindles for arms and legs fashioned from whole pieces of driftwood, though we knew not what desert river they drifted from. Immediately we were confronted by a mummy under glass that in the end was our best guess for The…Thing we sought. The tour gracefully wound down on a lighter note with and exhibit of a ladies side saddle that dated to 1842 B.B (before bikinis).

The stretch of I-10 through southern New Mexico (or perhaps, any highway) turns out not to intersect quaint, uncommon towns of high culture, so my initial unwillingness towards taking ‘out-of-the-way’ side trips was overpowered, as I learned that in a road-trip without a way, nothing was out of it. We followed the brown road signs to Gila National Forest, by way of a town, Silver City, which claimed to have 30+ art galleries. On the Sunday we came, only Blue Dome Gallery was open, but the large art quilt featuring a can of Bud, a woman and text beginning, “I hate you motherfucker” made the trip worthwhile. I left with a bowl made by this same artist and her husband.

We took many hikes in Gila, then in Spring Canyon State Park near Deming and in Elephant Butte State Park near Truth-or-Consequences. During these hikes, we realized that an appropriate symbol for the trip would be a snow-covered cactus…laughing, we summited mountains and looked down on snow clouds, we crossed frozen ponds whose frost reminded us of that from our breath that formed each night on the inside windows of our car, where we now slept, trying to appease our toes. We also started interacting with the authorities more…while cooking eggs on the side of the highway, a well-intentioned sheriff checked to see that I was in fact crouching over a backpacking stove, and not an unconscious man. Settling into my sleeping bag while stopped off the side of another highway, we learned directions to and the proper pronunciation of Elephant Butt park (bee-you-t)…where we were intending to camp all along.

From New Mexico quickly came Texas; El Paso, which seemed dilapidated and unremarkable, then Juarez which with its crowded joie de vivre, unconcerned litter and petrol smell reminded my companion of his ancestral home in Lahore, and surprised me with the fact that artificial borders really can restrict cultural osmosis. I don’t know if this is because of the rules changing last June, but contrary to what I heard, a drivers license is not sufficient, one does need a passport to reenter the US, even from Juarez. We got yelled at by the Customs and Border Protection officer, who made me admit my naïveté, and gave me an info sheet so that I will remember that I am noncompliant, though I’d rather say, nonconformist.

After hiking El Paso’s mountains, we made our way to marvelous Marfa, TX—a town I was hotly anticipating, yes because of an nyt article I read. But in the middle of the night, barreling down 90 just outside of Valentine, I was intrigued by an approaching square of yellow-green light, and squealed as I caught a glimpse of designer high heels in this exiled one-room outbuilding. Shit!, there is a shoe-store in the middle of the desert, I yelled, waking my sleeping companion. Turning around, we confirmed that what we saw was Prada Marfa, an experimental art installation, with unopenable door, housing 6 handbags and a gaggle of left-foot heels…god bless you, Marfa.

For a town with about 2,500 residents, the density of cool things in Marfa is incomprehensible. We visited: an art book shop with experimental poetry installation, a gallery featuring art by my favorite photog, Hiroshi Sugimoto, a vintage cowboy boot shoppe, a gas station turned pizza parlor, sardonically titled pizza foundation because of the abundance of artistic non-profits in Marfa, a screening of silent movie The Wind with live musical accompaniment (!) at local community art theatre, the Goode Crowley, with opening act by a cowboy poet (!!), and an open bar, and it was completely free (!!!), a lunch cafe run by a swiss woman whose family makes chocolates (I think not bean-to-bar) under the name, Vollenweider, finally (not really, but space….), we toured the sensational, spectacular, silvery, Chinati Foundation, which houses art by minimalist artist, Donald Judd, and his buds.

The story of artistic Marfa goes back to the 1970s when Judd, already a famous artist in NYC moved here and started purchasing old spaces, rebuilding them and filling them with world-class art. Eventually he died, and two foundations, Chinati and Judd preserve his art installations and living/work spaces respectively. The centerpiece of the Chinati tour is Judd’s 100 works in milled aluminum, two concrete artillery sheds, lined with floor to ceiling windows and filled in a checker-like pattern with 52 and then 48 boxes of equal exterior dimension but differing partitions of interior space. Of course, there is the interaction of light reflecting off the surfaces of the aluminum, but most interestingly to me were the acoustics of these spaces. Standing on one end of the shed, the conversations of our other tour participants melted into a pâté of mutterings, freeing the conversation of the arthritic boxes—slowly being heated by the morning sun, expanding and settling, they let out adagio tics and cracks elevating the inanimate almost to the plane of living beings.

From our two days in steeped in art and fine food, we drove through the night to Austin, once again making fine friends with The Man. Ask me for this story in person, but after an hour standing in the cold, receiving a warning for 72mph in night-time speed limit 65 zone, getting a sobriety test (BAC: .000 !), refusing a search and having dogs come and sniff our car, we were back on the road, cuff-less. Not one hour after that, the ominous red & blue lights flashing again, we were stopped once more, by the insane, but patriotic, border patrol. Not speeding, not anything, just driving through West Texas at 1am warrants proving your allegiance to the ol’ Uncle S, and because we’d had enough, letting them check your trunk for those dastardly and exploitative migrant laborers who villainousnessly pick our fruit to keep the economy humming…who but, the Mexicanos. The scent of guacamole in the back made them suspicious, but we were free and on the long road again to humble Illinois.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city.
Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
—Albert Camus

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.

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!

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).