artisanal thinking

The role of prodigal blogger is not a new one for me, but the reason I’ve again been silent for a period is due to my experimentations as the prodigal son. After letting the idea ferment for years, I decided that I don’t want to return to my ancestral home for some time—I already know what that place looks like! I want travel to introduce me to new ideas and new scenery, so this winter I stuffed my backpack and set out to meet two friends in Albuquerque, walk a little and see the desert-y part of the world.

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

Once, for the Italians of Piedmont, though perhaps hard to fathom, the cost of cacao—due to World War II rations, exceeded that of a provincial achene—the Hazel! So their story goes, confronted with limited supply and unmet demand, Mr. Pietro Ferrero sought to decrease the price of and make chocolate available to the common fascista by grinding not just one seed, but two! With the inclusion of relatively cheap hazelnuts and vegetable oil, the proto-Nutella was born. Also a man of his time in using cartoon characters to market sugar to children, Pietro called his creation Pasta Gianduja, the paste of Gianduja, a role in Commedia dell’arte representing the town of Turin, where Ferrero’s pastry shop was located, prior to the war.

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.

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!