Artesan Chocolate in Minneapolis

We can now add Rogue Chocolate, run by 22-year-old Colin Gasko from Minneapolis to the small but growing list of American chocolate makers run by dedicated fanatics obsessing over the possibilities locked in the cacao bean. The Minneapolis City Paper has a good profile on Rogue, written by someone clearly a little overwhelmed by the labor and science required to make chocolate happen. My inside sources say that his product is quite good, and I’ll be enlisting my Minnesota relatives in an effort to retrieve a review sample.

DeVries Makes the Saveur 100 List!

Saveur Magazine broke my heart last year when they named Hershey’s Cacao Reserve as item 57 on their 2007 “100 Things We Like” list. While it was nice that they were talking about single origin dark chocolate, I’d hardly rate the Hershey’s entry as the most interesting or delectable chocolate around. They redeemed themselves this year by naming DeVries chocolate to the number 7 position on the 2008 Saveur Magazine 100 Favorites List, and additionally putting the DeVries wrapper on the cover. The Saveur list is always good reading, as any foodie will find one or two things they hadn’t heard of before, but they’ll want to experience. The list ranges from cheap and tasty (competition barbeque) to expensive and tasty (Thomas Keller’s restaurants), and usually includes some cool tools for those of use that spend too much time in places like Sur La Table. On my wish list from the list this year is the Chinese ironwood cutting board.

Milk Chocolate Gets Some Respect

In last week’s New York Times, Julia Moskin writes a pretty great article on the new generation of artisan milk chocolates. The one thing she misses in the article is that, unlike dark chocolate, there are fundamentally different formulae for milk chocolate. The milk can be incorporated as roller dried milk, spray dried milk, cream powder (mmmm….cream powder), or the vacuum-cooked milk crumb that gives European Cadbury its distinctive caramel note. My current favorite milk chocolate is Iara from Coppeneur in Germany. It’s a single origin Ecuadorian chocolate, and full of powerful banana flavor notes.

Chocolate Returns

Finally got another batch going! My in-laws were nice enough to give me a nice assortment of beans for Christmas, so I got out 2lbs of the Dominican Republic, and applied a nice intense roast, aiming for a nutty, coffee kind of flavor as a nice contrast to the fruiter, low roast Venezuelans that I’ve been messing around with. Carefully winnowed this batch, as I’m finding that makes a fair amount of difference in texture. Also got to use real molds from Chocolat-chocolat, which makes for a far classier looking product than the choco-blobs I’d been making before. However, because I’m not using any extra cocoa butter, it’s a pretty slow pour, making molding somewhat difficult and messy. I also rushed the temper a bit, and ended up with cold spots in some of the pour, which of course instantly bloomed. Patience is key here. I didn’t wait for the seed crystals to cleanly melt into the chocolate to be tempered, which was the main problem.

Chocolate Surrealism

Doing some research yesterday, I stumbled upon chocolate manufacturing making a cameo appearance in the history of modern art. Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaist/Surrealist best known for signing a urinal “R. Mutt” and displaying it as art, also apparently knew something about how chocolate is made. One of his later works, The Large Glass, aka “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even“, consists of two large glass panels. The top (”the Bride”) contains an insectile figure, and the bottom, nine empty suits on a wheel that turns a….chocolate grinder.

(As an example of how abstruse Duchamp can be, and why he’s so entertaining, the French title of this work is La mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même, which contains MARiee CELibataires. To further confound people, he published a multiple part subscription book called The Green Box dedicated to “explaining” this work. Rather than some kind of straightforward essay, subscribers got a grab bag of copied explainations, sculpture, and found objects.)

I’m not equipped as an art critic, but Duchamp’s use of chocolate grinding as a kind of futile, Sisyphean effort of the empty-suited Bachelors to reach their Bride is sort of a grim counterpoint to the overt romantic images used to market chocolate these days. Or maybe I’m just crazy.

New San Francisco Artisan Chocolate Maker!

I have been hearing rumors of a chocolate maker starting up in one of San Francisco’s pier buildings for a few months. Now there is an article in the New York Times on Tcho, a chocolate startup founded by Louis Rossetto, who also started Wired Magazine. In typical Silicon Valley startup fashion, he dove in with both feet. After hearing of a chocolate factory for sale in Germany, he bought the whole works and moved it to San Francisco.

They have taken a very “product management” approach to chocolate making, offering small batches of “beta test” bars for testing, starting with a Ghana single origin. (An unusual choice for a first bar, as most artisan producers start with a Trinitario rather than a Forestero bean.) They are only offering them for pickup at the factory now. Hopefully I’ll be able to track down and interview someone from this interesting new company. Stay tuned…

Chocolate Rethought at Tailor

I was lucky enough to have time on a recent Manhattan trip to experience the Cocoa Tasting Menu at Sam Mason’s Tailor, the new restaurant by the former pastry chef at WD-50. Tailor and WD-50 are the two main bastions of “molecular gastronomy” in New York. The proponents of molecular gastronomy, working in the footsteps of insane genii like Harold McGee and Ferran Adria, use chemical principles to reimagine the way that food is made and tastes are paired. At one of these establishments, you are more likely to be eating watermelon air or pine needle sorbet than a steak or pasta. While many people are taken aback by the odd tastes and textures employed, this school of cooking has really taken the gourmet world by storm. Adria’s El Bulli is the most sought after reservation in the world, and Grant Achatz’s Alinea was named by Gourmet magazine as the best restaurant in the United States. The mainstream success of shows like Good Eats and America’s Test Kitchen also owe their success to the MG approach to cooking.

So, what does an MG kitchen like Tailor do with cocoa and chocolate? They pretty much take into some frontiers not often visited. The menu is definitely an aggressive exploration of how chocolate can pair with other flavors (squid and chocolate?!?), but I think there’s definitely more room for experimentation. What Tailor didn’t do was to work with the different flavors of chocolate itself, or imagine what can be done with the fat mechanics of chocolate. I think that some enterprising chef should do a menu with untempered chocolate, unconched chocolate, and perhaps also contrasts between the different bean varieties. Tailor (like many MG places) uses a lot of gels to manipulate texture. Chocolate (and cocoa butter), carefully crystallized, could do many of the same jobs, with possibly more toothsome results. My grousing aside, here’s what Tailor offered, with some tasting notes.

Squid salad, cocoa, toast, mint. The menu definitely starts on a challenging note. Squid and chocolate sound like an odd pairing, but the mint in this dish is definitely the peacemaker. There’s still a definite oceanic quality to the squid which fills the salt void in the chocolate taste, but the high notes of the mint build a little bit of a bridge.

Foie gras, peanut butter, cocoa, pear. Ah, two different fats singing in harmony! Foie gras and peanut butter were melded together in a small square, and dusted with cocoa and peanut. Foie gras loves to live along side sweet ingredients, and the pear and peanut butter prove to be a delicious counterpoint.

Chocolate gnocchi, brussel sprouts, lime puree. Soft chocolate pasta nuggets served with brussels sprouts leaves, on a lime puree. The trick here is that the dish is sprinkled with sea salt, which makes the lime and bitter-ish leaves support the chocolate.

Chocolate-miso cod, cauliflower puree, snow pea julienne. This is the Tailor twist on Nobu’s famous black cod. Crunch is supplied by tiny nuggets of Japanese rice crackers, and the chocolate supplies sweetness. The cauliflower puree is extremely smooth and enriched with olive oil (and is far better than most potato purees I’ve had!)

Duck and eel terrine, chocolate consomme, green mango. A small block of layered duck and eel, very slowly cooked, in a strong chocolate broth. This broth, much more bitter than sweet, could be used as the base for lots of dishes.

Beet ravioli, cocoa caviar, orange, tarragon emulsion. My favorite dish of the evening. A small bright red square made of thinly sliced beet covering an orange foam, covered with small chocolate gel spheres. Ultra-refreshing, and a huge contrast to the bass notes of the previous dish. The tarragon emulsion is a brilliant green, herbal counterpoint that adds depth without taking away from the pure, clean flavor of the beet and orange.

Butternut squash cake, cocoa sorbet, cashew beads, maple Fall on a plate. Cake with ice cream, topped with a square of clear squash brittle. These are ingredients that more obviously rhyme, and this is executed without too much sugar to distract from the basic flavors.

Soft chocolate, sesame ice cream, mole A small strip of chocolate gel, like cold semi-melted chocolate. Your mouth expects melted chocolate to be warm, but this is cool and soft. A very nice trick, and the sesame ice cream works too.

It’s great fun to experience this kind of experimentation, and while the flavors are unconventional, after I mentally stepped back a bit, they were really delicious. The best part of the overall menu is that they got the goodness of chocolate without the goopiness and sugar that usually accompanies it. Now I’m just keeping my fingers crossed for Cocoa Tasting 2.0, with varietal cacao (the fruitness of Madagascar, the smoky earthiness of Arriba) and elements of less processed chocolate. Sam, I’m willing to help anytime!

Interview with Art Pollard of Amano Chocolate, Part III

Here’s the last segment of the interview with Art Pollard of Amano. In this segment, we discussed how he sees the market evolving, and how his company fits into that picture. I recommend reading this interview while eating a square of Amano Madagascar, and support independent American chocolate makers!

How much effort is Amano putting into pulling customers from the wilderness of eating industrial chocolate? Do you envision yourself growing more from individual chocolate lovers or the culinary trade?

I think people throughout the world and right now, especially the American public, are waking up from the darkness of industrial chocolate. This has not been lost on the “industrial chocolate complex,” however. I am amazed when I walk into many stores how they are currently trying to reinvent their chocolate so that it looks like premium chocolate. The packaging on much of this chocolate is beautiful—at least compared to what has traditionally been used. Unfortunately, when I taste the chocolate, it still tastes like the same old— I am hopeful that the American public will not be fooled by the slick marketing campaigns these companies have been running of late.

NPR’s Morning Edition on Cacao Farming

National Public Radio ran an interesting feature on Cacao farming this morning. As part of their series on climate change, the piece focuses on how cacao can be grown under existing forest canopy, and hence is a way to farm and preserve existing rainforest. The NPR page, in addition to some good information on how Cacao grows, also has a photo of Mars’ chief agronomist, who looks a little like Santa Claus on a tropical vacation.

Interview with Art Pollard of Amano Chocolate, Part II

Today, we continue the interview with Art Pollard of Amano Chocolate, focusing on how they formulate a chocolate, and their philosophies on sourcing cacao. On a side note, my sister-in-law and her family went on an adventure to New York City, (with two little kids, every trip is an adventure) coincidentally at the same time as the New York Chocolate Show. They said the show was swamped, and that the Amano crew were incredibly busy. They happily did manage to get a bar of the Amano Madagascar, which they rated as their favorite chocolate of the show. I hope to be able to post some of their pictures soon!

Thanks again to Art for all the information in the interview. In this segment, I found his views on chocolate aging to be especially interesting. It’s a topic that’s not widely discussed, but is a crucial part of the process for serious chocolate makers.

On with the interview….I’ll be posting the final part of this interview later this week.

How do you go about “designing” a chocolate? Are you aiming at a specific flavor goal, or are you working from the specific characteristics of a bean?

Each bean is different and has its own unique flavor characteristics. Our goal is to try to bring out the best of each bean we work with. One shortcoming we see in some single-origin bars is that in our opinion, the chocolate makers begin with a preconceived idea what “chocolate” is supposed to taste like. This gives rise to all their varieties of chocolate tasting more or less the same.

For us, our first step is to ensure that the beans we are purchasing are what we are looking for, both in terms of quality and then flavor. From here, we run a number of tests, both as far as roasts are concerned, and then how the chocolate behaves in the conche. In the end, when we feel we have a handle on the characteristics of the bean, we run a small test batch. We then let it age approximately thirty days, to allow the flavor to develop more fully. Then we reexamine it. If we like what we taste and see, then we continue on. If we do not, we start over.

All in all, we keep working with the beans and developing our formulation until we feel we have it right. Some beans take much less work than others.