Chocolate in Context

South East Asia, Before the Chocolate

2011-12-05T23:37:00.001-05:00

A couple of weekends ago in Hanoi (only an hour-and-a-half flight from Guangzhou), my uncle asked me if I ever write about my travels. The question struck me because writing about my travels is one of the things that, when asked, I claim to do for a living, and because Vietnam is even the country where, a dozen years ago, I began to undertake travels that could be chronicled. But you (and my uncle) might not know that, since there is no record in any mainstream publication of my ever having been to any of the countries in the current Association of South East Asian Nations. Why? Well, as I write in a poem that was just published this week (a proud first), the reasons are many. Sometimes I prefer to just read a book. Or write a poem. Tangle myself in the lusty pursuits of the human soul. Or get back to the work I'm being paid to do and grade papers. Or throw myself uncomfortably onto the couch to contemplate the lack of insulation in my apartment and the accumulation of allergens on the blanket that I'm using to do the job while watching several uninterrupted episodes of The Wire on pirated DVDs. Anyway, I'm ambivalent about "travel writing," which, as I had the wonderful occasion recently to discuss with the English professor to whom I had first submitted my own travel stories as a student on Semester at Sea in 1999, is predicated on the antiquated cultural notion that what is strange to you is ipso facto universally strange; and once an author disabuses herself of that faulty logic, she must reconsider her research and file the work under a new category (journalism, say, or memoir; anthropology, maybe, or confession). Or acknowledge that there's no there there--which is not such a terrible thing. That emptiness, vastness, confusion is often why we travel in the first place--to be foreign, to get away, to lose ourselves. That's a wonderful pursuit. One of my favorites. I'm just dubious of the instinct many travelers have to write with authority about the very thing within which they are lost. In 1999, I invoked "the uncertain tree-lined streets that frame latter-day mythology aboutcolonial Saigon" in one of my first travel stories. Like many 21st century travel writers, I have continued to question the biases and motives of travelers from my part of the world while at the same time participating in them, projecting them, with my very presence, back onto parts of the world that are not my own. That is the trap we have constructed for ourselves, and for a while now the trap itself has made for an interesting topic of inquiry (I particularly enjoy what Claude Levi-Strauss did with it in Tristes Tropiques).

And until I figure out how to get out of the trap entirely, here are the items and encounters that have most impressed themselves on my memory over twelve years of travel in Southeast Asia:

1. Van Cong Tu's Hanoi street-food tour and the discreet bourgeois charm of Tu's shiny white Vespa (you can jump on the back if you're touring solo).

2. On the topic of the bourgeoisie, everything about the Metropole hotel in Hanoi, especially the Vietnamese cooking class and the perfectly grilled steaks, heavy French sauces, and artichoke stuffed with mustard-seed-spiced cauliflower salad in the bistro facing the street.

3. The mystery of Saigon, which had about one and a half tall buildings when I visited in 1999 and now, I hear, looks likes Singapore or Hong Kong, though the miraculously delicate spring-roll dipping sauce made from other ingredients mixed into incredibly pungent fermented fish sauce is as good as ever.

4. Pho.

5. The fruit. Everywhere, the fruit.

6. The combination of Buddhist ethics, creative spirits, and fragrant herbs, resulting in phenomenal restaurants that train street kids for jobs in hospitality: Koto and Hoa Sua in Hanoi; Makphet in Vientiane.

7. Everything about Vientiane.

8. Riding away from the inevitable sensory overload of Angkor Wat, on the back of a moped, into the gentle dusty landscape and weaving between with blue houses on stilts.

9. Dialogue in and about Burma/Myanmar.

10. Vatch Bhumichitr La Bhu Salah guest house: combination art retreat, culinary indulgence, and friend's holiday house.

11. The oil massages and stir-fried noodles you get every day on a beach vacation in Thailand: simple, easy, never less than good, and you don't have to settle up until you leave at the end of the week.

12. The "tent experience" at Relax Bay on Koh Lanta in Thailand (or so I imagine whenever I think about planning a trip there).

(The photos here are mine and other people's, accumulated over time.)

Still to come on Chocolate in Context: Vietnamese bean-to-bar chocolate makers.

Chocolate Vacation Planning: Touring Mesoamerica

2011-11-01T01:44:00.000-05:00

The conflict of course is not whether or not Hamlet’s unclekilled his father, but whether the conflicted young heir identifies with hiswronged father or his usurping uncle. And here in China, though this vastly incomprehensible place (moreirksomely incomprehensible than any country else I have visited in Asia or the world) frustrates me to the point of palpable brattiness, I am enormously more happy than I would ever be in any midsized American city. The irony is all. And theenduring irony of the story of chocolate—which has sustained my interest and mycommitment to writing this blog even when I’m geographically separated from orotherwise abstaining from eating fine chocolate—is that the region responsiblefrom bringing chocolate production and its accompanying mythology into theworld is today one of the least significant regions in the global chocolate industryand often the least associated with chocolate.

A couple of weeks ago, I received, in the span of a couple of days, two enticing offers to tangle myself in chocolate's roots in Mexico.

The first message read "EMILY GYAL!!! I been trying to find you! You still interested in Mexico???? We are planning to leave on Saturday, the 30th--- going til Nov 5th! Up to Merida for Day of the Dead stuff!" Really, I can think of nowhere I would rather be this early November than mingled among Mayan ruins, but Hipmunk, my favorite little aggregater of airfares, indicates that a one way trip leaving Guangzhou for Merida, Mexico, tomorrow, would cost me fourteen-hundred bucks and involve about 24 hours of travel on two different airlines and three separate flights. Anyway, I suspect that message, sent by someone whose email signature identifies her as a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize, was intended not for me but for yet another Emily Stone in the chocolate world. This Emily Stone sources and buys cacao from the Toledo region of Belize for the new (to me, at least) New York City-based Moho bean-to-bar chocolate producer. Her Chocolate Life profile invites readers to "Come check us out if you're in the neighborhood!" And I hope that her Peace Corps friends and many of you find her and her chocolate soon.

The second message came from the international man of chocolate mystery Steve DeVries, who was at work planning a week-long chocolate origins tour in Mexico, built around the Tabasco Chocolate Festival, over Thanksgiving. The tour is open to anyone who's interested--I wish I had the $1750 on top of that $1400 for the last minute flight to sign up! He sent me the itinerary along with some photos which I'm reproducing here. Alas, the trip may already be sold out, but do get in touch with Steve right away if you're interested--more interest, I imagine, could lead to more tours.

Schedule for Chocolate Tour of Tabasco and Chiapas in Mexico. Led by Steve DeVries.

This tour is to an area with centuries if not millenia of experience with cacao and chocolate. This is the area that Hernando Cortez traveled and fought through on his way to meet Montezuma in the early 1500's. I have led a similar but larger tour to Costa Rica the last four springs. Mexico produces about 100 times more cacao than Costa Rica meaning a lot more available learning opportunities.

Fee for the trip, excluding airfare and alcoholic beverages is $1750 single occupancy. The tour will run with five participants, but can have up to eight. A deposit of $900 is due with sign-up. Once 5 have signed up, I will confirm the tour and the balance of $850 will be due.

The van and the driver are being provided by the Secretait of Tourism of the State of Tabasco. If you have any additional question or want to sign-up, you may call me (Steve DeVries) at 970.215.4848 or e-mail me at steve@devrieschocolate.

11/20 Arrive in Villahermosa (VSA) by international flight. Take taxi to the Best Western Madan and check-in for the night

11/21 Monday; Tour of Cacep Chocolate factory, from Roasting to Conching. Also tour of "greenhouse" and surrounding cacao plantation'

Tour of large cooperative Fermentation and Drying Facilities

Travel to Comalcalco and check into the Hotel Copacabana.

11/22 Tuesday; Tour of factory for Chocolate Brondo in Paraiso. Watch process from Roasting to Conching, Tour their cacao plantation and others on the area.

Return to Comalcalco and Hotel Copacabana

11/23 Wednesday; Tour of Finca Cholula, including their artesanal chocolate production, their small chocolate factory machinery production and surrounding cacao plantation

Tour the Zona Arqueologica nearby. The only Maya site with the pyramids built of fired brick, not quarried stone.

Return to Comalcalco and tour Hacienda La Luz and Museo Wolter. Continue stay at Hotel Copacabana

11/24 Thursday; Tour other cacao plantations and the fermenting and drying cooperative

Travel to Villahermosa and check in to Best Western Madan. Attend the Tabasco Chocolate Festival at 1:30 for round table discussion and later talks. They run to 8:00, but anyone can

return to the hotel earlier.

The 2nd Tabasco Chocolate Festival is an international event with professional translators. The site for the event is http://festivaldelchocolate.mx/portal/ but it is only in Spanish. Here is a machine translation to English by Alta Vista's Babelfish http://tinyurl.com/Festival-in-English . Being a machine translation it's a little rough but intelligible.

11/25 Friday; Morning tours of the Mercado Central and Maya museum/park La Venta. Attend Festival starting at 12:00 to 6:00

Stay at Best Western Madan

11/26 Saturday; Travel to Pichucalco and tour the haciendas and fermentary of the Jimenez family. Also visit the Pichucalco Cacao Cooperative

Stay the the Hotel La Selva

11/27 Sunday; Early start to Palenque, a huge and amazing Maya site. Google "Palenque, Chiapas, Maya" for more info and photos

. Five or six hours at Palenque and its museum. Return to Villahermosa and Best Western Madan.

11/28 Monday; Flights home.

Happy Halloween, Happy Day of the Dead, Happy All Souls Day and All Saints Day. Eat chocolate responsibly.

Reflections on a Silent Month: Alentejo Cake and Other Iberian Recipes

2011-09-12T14:07:00.000-05:00

While the mainstream is discovering the multitudinous health benefits of chocolate (cheered on by the new International Society of Chocolate and Cocoa in Medicine), I’m pulling myself away from the headache-causing tannins and the stimulant effects of theobromine. I find myself drawn instead to earnest sweetness of summer figs. During my one month at the Obras residency in the Alentejo region of Portugal, hot and golden-hued in the summer, I bought several kilos of figs a week and ate them without remorse. I also bought many of the other miraculously simple ingredients from the local market in the marble-covered town of Estremoz and came up with a set of wholesome recipes that I contributed to our calm if festive shared dinners at the residency. And when it was my turn to make dessert, I found that chocolate and figs go together very nicely.

Bread Salad
Adapted from an idea my neighbor Anneke Muijlwijk at Obras gave me
Roughly chop a couple of slices of stale Portuguese bread and fry the pieces in olive oil and salt (and pepper, if you haven’t run out) over medium heat until their browned appearance suggests that they’ll be just a bit crunchy. Set them aside for a couple of minutes while you roughly chop half a peeled cucumber, two plum tomatoes, and a handful of big fresh parsley leaves. Press the pits out of a dozen or so green olives and chop them each in two or three pieces. Mix everything together. There’s no need to blot the oil from the croutons since it will dress the salad. Crumble some soft goat cheese or farmers cheese on top.
Serves one, in the middle of the workday.

The Bomb Sandwich
Adapted from a recipe in last month's issue of Bon Apetit, with a name suggested on two different occasions by two different people I met this summer, one Belgian and one Portuguese
Buy one package each of Queijo Flamengo and Jamon Iberico. Have handy a loaf of Portuguese bread, not sliced too thickly. In one layer, place a slice or two of cheese on one piece of bread. Top with a slice or two of ham, also in one layer. Top with another piece of bread. Melt a healthy dollop of butter in a frying pan over medium heat. Smear the outside of both pieces of bread with mayonnaise. Grill the sandwich until the mayo and butter together form a delicious crust and the cheese is thoroughly melted.
Multiply by the number of people eating.

Stone Soup
Adapted from the children's story of the same name, familiar on both sides of the Atlantic. In the fable, the entire population of a village claimed to be without food but when someone began to prepare a pot of soup with only a stone as its base, other ingredients materialized from houses far and wide. In this variation, I put a bit of myself into the soup, adding bits and pieces generously bequeathed to me by fellow artists leaving the residency and returning home for the summer.
Bruise and thin thinly slice five or more big cloves of garlic. Roughly chop half a head of cabbage by slicing it into wedges and then slicing each wedge with the knife perpendicular to the long edge. Open a can of whole plum tomatoes, quarter them, and save the juice. Fry the garlic in a large pot over low to medium heat with a big handful of just-snipped rosemary, thyme, and bay leaves. (At this stage, you could add a hefty portion of the thick rind of a brick-sized piece of prosciutto--or, in Portugal, presunto--that you bought at the market earlier in the summer for two Euro; this step is unnecessary, but it adds a richness of flavor as well as a general feeling of richness in knowing that, on a surface level, the essentially negative amount you paid for this prized meat makes up for the many more Euro you managed to spend just by being impulsive and disorganized, and in knowing that, on a deeper level, living in a place like this where time and good company and the meat of acorn-fed pigs in abundantly available is a long-term antidote to those kinds of irksome rumination over one's actions.) When the garlic begins to brown, add the cabbage and cook just until the garlic seems to going too far. Add the tomatoes and the juice, fill the pot with water, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and let the soup simmer for half an hour or longer. Then bring it back to a boil, add a cup or more of small pasta (little alphabet shapes are good if you are a writer), and remove from heat.
Serves as many as come for dinner.

Alentejo Cake
Adapted from the "Cornmeal and Fig Cake" on Epicurious
Preheat oven to 375F and butter an 8- or 9-inch square cake pan. Take about a dozen figs and halve each one from the stem down to the base and then cut each half into four pieces by slicing in one direction and then slicing again at a right angle (so each fig is divided into eighths). Place the cut-up figs in a bowl with 3/4 cup of pine nuts, and anywhere from 3 to 6 ounces of chocolate pieces (or one to two chocolate bars, roughly chopped). Whisk together the yolks of three big Alentejo eggs with 2/3 cup sugar. Bring three cups of milk to a simmer in a medium to large pot. Whisking, add the hot milk to the egg mixture. Return the milk with the egg and sugar to the pot and whisk over medium to low heat while gradually adding just under a cup of polenta. Continue whisking until the mixture begins to bubble and pull away from the edges of the pan. Remove the pot from the heat and add the figs, pine nuts, and chocolate. Whisk until the chocolate is melted and everything is combined. Pour the polenta batter into the prepared pan and bake for forty-minutes or until a knife come out of the center clean. Cool, remove from pan, serve with great pleasure.

Obras directors Luna, Carolien, and Ludger

Macau to Lisbon: On the Hunt for Egg Tarts

2011-08-19T10:27:00.007-05:00

Macau--which I first visited in 1999 just before the outstretched arm of the Portuguese empire contracted and the peninsula and affiliated islands reverted to Chinese control--reminded me, on a more recent visit earlier this month, of Antigua, Guatemala, crossed with Las Vegas. That "Special Administrative Region" of the People's Republic of China was the first stop on my summer holiday. I was accompanied by my friends Nathan and Ana, who asked to be described as "my vigorous and youthful-appearing polyglot buddies," and together we sought out the SAR's best egg tart. Sort of a flan molded into a two-bite-sized pastry shell and then browned under the broiler, the egg tart--along with crusty bread, cobble-stoned streets, and airy courtyards--is one of the most durable Portuguese legacies in Macau. Nathan and Ana's five-year-old son, Marco, has no interest in egg tarts but he does have an eye for light and shadow, and, thanks to him, for the first time in quite a while Chocolate in Context had its own dedicated official photographer on the trip. This August I've followed the luscious pastry I found in Asia back to Portugal, and I'll spend the next month in this calm and quiet European country in the shadow of the twenty-first century. But here at my artists' residency in the Alentejo region, there is a castle on the horizon, a pool down a path to be navigated with a flashlight on a warm evening, and, everywhere, art--real, growling, pulsating art--on the walls of this old, stone-encased farm house. So I will mention a few versions of the sweet snack that spans continents and then return to the cork and olive trees on the horizon.

Ou Mun Cafe
Our first stop was this bakery cafe that beckoned us with its charming tiled exterior but disappointed with its egg tarts whose syrupy filling was the taste and texture of condensed milk rather than the quichey, french-toasty sweet souffle we prefer. We took this to be a baking error made by a kitchen staff too far removed from Macau's Portuguese influence, but I must admit that the first egg tart I tried in the town of Estremoz the other day was very similar.

Margaret's Cafe e Nata
If you're coming from mainland China where such a thing simply doesn't exist no matter what price you name, you'll find nothing so delightful as watching the sandwich ladies smear simple hearty chicken salad made with bacon and avocado on whole wheat bread. The egg tarts are greasy and sweet and the perfect indulgence at the communal wooden tables outside.

Koi Kei
These flaky, light, and reliable mass-produced egg tarts are available at several locations near the bottom of the steps of the ruins of the Cathedral of Saint Paul.

Lord Stow's Bakery and Cafe
A chronicle of Stow printed and displayed in the tiny (but famous and franchised) bakery uses the rhetoric of colonial-era stories but these egg tarts are the twentieth-century invention of an Englishman--and his decision to use cream instead of cornstarch makes them quite luscious indeed.

The best is yet to come?
In Lisbon, the most coveted egg tarts are the Pasteis de Belem made with the Jeronimos Monastery's secret recipe. "They're like the ones in Macau, all caramelized on top," my friend Loring tells me, "but they're somehow more delicious (perhaps because they're made by nuns?)"

Photos by Emily Stone and Marco Stringer Greenleaf

To Hong Kong and Back Again: Big City Chocolate

2011-07-04T18:32:00.008-05:00

I like to say that where I live is a two-hour train ride from Hong Kong. The truth is that the trip usually takes two subways (and the accompanying suffocating crowds) in Guangzhou, one train to the wacky frontier town of Shenzhen, a voyage through a seemingly endless network of escalators and walkways leading to an immigration checkpoint more or less in a subway station, and then rides of a couple of different Hong Kong metros before arriving in the central district of the city aptly named Central. What's more, the city of Hong Kong (much like the city of New York) seems to levy some kind of mystical financial capital tax of exactly twice the amount of money I intend to spend on any particular trip. But there are advantages to being on that side of the border, among them that Google is efficient and uncensored. In fact, it was the artificially intelligent Google, not a savvy expat or coffee-stained issue of Time Out Hong Kong, that pointed me toward Epoch Desserts on Star Street. Star Street is a sort of planned community of boutiques and happy-hour bars behind the one of the three Pacific Place office tower behemoths. Epoch serves and epic seven-layer chocolate cake, each layer made with Valrhona chocolate, the old artisan standby and really the best option for baking again now that Scharffen Berger's fine edge of flavor has been sanded off in the Hershey factories. They also serve two varieties of hot chocolate, a regular and a light (the shop attendant described the light variety as "chocolate mixed with milk" and I asked "isn't the regular hot chocolate mixed with milk, too?" and she said yes and looked confused--but you get the idea). If you want to do a live-action google search of chocolate outlets in Hong Kong, you could wander down Star Street from Epoch to find the little art gallery and culture library run by the designer agnes b., which might, in turn, turn you on to the various other agnes b. operations in town, including a couple agnes b. Delices shops that serve elegant little pastries a roster of ginger- and coconut-spiked hot chocolates (that the staff will pour over ice for you during these summer months).

Fated Hutongs and Growing Markets: Chocolate and Other News in Beijing

2011-04-12T20:42:00.003-05:00

Everyone and everything seemed to converge at Wudaoying Hutong when I was in Beijing last weekend. I was being a tourist with Pitt MAP leader Dave Bartholomae and his wife Joyce on Sunday afternoon, and my Beijing's Best ap indicated that, from our location at the Lama Temple, we were .3 kilometers from Brand Nu, a boutique that strives to introduce rural craftspeople to urban consumers and to introduce urban designs and profits to the same rural artisans. But the ap's map was malfunctioning, either because Google and my Chinese iPhone carrier weren't cooperating or because the application's creative and technical aims were out of sync (as I talked about with the Pitt MAP students in class the next day, all writing is a struggle to fit particular material into the particular form you've chosen for it). Without specific coordinates, we decided to just wander into the lane, or hutong, across the street from the temple to see what we would find. According to Dave, whose sources include the dog-eared guidebook he carries around with him and Michael Meyer's book The Last Days of Old Beijing, the hutongs are networks of tiny housing units that, by winding in on themselves and away from the outside world, created durable communities, first among extended families, then, after the revolution in 1949, groups of workers, and now, after the economic reforms that began in 1978 and have been reinforced in every five-year plan since then, among artists, entrepreneurs, and middle-class consumers. Familiarly lost, we looked around for friendly souls and then approached them in English. Did they know how to find Wudaoying Hutong?, we asked. Wudaoying Hutong? We were standing on it. We wandered around, comparing this renovated, refitted version of a hutong to the neighboring alleys where a whole family might still share a single room without a bathroom to the cement-dust-covered construction sites in the process of changing from the old style to the new. A few minutes later, Pitt MAP's global health professor Peter Veldkamp, who had been circling Beijing's ring roads on his bicycle, called to find out where we were. Wudaoying Hutong, we told him. Wudaiying Hutong?, he asked. He too was on Wudaoying Hutong.
And after a trip to the iStore-flashing Sanlitun mall, a quiet drink among photos of Mongolian cowboys at the Amilal Whisky Bar, a writing class, and a day of classic Beijing cuisine (street-side noodle vendors and table-side roast duck carvers), I asked some of the Pitt students to join me at a Grave Sweeping Day folk and blues show (not quite the same thing as catching Bob Dylan's China tour, but an exchange of cultural fluids nonetheless). The only thing was we had to find the place. Where was it? Wudaoying Hutong.

Inspired by econ professor Svitlana Maksymenko's sweet tooth, my hosts and I decided to spend the grave-sweeping holiday (a variation on Day of the Dead) seeking out chocolate in China's capital. "The first thing to hit your tongue is the sort of bitterness of this powder," Dave soon declared about the hand-rolled truffles prepared by Laurier Dubeau at La Place Collection, a not-quite-retail store in an office tower (which I discovered on the Chocomap). "But then it's great. It's smooth and creamy. Chocolatey. It's real dark chocolate but without bitterness." La Place's hazelnut truffles, with a core of Belgian Belcolade milk chocolate, taste like finer, fresher Ferrero Rochers; and the dark chocolate variety is unadulterated French Valrhona, the brand I named at dinner when asked what my favorite chocolate was. La Place--just like, as far as I can tell, all of their competitors in Beijing and elsewhere in China--is a chocolatier rather than a chocolate-maker. This means that they don't make chocolate but they use chocolate to make confections. Again, there's nothing wrong with this. Nobody berates the baker for not milling his own flour. But there are a couple of connections I would like to make. Something I've said before but will repeat here is that chocolate is a commodity produced in the developing world and refined and consumed in the developed world. But is China the developing world or the developed--or do we need a new global-power vocabulary? And I will be very curious to see how China, one of the major forces of development in 21st-century Africa (the continent where the vast majority of the world's cacao beans are harvested), will change cacao agriculture, chocolate production, and global views on ethical chocolate trading in the coming years.

Our next stop was one of the several branches of Les Comptoirs de France, recommended by Elyse Ribbons, coordinator of the monthly Chocojing meetings. The menu promises and makes good on several wholesome hot chocolates and the shop we visited dolls up the sidewalk with welcome outdoor seating. But I'd describe Les Comptoirs as a second-rate facsimile of Payard Patisserie in New York: inside the fancy packaging, tart shells are cracked and bonbons are unevenly dribbled with chocolate. Something to point out, though, is that Payard closed down last year and Beijing's Comptoirs are going strong with five locations. Svitlana (a native of the Ukraine who explained that "I'm happy for China--China has done what the Soviet Union wanted but never got a chance to do") attributed the success to two very simple factors: an enormous population and a strong economy. So the market for everything is growing? I asked, taking advantage of our taxicab conversation to make up for the economics class I never took in college. "No," she said. "The market for audio tapes is not growing." A budding Beijing chocolatier named Emay Wang, coincidentally, posted thoughts on the same topic on the Chocolate Life a couple of weeks ago.

To be among other travelers in Beijing in April of 2011 is a poignant experience. We are foreigners to the place, don't know its rhythms or its routines. Yet we're more likely to find extensive, inquisitive reporting of the news at home than locally. The best response, I think, is for us, any of us, from anywhere, to learn as much as we can and come to our own conclusions.

Remembering the Midwest: Minneapolis Chocolate in Spring

2011-03-29T09:07:00.010-05:00

I ended the last missive from my shifting geographical location with a cryptic message and a dodgy photograph suggesting that, to be whole people, to be fully integrated members of civil society, we must read essays. What, I know I am provoking you to ask, is an essay? And what does it have to do with chocolate? For one thing, the essay is a form that far too easily collapses into a set of rhetorical questions. What else?

I started graduate school in “creative nonfiction” three years ago teaching “essays” to freshman in composition classes and reading and writing “essays” in creative writing workshops, stridently professing that this thing, this essay, was so inherently different in character from those deadening, restrictive “five paragraph themes” that traumatized me from the first to the last day of high school. Essays, so I said, aspired to intellectual innovation. Essays, truly understood, were art. But what does that really mean? What is an essay? It is true that the essay, the thought experiment, as it was imagined by Montaigne in the sixteenth century, is as different from the scripted student writing that bears its name today as is the meaning of the phrase “coger el coche” in Spain from that in Guatemala. But the plot-driven nonfiction pieces (which resemble short stories except that they pledge a certain journalistic accuracy and are generally more boring) that are passed around as “essays” in a great many graduate workshops don’t fit the classical definition either. Montaigne’s essays weren’t “proofs” in the high-school sense, nor were they “stories” in MFA-program sense. The Montaignian essay shares a lot with the contemporaneous Shakespearean soliloquy: intricately linked motifs and patterns of language help to illuminate and complicate a question or problem, but there is no “narrative arc” to speak of. Over history, several writers have set out to revive Montaigne’s project, with greater or lesser insight into what the project actually was—Patrick Madden I think is among the most current and most responsible of them. Socrates is sometimes invoked as a proto-essayist. Spalding Gray may have been the most significant inheritor of the genre in the 20th century. The Romantic writers were particularly fond of the form and it’s “familiar” tone. Before either of the World Wars, György Lukács put forth a fiercely compelling and confusing definition of the essay as cultural criticism that behaves, formally, like art; in Edward Said’s eloquent summation, written after the World Wars, “Lukács said that by virtue of its form the essay allows, and indeed is, the coincidence of inchoate soul with exigent form.” John D’Agata is the 21st century’s formalist essayist and has offered his own definitions of the word “essay” that are too beautifully succinct to summarize. As a student of the essay, I was first inspired by the intimacy and immediacy of the essay voice, then frustrated with what increasingly revealed themselves to be generic figures of speech and figures of thought that stood in for honesty and spontaneity on the page, then in awe of the way the form inherently acknowledges its own constructedness, the illusion of truth sustained and dismantled at once. Just after my last semester of graduate school, I described the essay at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in Minneapolis as “a process of thought recreated for an audience and arranged rhetorically.”

The weekend in 2010 that I was in Minneapolis, Memorial Day weekend, I had to make up my mind about whether I would go back to New York and accept a very decent job teaching college freshman formally experimental essays, albeit following formulaic syllabi, or whether I would voluntarily place myself in peculiar political, linguistic, and financial circumstances to teach creative writing to some of the brightest students in China. Both options offered tremendous opportunities, but neither one was what I had expected and neither one had anything at all in common with the other. This was less a career decision than a neurological experiment tracking the human being’s ability to comprehend contradiction. To up the Woody Allen quotient of the experience, I was also awaiting news about whether I had a brain tumor (I do not: I have Joan Didion-esque migraines and a sinus anomaly that goes unnoticed except on days like today when every factory in Guangzhou is chugging at full speed and I’ve been hit with a hideous Hunanese flu). I had so recently turned in my thesis that I probably showed up with stray editing-pen marks on my face. My conference panel on “Rhetoric and Poetics” was no doubt assembled by the spirits or the ancestors as the farcical celebration of my pending professional commitment to the academy: Where, precisely, did the Virginia Woolf panelist’s accent originate? And who was the man from Alaska in the gray flannel suit?

My host in Minneapolis was my friend Leila’s mom, Kathy, a demographer at the university. Leila and her mother have no particular allegiance to sleep and they can accomplish an astonishing amount in any given 24-hour period. After returning from work and before packing for her trip to New York to visit Leila and her sister Soraya and handing over the keys to me, Kathy completed and printed out a survey of sixteen local academics, two men and fourteen women, who gave anonymous comments about their favorite chocolate in the Twin Cities. They suggested more locations than I could check out on foot and wrote with a more responsible commitment to detail than I probably would have exercised on my own. So, with Memorial Day of 2011 in view, I reproduce a selection of the survey results here with tremendous gratitude to Kathy and her friends:

BT McElrath is based here and can be purchased in stores like Lunds. Really good, unusual chocolate truffles and candies. "The salty dog" chocolate bar is not to be missed.
Perhaps BT McElrath: He used to be the pastry chef (I think) of the bakery when it started back in the warehouse district and I recall Peter saying that Bryan was using the equipment to try out some chocolate making. He later left to pursue the chocolate business. When I see his chocolates I am so glad he made it and has become known for it.

Surdyks

Lunds/Byerlys

I think the best chocolate truffles in town are made by - gasp! - The Wedge Co-op on Lyndale. they are amazing. They also make what I think is the best chocolate cookie in town - the Black Angus.
And Rustica Bakery has a fantastic bittersweet chocolate cookie.
I've got to put in a "second" for whoever mentioned the Bittersweet chocolate cookie from Rustica. They are amazing. My husband and I always buy a bunch when we have people coming into town, and then we say, "You HAVE TO try this cookie! Isn't it the best cookie you've ever had?"
Big old house and chocolate chocolate chocolate... Rogue Chocolatier. New - just chocolate that they make themselves.
Rogue: I think it is available at Kopplin's Coffee in St. Paul's Highland Park, at Kitchen Window in Uptown Minneapolis, and in Surdyk's Cheese Shop in northeast Minneapolis.
If you're talking chocolate cake, I love the one (Can't remember the name of it and they have a few varieties) at Cafe Latte in St. Paul. There's also "Cupcake" and another good cupcake place near Trotter's cafe in St. Paul (can't remember the name of that one).
If the writer really wants a local slant, besides Regina's (someone else identified it too)--she should buy a few Nut Goodies. Pearson's is so local you can't get it in Chicago--I don't know even if they distribute in Wisconsin. I grew up with them as the "luxury"--they were ten cents when Hershey's was a nickel. They stopped making Nut Goodies for a few years when I was in my 20s, then started up again. Nut Goodie has become a travel talisman for me, ever since I threw one into my bag for my first trip to Africa and found myself eating it at midnight in a hotel in Harare when they seemed to have lost my laundry. I now carry one on every trip, two for Europe, three for other continents. My personal travel de-stresser; I never eat them at home. Too sweet and very ordinary, but very comforting.
There are also some fabulous hand made ice cream places that have great chocolate options, especially Izzy's and the Pumphouse Creamery. Both use organic, local ingredients and environmentally friendly production practices.
I would also recommend checking out the Sweet Bakeshop. Local, organic butter, eggs, etc. Highly acclaimed.
The chocolate ganache cupcakes at the Franklin Street Bakery are a favorite of ours.

In May of 2010, I began to compose this blog post while walking in Minneapolis along that vein of American culture, the Mississippi River. Whatever precise adjectives, rhythms of explanation, and thematic resonances I arrived at were too fragile to survive nearly a year of rattling around in my head (displaced by another Midwestern journey, at least). But the combined curiosity about and hunger for the bloom of spring, the taste of unknown local sweets, and the possibilities of the future returned to me today as I followed the new Pearl River promenade to the Guangzhou Bridge across to Ersha Island, thinking in words that explained my state of mind, even to me.

I put things off but rarely forget them. In my essayists’ mind, I make connections between disparate occurrences, drawing past and present, or present and future, together suddenly, finishing an old abandoned project only to distract me from a new impending deadline (I know, Mr. Feng! You need me to record last semester’s grades on those inscrutable forms! Coming right up, Mr. Feng! Many apologies, Mr. Feng!). Guangzhou has the river but it doesn’t yet have post-industrial blue skies or farmer’s markets in refashioned factories. I’d have to return to Minneapolis to find those, and to have Nepalese dumplings in front of art exhibits, to sample shortbread cookies made with American heirloom ingredients and Scottish family recipes, to talk to raw-chocolate quacks and breakfast-cereal artisans. Today, I posted my pictures from last spring in Minneapolis, and from my more recent travels here in Asia, on the Chocolate in Context Facebook page. It occurred to me to do this today because I was thinking about my own writing in preparation for a talk that I’m going to give to students in the Pitt Map study-abroad program in Beijing next week. I was thinking too about how long it’s been since I’ve updated this blog. I wrote this post a bit out of obligation to the Pitt students who are expecting to meet a writer, a fellow blogger, but also as a way of figuring something out—that the blog, today, more than so many other things published under that flag, is the essay. Blogs are where we are intimate and eccentric, where we ramble on, make loose connections, and enjoy the boundlessness of the form.

Chocolate Capitalization: Notes on Vientiane, Bangkok, and DC

2011-02-05T04:02:00.010-05:00

Yesterday, I heard essayist Kyoki Mori say that "if I were to do a blog, there would only ever be one post every three months." The material of her work, threads that stitch themselves together in patterns of recollection, association, lyric, and punctuation, don't lend themselves to brief excerpts, daily updates. My approach to my own blog in recent months has been temperamentally--as well as temporally--similar. I have spent my winter holiday in quiet corners in Thailand and Laos thinking and thinking and thinking over the essays I'm writing about Guatemalan chocolate, content to walk along the quiet Mekong river to find something constant in the quality of the light, or to consider, at great length, a single comma.

But back in the States, the day after I saw Mori speak at the annual AWP conference, I took myself from the Marriott in Woodley Park to Biagio Fine Chocolate in Adams Morgan and interviewed the oft-praised proprietor, Biagio Abbatiello. Still, the bean-to-bar-to-curated-chocolate-boutique narrative and its scene-setting eccentric details (a wooden mask of a garuda from Indonesia representing the geography of cacao, a location set back from the street to ensure that the sun doesn't peak through the window and send the temperature indoors above seventy degrees) is familiar enough, to me, to chocolate enthusiasts, to the ever-growing industry created by that ever-more-common narrative. Even in Biagio's words, "we've hit a comfort level in terms of what people like." I will celebrate that comfort. Today, I prefer the looser weave of idiom and idea to the allure of the new. I offer suggestions in this mindset, this context:

In Bangkok, buy the Essential Bangkok iPhone ap and Nancy Chandler's illustrated Bangkok map, and notice the lemongrass, the galangal, the ginger, the chiles that traveled here from the Americas half a millennium ago, everything that is phenomenal in shades of saffron and ochre, before occupying yourself with the mediocre chocolate.

In Vientiane, buy the pear and chocolate tart at Le Banneton. Go to the Phimphone Market for ice cream every day, always looking at the dessert counter to see if the Mexican chocolate cake will appear. Stay at the Hotel Khamvongsa, open the windows, walk down the street to Makphet for dinner one night and Le Vendome the next.

In DC, buy a Potomac chocolate bar at Biagio, possibly the only store that sells it. Then save it for after dinner at Pizza Paradiso in Dupont Circle, revered by Steve DeVries and no doubt better than the dinner I had last night.

Read a book published by Essay Press or Welcome Table Press.

Hong Kong Hot Chocolate

2011-01-01T03:38:00.004-05:00

The great blizzard of 2010-2011 has missed us here in south China, but this is nonetheless the season for hot chocolate. The consensus, online and off, is that Sift in Hong Kong's Soho district is the best chocolate alchemist in the region. It took two treks up the slope leading from Queen's Road Central to the Peak on two separate trips to find my way inside (Sift is closed on Mondays), but I took a spot at the cosmopolitan dessert counter on Boxing Day, where I could watch the patissiers making sugary art while I browsed the dessert menu ("Sift Chocolate Cake: chocolate ganache, jivara, praline crunch, chocolate fudge cake," "Variation of Strawberries: strawberry eton mess, strawberry buttermilk shortcake, strawberry sorbet") and sipped my winter drink: Valrhona 72% chocolate (Araguani, I suppose), whole milk, homemade marshmallow charred around the edges with a kitchen blowtorch.

Guangzhou: New Town, New Chocolate

2010-11-12T02:04:00.005-05:00

As I sit here in my apartment on the South Campus at Sun Yat-sen University, gobbling up a bowl of arroz rojo y frijoles negros improvised with a wok and a two-burner gas stove, I'm possibly only days away from receiving a visa that makes me an official resident of the city of Guangzhou. The first couple of weeks of eating were incredibly confusing. The supermarket aisles contain more sweet, sticky, crunchy, and other wise junky foods than you'd find at a Walmart in a Midwest potato-chip test market, no canned or frozen vegetables, and not a single variety of tomato sauce other than ketchup. But with the help of Mark Bittman's east-west stir-fries and culturally ambiguous chicken adobo--along with my own ten-minute noodle soup invention (bring some boxed stock to a boil, add a fistful of soba noodles and cook for a few minutes while you slice off the stem part of four or five heads of baby bok choi to separate the leaves, then add the bok choi to the pot, cover and cook for another minute, turn off the heat, add a splash each of soy sauce and sesame oil, pour into a pretty bowl, grab a pair of chopsticks, slurp, and enjoy--my Asian kitchen is becoming a much more familiar place.

The Asian Games, an Olympic-scale event involving athletes from 45 countries and stadiums full of local volunteers (official figures are not so easily googled in China, but one count I saw was 6000, including most of my students) begin tonight just across the Pearl River in Guangzhou's new urban center Zhujiang New Town. As I type this while watching official Chinese news coverage of the G20 summit on TV, I have to say that nothing signals China's actual and metaphorical growth like the transformation of New Town from a flat piece of land to a citadel of highrises. Leading up to the games, new buildings literally sprung up every day, reflecting changing tastes of all kinds here in Asia. While the artisan chocolate industry may have already expanded to capacity in the States, new chocolate shops here can offer genuinely new services and products. The single bon bon I picked up in New Town's new Two Oaks chocolate shop just before closing time one night a couple of weeks ago left me curious to find out who owns this place, where she learned to make candies and pastries, which ingredients she uses, and what she thinks of China's emerging chocolate market.

798, Beijing: Axis of Art

2010-10-12T04:40:00.005-05:00

As the world considered the future of artistic freedom in China with excitement and uneasiness, I visited the Chinese capital city last week. To placate the gods of tourism and professional obligation, I wound my way through the Forbidden City and tracked down the Cocoa Ballet storefront in the Houhai district (where the decor combined Callebaut marketing posters and the PRC flag, though the cheery assistant told me that the ballet chocolatiers also use Valrhona couverture). But I'd like to spend most of my energy here celebrating the ongoing conversation between artists and audiences from all over the world in Beijing's 798 district. A collection of galleries, boutiques, and pedestrian walkways and tunnels, 798 is a kissing cousin of Soho in New York--it's a former industrial zone (the Bauhaus factories were built by the East Germans) that was originally embraced by struggling artists whose own successes raised the rents and transformed the place into playground for yuppies and bourgpats. I received a farcically stereotypical response to my curious entree into the exhibit of North Korean paintings ("No photos!" a disembodied voice shouted from behind a curtain, "No photos! Shut down! Shut down!"), but I spent two days in the neighborhood largely in awe of the overlapping exhibitions from local, Vietnamese, Cuban, Russian, and American artists. In my own expression of artistic freedom, I have posted the rest of the photos on Facebook.

Good Clown! One Thought of Chinese Chocolate!

2010-10-04T08:09:00.004-05:00

Not long after I started writing about chocolate, I posted Wallace Stevens's "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" on this blog. Stevens tells of a "November of Tehuantepec," an isthmus in what is now the south of Mexico which the Spanish conquistadors exploited as one of the first bases of their empire and its chocolate trade, a geological practice round for the volatile and fertile terrain of Central America just below, a location evocative in more than its geography of an expat life I voluntarily led and left behind in Guatemala.

Four years later, I presented the poem to my wonderful continuing education students in Pittsburgh this summer, asking them to follow the set of relationships--those that the poet might have imagined and those that we're peculiarly able to construct in the present moment--that lead us from the "rosy chocolate/ And gilt umbrellas" of the first verse to the "chop-house chocolate/ And sham umbrellas" of the second to "porcelain chocolate/ And pied umbrellas," "musky chocolate/ And frail umbrellas," and, ultimately, unexpectedly, "Chinese chocolate/ And large umbrellas."

Global power shifts. And so do our lives. I now live in the country whose economy recently became the second largest in the word. I've been in China for exactly one month, and I plan to stay here for at least the next ten, teaching creative writing at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Our campus lines the Pearl River, which leads out--decorated along the way with ever more luxurious office towers and apartment buildings--to the machine of ocean guarded by Hong Kong. I have no idea what Chinese chocolate I'll find here, but I'll start with Bertram M. Gordon's article on just that, "Chinese Chocolate: Ambergris, Emperors, and Export Ware," in Louis Evan Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro's Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage anthology.

Midwest Chocolate Part 2: Best in the Madison

2010-08-21T08:16:00.006-05:00

I started collecting recommendations for chocolate in Madison (home of the country's largest farmers' market and a capital building that was taller than the nation's until builders shaved off the very top) when I first arrived six weeks ago. But I find myself only turning back to my blog in the hour before I head to the airport and fly back to the east. In eight weeks in Wisconsin, I've learned about as many local chocolatiers. I'll focus on three here.

Gail Ambrosius: Ambrosius was kind enough to lead a tasting of Hawaiian, Columbian, and Madagascan chocolate at the event where I read about chocolate's cultural and primordial origins in Guatemala last week, arriving in between filming a segment for the Food Network and appearing in person again (to talk about pairing chocolate with beer) at the mayhem of the Taste of the Midwest festival. Though she uses some more subtly-flavored blended chocolates for the outside coating of her bon bons (she prefers family-run Guittard to big-business Callebaut), Ambrosius primarily focuses on the flavors of single-origin chocolates, matching the inherent coffee notes, grapey hints, or even exotic floral flavors with complimentary tastes in pureed raspberries, dried and diced figs, and carefully measured cointreau. "I come from a farming family," Gail told me when I visited the kitchen of her shop next door to the Barrymore Theatre on the east side of Madison, which she often leaves behind for research trips to cacao-producing regions. "I know how hard farming is. I know that the people are generally poor. For me, it's very important to go to the farms and see how they work."

David Bacco: Rumor has to that the flashy chocolatier Bacco, whose confections are as likely to be spray-painted in edible enchanted-forest-green and dabbed with gold dust as they are to advertise their traditional cashew-and-caramel fillings, has fled town to pursing a nostalgic dream of being a bike messenger in New York. Since I arrived in Madison, Bacco sold out of the business, which has slowly shed his name and updated signs and labels to read “DB Infusions.” “That infusion of flavor really represents where we’re going with the business right now,” said a UW English major named Dakota who was working at the counter when I stopped in yesterday. The namesake may have been gone, but behind a stainless steel counter in the kitchen, which you can see through a window in the shop, chocolatier Megan Belle was had at work.

Markus Candinas “What’s the deal with the flavors and stuff?” I heard a wholesome customer ask just as I walked into the downtown Candinas shop a couple of weekends ago. Markus Candinas recently opened this branch of the candy business he started well over a decade ago in what used to be a cornfield in Verona, WI, to be more visible to Madison’s increasingly discerning chocolate customers. I looked at the collage of antique chocolate ads and other pop-culture memorabilia made by one of the owner’s friends while the owner (staffing the shop himself, working weekends) answered the question. “Everything is very smooth, very creamy,” Said Candinas, whose creative influences are Norman Love, Andrew Shotts, and Michael Recchiuti. “Nothing really out of the ordinary. The emphasis is always on the chocolate.” Of the fifteen couvertures that Candinas blends in different proportions for different bon bons, twelve are Swiss chocolates (like Felchlin and Lindt) that are famously conched and refined for hours. The truffles I sampled when I visited—two of the most popular—were champagne and hazelnut. Very smooth, very creamy, nothing out of the ordinary, the emphasis was on the chocolate. One of the longest-working chocolatiers in Madison, Candinas is puzzled by the fiercely mounting competition in the business locally. “You could go anywhere else in the country and you’d be the only one,” he told me. “So why true to push someone else off a pedestal when you could have a whole pedestal to yourself?” But Candinas is also one of the most affable chocolatiers in Madison, who prefers words like “hou-ha” to sharper expletives. When I asked if he had any special events planned for the fall season, Candinas told me that “everyday at the factory is a special event.”

Chocolate Linguistics Part 6: Chocolatiers and Chocolate Makers

2010-08-04T08:28:00.003-05:00

When asked I Pierrick Chouard, who makes chocolate for Vintage Plantations and who only weeks ago relocated his factory operations from Ecuador to the United States, to define the terms "chocolate maker" and "chocolatier," his first response was that "differentiation may not be the best way to promote artisan chocolate making." Setting up and fortifying different camps is a futile activity, I agree. But I continue to ask questions about cacao rhetoric (collected under the tab "Chocolate Linguistics" on this website and scattered around the web) precisely to point out how our opinions, attitudes, and objectives inform the language that we use (and hear). Though Pierrick is tied up with the fan belt of a tempering machine this week, I hope he'll enjoy reading the overlapping definitions I've collected here, including the contribution from Wisconsin-based Gail Ambrosius, who uses Plantations chocolate (or "couverture") to make her confections.

In your own words, what's the difference between a "chocolate maker" and a "chocolatier"?

Gail Ambrosius
Owner of Gail Ambrosius Chocolatier in Madison, Wisconsin

A chocolate maker is someone who has a thorough understanding of chocolate, how and where it is grown, the best growing/processing practices, and has a fine palate to recognize high-quality cacao beans. A chocolate maker is someone who produces chocolate starting with the cacao beans. Hopefully, he or she is also traveling to countries that produce the beans to see how the cacao is grown, ensuring that it is fermented properly and dried well. After the beans are sourced, he supervises sorting the beans after they arrive at the lab or facility to make sure only quality beans go into the roaster. Then he makes sure the beans are gently roasted to tease out the best flavors. This is work that requires someone with expertise--who knows how to bring out the best flavor of the beans in order to make a fine quality chocolate. Once the beans are roasted and winnowed, they go through the first grinding to make chocolate liquor. Once the liquor is made, a chocolate maker will decide upon the recipe or formulation of the chocolate to be produced. After the formulation is made, more grinding and conching takes place until the chocolate maker ends with a fine-quality, fine-flavor chocolate.

A chocolatier is someone who also has a good understanding of chocolate, how and where it is grown and processed, and knows how to showcase its finest qualities in confectionary. The chocolatier begins by tasting fine-flavor chocolates produced by chocolate makers and decides based on those flavors how to best highlight and enhance the chocolate in a confectionary application. The chocolatier creates alchemy by taking the fine-flavor chocolate and by using the art and science of confectionary and imagination to create wonderful confections and other chocolate products.

Gail will host a chocolate tasting to accompany readings by me and Michelle Wildgen at the Alchemy: Chocolate and Cheese event in Madison on August 12.

Carlos Eichenberger
Owner of Danta Chocolate in Guatemala City, Guatemala

Chocolate makers manufacture chocolate, in bar, callet, block or other form, in whatever scale they wish to produce. This doesn't necessarily mean it has to be manufactured from bean to bar. It could also be nib to bar or liquor to bar. They sell their chocolate either to chocolatiers, chefs, pastry chefs or end users.

Chocolatiers on the other hand (and strictly in my personal opinion) purchase their chocolate from manufacturers to transform into their confections. This may also include bars, especially if the chocolatier is blending several origins or manufacturers.

In my particular case, I like to call myself a chocolate maker/chocolatier since I'm working both ends of the business.

Matthew Stevens
Editor of Dessert Professional magazine

Chocolate maker (French: Chocolatier) :: a person or company who/that makes chocolate packaged for direct consumption (i.e., to be eaten), and/or for use as an ingredient. Chocolate makers/manufacturers may also make semi-finished products for their own use and/or for sale to others as ingredients.

Chocolatier (French: Confiseur) :: a person or company who purchases finished chocolate and semi-finished cocoa products from cocoa processors and/or chocolate makers/manufacturers and uses them to create confections (e.g., bonbons) and other products, including chocolate bars.

In France there have long existed the professions of chocolatier and confiseur. Traditionally, a chocolatier made chocolate (most often from cocoa beans, but also from cocoa nibs or liquor), and a confiseur (confectioner) crafted bonbons. As a result, stores were identified as chocolatiers, confiseurs, or chocolatiers-confiseurs to accurately portray their skills to the public.

To make things more confusing, the French have long abandoned their distinction between chocolatier and confiseur at the public and governmental levels. In France today, a chocolatier is what was formerly identified as a confiseur, and the term confiseur has been effectively tossed onto the culinary compost. Even the honor of Chocolatier MOF (Meilleur Ouvrier de France) is awarded by the French government to those who in days gone by would have been known as confiseurs.

One of the few Frenchman to lament the elimination of the traditional and accurate chocolate career terminology is Stephane Bonnat. He is a chocolatier-confiseur by definition, and excels at both. And he is a purist who would like to see a return to adherence of the traditional definitions.

Summer Vacation: Dinners at Edenfred

2010-07-23T13:33:00.009-05:00

I've been in Wisconsin since the Fourth of July weekend, most of the time at the Edenfred artists' retreat, rambling around a Madison mansion with a rotating set of writers, musicians, and visual artists. I've occasionally hovered around the fully-stocked kitchen in the afternoon, making a boysenberry version of my chocolate bread pudding and a a half-gianduja variation on Heidi Swanson's chocolate loaf cake, and last night I joined a few other residents for a late-night trip to David Bacco Chocolats in Madison's Hilldale Mall to sample the surprisingly satisfying Madras, Mayan, and White Violet drinking chocolates. But I mostly spend my days editing (and sometimes cutting) pages by the dozen, emerging from my room just in time to join everyone for dinner. And I've been lucky to share the house with several generous souls and good cooks over the past few weeks. I'll leave it to Edenfred director David Wells to publish his recipes for green-chile pork, roasted-red-pepper tapenade, and mushroom and white bean ragout in the official Edenfred cookbook (or at least on the organization's Facebook page), but I'll reproduce recipes from an ad hoc dinner with some of my fellow residents here.

Indian-Spiced Turkey Burgers
Grilled by Howard Pollack, musicologist and author of six books, including George Gershwin: His Life and Work

Howard explains:

I made the five turkey burgers with 1 and 1/2 pounds ground turkey, half breast, half leg, as suggested by the butcher at Whole Foods. I diced and very slowly sauteed a medium-sized onion in about a tablespoon or 2 of olive oil until cooked but not brown, about 25 minutes, after which I added two minced garlic cloves, and a healthy amount (approx. 1 tablespoon each) of sweet curry, coriander, and cumin, and cooked them another minute or two. While the onion mixture cooled, I mixed the turkey meat with salt, pepper, and probably about a half of a cup or more of some mango chutney (avoiding the mango chunks). Because the burgers looked pretty wet, I added an egg white to help bind the meat, but since they still looked wet, I put them in the fridge to set, and then let them come back to room temperature, which seemed to help. At least the burgers didn't fall apart on the grill, which I greased with olive oil. I cooked the burgers on high heat until done, I think it was about 8 minutes for each side, and served them with toasted whole-wheat buns with slices of red onion, tomato, and mango chutney (or whatever the preferred condiment). After a little research, I discovered that this is actually a simplified version of the "chutney turkey burger" recipe in Joy of Cooking, which does not have the sauteed onion and garlic part, but which has you add Dijon mustard and lemon juice and scallion directly into the mix. I'll have to try that next time. However, the amounts of the spices called for in this recipe -- 1 teaspoon cumin and coriander -- seem on the timid side. The book recommends chopping up the mango slices when you add the chutney, and serving the cooked burgers on sourdough bread. I also recommend, for enhanced effect, serving them on a beautiful, breezy summer Wisconsin night on the portico of a 1916 Georgian mansion.

Elotes (Corn with Awesome Toppings)

Boiled up by Christine Lee, woodworking installation artist whose pieces have been on display at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, and the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston

Christine's Instructions:

take boiled corn and add:
-lots of butter
-little spread of mayo
-sprinkled chili powder
-sprinkled cojita cheese*
-lime juice

*(parmesan seems to be an ok substitute)

My Impromptu Two-Bean Salad
This is a much-simplified version of the"Three Bean Salad with Jicama and Orange" recipe in Annie Somerville's Field of Greens cookbook.

Drain and rinse two cans of pink beans and one can of pinto beans. Dice one small-to-medium cucumber and one or two shallots. Chop a handful of garlic mint (or another variety of mint). Whisk together (to taste) one teaspoon of lime zest, half a cup of orange juice, two teaspoons of champagne vinegar, two tablespoons of olive oil, a teaspoon of ground cumin and a pinch each of salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper. Toss the beans in the vinaigrette and then pour the dressed beans into a serving dish. Artfully arrange the cucumber, shallot, and mint on top.

I also made a summer squash soup for the first course, borrowing yet another recipe from Heidi Swanson's 101 Cookbooks. I used Greek-style yogurt instead of buttermilk and added several handfuls of ice before serving to bring the soup closer to room temperature. It's equally lovely chilled, topped with snipped chives and a drizzle of citrus-infused oil, and you can also add the leftovers to a rainy-day stew.

Many thanks to Cathy Cofell, author of Tiny Little Crushes and Kamikaze Commotion, for the prep work, the extra pictures and--especially--the kitchen cleanup.

Chocolate Panel: Guittard to Patrick

2010-07-01T10:54:00.003-05:00

Attending the Fancy Food Show is an event rife with irony. For three days, the Javits Center in New York is full of food and full of pleasure. At the same time, everything is for sale: the food, your ability to sell the food, even your ability to write about someone else's ability to sell the food. The trade show makes me want to pick up a microphone and proclaim that food writing as either an art or a form of enterprise is deeply suspect. Of course, in doing that (even in doing this, writing this blog post), I'd be implicating myself. Thus implicated, I turn the microphone over to a set of very wise, creative, and fair-minded people in the chocolate business: Maricel Presilla (author of The New Taste of Chocolate and owner of two restaurants and the new Ultramarinos shop in New Jersey) and Gary Guittard (elder statesman of the artisan chocolate movement whose Guittard Chocolate Company has been in the family since 1868), along with Art Pollard and Alan McClure (whose Chuao- and Madagascar-sourcing companies Amano and Patrick have been in their families since about 2006).

Maricel: You have to be educated and the growers have to educate you, too, but a shop is a forum. I sell the Bonnat Soconusco bar in my shop. I sell it for more than any other bar. And I'm selling it because it has a story, which is real, and I know that in selling it I'm helping farmers."

Gary: "Education is really the key. The way we learn about chocolate is through origins. I like to think of musical instruments and colors in regard to flavors of chocolate. I was hoping to find a deeper purple for Peru but I couldn't figure it out. I think this is very flowery, I think it has an aromatic, almost jasminy flavor."

Art: In my opinion, the best cocoa beans are the ones that produce the chocolate that you like the best, but there's no denying that the Chuao beans are absolutely spectacular. Blueberry, plum, molasses, coffee, and creaminess of like some almonds.

Alan: The expression of terroir without what's going on in our heads is nothing. There's a lot of pushback right now, especially because of the recession. People say that they want farmers to get a more fair wage, but they don't want to pay more for the chocolate. And that's a big, big problem.

Thanks to chocolate guide Alexandra Leaf for organizing this event, wonderfully un-commercial chocolate maker Steve DeVries for inviting me, and the worldly-wise retailer Seneca Klassen for aiding and abetting my infiltration of the event.

No Purple Prose: Amano Takes Chuao

2010-06-25T19:37:00.005-05:00

Perhaps my dark glasses are deceptive. When I was out sampling chocolate in Manhattan this afternoon, I recognized the manager of the Vosges store on Madison Avenue as someone I know. He didn't seem to recognize me, though, as he glanced in my direction and said "excuse me, we don't allow photographs--kindly erase those images from your camera." Well, sir, I certainly appreciate your point of view, but, no, I will not delete my photos of your Harold-and-the-Purple-Crayon shop.

I wonder if Art Pollard wears dark glasses. Just a day ago he called me and declared, proudly but rather stealthily, "I got Chuao." So Art's company, the Utah-based Amano, joins the European chocolate makers Amedei, Valrhona, and Pralus in sourcing cacao from the world's most coveted appellation, an isolated Venezuelan valley only accessible by boat, or on a six-hour hike from the Ocumare valley, another Amano-supplying Venezuelan coastal region. I can envision Art in the village of Chuao, poised behind a pair of bug-eye glasses and a telephoto lens, in careful defiance of the legendary lockdown on the local cacao imposed by the Italian company Amedei for years. On the other hand, maybe he simply relied on patience and good business sense. "To be fair," Art told me when I spoke to him again earlier this evening, "I didn't start going there until Amedei lost their exclusivity and the beans became more generally available," which happened a couple of years ago.

Art says that the the Chuao beans "tend to be darker in color and in flavor" than their counterparts in nearby Ocumare. In the coming weeks, the foodie media may try to get Art to say something dopey about his new product--that, for instance, he's discovered pure "criollo" beans whose genetics haven't changed since the Spaniards transplanted them from Mesoamerica to Venezuela in the seventeenth century. I'll admit it, the hype about Chuao is such that I even tried to get Art to praise Chuao's holy purity. But cacao just doesn't work like that--the trees reproduce sexually and each generation is different from the last. Nonetheless, in a more nuanced way, the Chuao beans are historically important. "Because of its remoteness," Art says, "its genetics reasonably closely resemble what was planted at that time."

Midwest Chocolate Part 1: Indiana by Proxy

2010-06-21T07:50:00.008-05:00

Though I'm making a detour through New York this week, I'm spending most of my summer in the grain-growing, cheese-making heartland of the Midwest. And after muddling through chocolate shops in my cosmopolitan hometown where stressed-out salesladies peddle wares that were imported from somewhere else and parrot corporate message that are almost unbearably defensive and transparent (the Fifth Avenue Cluizel shop, the "World's Best Chocolate Cake"), it occurs to me that places like Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin may be more fertile chocolate grounds as well.

I may well have found this year's Association for the Study of Food and Society conference at Indiana University more fruitful than this jaunt to New York. But the timing was all wrong and I couldn't make it to Bloomington. I didn't want to miss out completely, though, so I asked the various foodie anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and theorists of other stripes on the ASFS listserv for their local chocolate findings and suggestions. And I'm absolutely grateful for their responses.

Here's what my research turned up:

"BLU Boy is the only truly local craftsman of chocolate that I know of in Bloomington. He made a bacon caramel chocolate for a dinner featuring local chefs and bakers that focused on using the entire pig, and the chocolates were delightful."

"Angel B's also makes fantastic cakes and pastries. I stop there for a cup of coffee and a freshly made pastry on mornings when I know I'll need an extra boost."

"Indiana Foodways lists most, if not all, of Indiana Chocolatiers. I hope I do not offend, but they are not really that good."

"Ghyslain in southern Indiana, I believe, makes beautiful artisan-style, hand-painted chocolates. He is originally from Quebec and has a business in chocolate pieces as well as pastries. I ordered and served his raspberry dark chocolate truffles (now called purple passion) at my wedding and they were amazing (in combination with fresh raspberries and lemon curd pound cake)."

"Not exactly Bloomington, Emily, but the next state over: Dan Schreiber in Urbana, Illinois (home to the University of Illinois), is apparently one of only a handful of individuals in this country who process their own cacao beans--and then, of course, he makes artisanal chocolate out of them. See his blog."

Amano Sleuthing and Other Chocolate News

2010-06-08T09:01:00.005-05:00

Time passes so quickly, even over the summer in Pittsburgh, when (most) classes are out and (some) days are filled with sunshine. Time moves quickly in chocolate news, too. Just over the past couple weeks, while my History and Literature of Chocolate students and I have been tracing the developed-world path that sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century cacao beans traveled fueled by colonial policies in the developed world, Salon posted a feature on the Bostonian-Oaxacan chocolate company Taza (which we sampled during our class session on "authenticity" in Mexican chocolate), my barista cousin Julie passed along the New York Times' piece on a coffee-chocolate combo bar newly issued by Sahagun (another company that fuses traditional Mesoamerican chocolate practices with the ethos of the contemporary American artisanal food scene), the LA Times published an encouragingly balanced account of recent studies linking chocolate to good health, and the Daily Mail in the UK looked into changes at Cadbury since the company was swallowed up by Kraft earlier this year.

Yesterday in chocolate school, we considered what Johnny Depp, in his roles in Chocolat and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had to teach us about chocolate's transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a passionate and folksy indulgence to a sanitized, industrially-produced treat. Interesting, I suggested, that the proverbial chocolate factory tour, whether in Wonka World or Hershey World, doesn't tell you a lot about the roots of the trees from which the chocolate bars grow. Though the rhetoric of chocolate production is changing, the traditional chocolate factory narrative is that liquid chocolate emerges from enormous stainless steel vats ready to be molded as if by immaculate conception or spontaneous generation.

Twenty-first century chocolate makers like Amano, however, flaunt the origins of their cacao beans, celebrating the Ocumare, Sambirano, and Guayas regions. But Amano owner Art Pollard is forgoing his usual transparency in order to hold a contest in which fans can guess the identity of the newest bar. Of all of the people who guess the geographical origin of the next Amano bar correctly, the Utah-based chocolate maker will select one winner to receive a year's supply of Amano bars from cacao-growing countries around the world. Art's not providing too many clues, so I suggest that you do some outside research (try the article on "The Flavors and Aromas Of Varietal Chocolate" at The Nibble, as well as Amano's own blog).

Midterm Chocolate: A Crib Sheet

2010-05-24T07:31:00.003-05:00

So far in my "Literature and History of Chocolate" class this summer term, we've discussed cacao's botanical origins and pre-Columbian chocolate. Today, we'll discuss European and colonial chocolate. Next, we'll talk about industrial chocolate and contemporary American artisan chocolate, but we have a two-week hiatus for Memorial Day first. If we had a midterm exam, now would be the time to study for it. Of course, this is a non-credit, recreational class without exams or other tests of loyalty. But my students from the Osher Institute at Pitt are so focused and conscientious that I prepared a midterm crib sheet for them, just in case they're planning to study over the break.

Anyone else who's interested is welcome to follow along.

Midterm Crib Sheet

Comprehensive chocolate chronologies:
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate. Second edition (nonfiction)
James Runcie, The Discovery of Chocolate (fiction)

Elaborations of the chocolate-making process:
The Grenada Chocolate Company flow chart
Valrhona’s bean-to-bar slide show

Mapping cacao’s history and origins:
AllChocolate.com’s interactive world map

Close readings of cacao botany:
Allen Young, The Chocolate Tree
The International Cocoa Organization’s video of a developing cacao pod

Sorting out the chemical and medicinal properties of cacao and chocolate:
Emily Stone, “Health by Chocolate”
Bittersweet Café’s survey of “Health and Chocolate”

Biographies of American chocolate industrialists:
Joël Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars
Michael D’Antonio, Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams

“Chocolate Adventure Narratives”:
Bill Buford, “Extreme Chocolate” (in the New Yorker)
Mort Rosenblum, Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light
Paul Richardson: Indulgence: One Man’s Selfless Search for the Best Chocolate in the World
Peter Kaminsky, “Magic Beans”

Anthologies of scholarly articles on chocolate:
Cameron L. McNeil, ed., Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao
Louis E. Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro, eds., Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage

Investigations of the global politics of chocolate:
Carol Off: Bitter Chocolate: The Dark Side of the World’s Most Seductive Sweet

Further reading on the geopolitics of single ingredients:
Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History
Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation
Tim Ecott, Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid
Patricia Rain, Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance
John McPhee, Oranges
Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World
To learn more about the intersection of food and politics in Guatemala specifically, see Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (expanded edition), by Stephen E. Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, and Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala, by Edward F. Fischer and Peter Benson.

Discussions of modern food distribution as a product of colonialism and empire:
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., “Columbian exchange: plants, animals, and disease between the Old and New World”

Chocolate cookbooks that consider the food’s global, political, economic, and historical contexts:
Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger, Essence of Chocolate: Recipes for Baking and Cooking with Fine Chocolate
Maricel Presilla, The New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes. Revised edition.

Guides for the connoisseurs:
Chloé Doutre-Roussel, The Chocolate Connoisseur: For Everyone with a Passion for Chocolate
Clay Gordon, Discover Chocolate: The Ultimate Guide to Buying, Tasting, and Enjoying Fine Chocolate

Places to meet other chocolate enthusiasts:
Seventy Percent
The Chocolate Life

Resources for renegade home chocolate makers, working from bean to bar:
Chocolate Alchemy

Bean-to-bar chocolate makers we’ve discussed so far:
Valrhona
Scharffen Berger
Hershey
El Rey
Askinosie
The Grenada Chocolate Company
Theo
Claudio Corallo
Pralus
Taza
Michel Cluizel

The Perfect Finish and Other Chocolate Summer Reading

2010-05-08T15:13:00.004-05:00

The last time I thought seriously about any kind of chocolate other than Trader Joe's chocolate-covered almonds (an emergency substitute for Michael Recchiuti's dragée), I was in Mexico City, looking at Remedios Varo paintings at one of the museums in the middle of Chapultepec Park. And a few month from now, I may well be contemplating chocolate recipes and global trade patterns in another distant country. But, the enchantments of surrealist art aside, predicting the future is a dangerous activity. Better to concentrate on the present.

Today, I hold a master of fine arts in creative writing--I got my graduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh on May 2nd. And on Monday, I begin teaching a five-session course titled "The Literature and History of Chocolate" at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Pitt. In my lectures (as I have done in my recently-completed thesis project, titled "Happenings: Essays on Love, Chocolate, and Language"), I will defer to the authority of Sophie Coe, whose The True History of Chocolate seems impossible to improve upon. But I'll also bring in samples from playful stories like James Runcie's The Discovery of Chocolate and from chocolate purveyors whose goods may or may not be found in Trader Joe's.

Over the coming weeks, I'll chronicle our discoveries as a class here on Chocolate in Context. The summer also promises to carry me to New York for the Fancy Food Show at the end of June, and across the Pennsylvania border in the other direction in search of Midwestern chocolate. In August, I'll even team up with novelist and Tin House editor Michelle Wildgen and chocolatier Gail Ambrosius for an event that will turn out to be either a literature-infused chocolate tasting or a chocolate-infused literary reading in Madison, Wisconsin.

And then what? Again, better not to get ahead of oneself. I'd rather spend my time catching up on my chocolate reading. A few new books have come across my desk recently: David Lebovitz's Ready for Dessert, Chronicle Books' Chocolate Cakes, and a book by Obama's pastry chef Bill Yosses and New York food writer Melissa Clark that seems particularly timely--The Perfect Finish.

Unguided Tour: Mexico City Chocolate

2010-03-28T17:59:00.008-05:00

How might one find chocolate in Mexico City? One might bring a guidebook. One might remember to print out the New York Times' 2010 version of its "36 Hours in Mexico City" article instead of the 2007 version. There's nothing wrong with the earlier article, but the current one mentions a shop called Princesse Cacao in the Condessa neighborhood.

But imagine that one winds up in Mexico City for one's cousin's wedding planning to meet a Dutch friend from Guatemala who won't be able to make it after all because she is not currently in possession of her own passport and so one wanders around alone in the rain and then the sun and then the dark until one inadvertently finds (the way one does on the streets of Paris) a chocolatier, or chocolateria. This chocolateria claims to make its own chocolate from beans in the Soconusco region of southern Mexico, and the discovery of the shop makes one as happy as knowing that one is just drafts away from finishing an essay about Guatemalan chocolate titled "Stumbling Toward Soconusco" that one is writing for one's thesis project. One shares this artisan chocolate with one's family and it turns out not to be very good, so one thinks it's for the best that one left the box in the middling hotel restaurant and promptly forgot the name of the chocolateria.

Even without a guidebook or an up-to-date 36-hour schedule, one finds a few blogs about Mexican food written by expats living in Mexico City (The Mija Chronicles, Good Food in Mexico City), one meets some cousins one hardly knew one had (who take one to the National Palace where one can admire Diego Rivera's incredible layered thinking about the complexity of history layered in paint upon the walls), and one takes the sage advice of the tour guide employed by the same cousins to jump out of a van with the entire family in the middle of downtown so that one can sample crisp and sweet and toothsome churros accompanied by a whole set of chocolate drinks at El Moro. Another day, one accompanies the bride and her parents (who are Pittsburghers and who have taken very good care of one while one has lived in that city) to Frida Kahlo's house in Coyoacán where one celebrates another wonderful mind. One's family is very fond of tour guides but one eventually takes one's leave of these guys in San Angel, and even if one doesn't have enough guidance to know that one might find Diego Rivera's studio in that neighborhood if one looks hard enough, one still finds some pretty decent tacos down by the bus station before one stumbles miraculously upon a lady in white carrying a basket of her own handmade chocolates. She too tells one that the essential ingredient comes from Soconusco but give no more details. One samples the stuff and then buys a small package for fifteen pesos, though one doesn't have a chance to eat the chocolate before the wedding (where one is served dinner at 11pm and then panes dulces and chilaquiles and frijoles and cerveza for breakfast at 5:30), so one leaves the chocolates for the lady who cleans one's fancy hotel room. Before one leaves Mexico, one walks through Chapultepec park, stopping at the archaeology museum and the modern art museum before finally arriving in the Condessa neighborhood, which is very Parisian in its effortless quaintness. And even if one doesn't know to visit Princesse Cacao, one does stop at a bar that one's cousin points out was mentioned in the latest New York Times travel communique. It is at precisely this bar that one asks for a restaurant recommendation to which a lovely young man responds by walking one a few blocks to Cafe La Gloria. Having discovered that although one loves one's immediate family dearly but doesn't particularly care to eat with them in restaurants in foreign countries, one calls in the various cousins and asks the waitress if one may sit and wait, which she encourages one to do at a very large bistro table where one sits for half an hour reading poetry disturbed by nothing except a glass of wine while one awaits the trip's harmonic conclusion.

Philadelphia Chocolate, Ancient and Contemporary

2010-02-28T08:30:00.007-05:00

On my way to San Francisco in December, I got bumped off my connecting flight and waylaid in Philadelphia overnight. Though it left me in below-freezing weather without a coat, the stopover opened up a couple of new routes in my chocolate travels.

First, in the midst of all the mayhem, USAir gave me a voucher which I just used to cover the flight for my upcoming trip to Mexico City.

Second, I found out that the commuter train that stops at the Philadelphia Airport also stops directly across the street from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The permanent collection contains exactingly and respectfully curated carvings and sculptures from towns and sites I've visited in Central America, like Guatemala's Chocolá and Belize's Caracol. And a special exhibit of Mayan vases factors in a slew of anecdotal information about chocolate. Among the American Mayanists profiled in this "Painted Metaphors" exhibit are M. Louise Baker (whom the Penn Museum stationed in Mexico and Guatemala between 1908 and 1935 to paint water colors of artifacts and who commented about the Harvard-trained archaeologist Robert J. Burkitt that "I liked him very much and he was very kind to me--fed me chocolate drops from a little canvas sack whenever he met me") and W. Jeffrey Hurst (the Hershey Company's resident scientist whose 20th- and 21st-century work to find traces of the chocolate chemical theobroma in ancient vessels has been extensively chronicled in Sophie and Michael Coe's The True History of Chocolate, among other places).

One stop I didn't get to make on my impromptu trip to Philadelphia was the John & Kira's store. But I've always liked getting the socially-responsible chocolate company's lavish calendar and I've long agreed with uppity magazine editors across the country that their chocolate fig pumpkins for Halloween are incredibly photogenic. Though I still haven't visited the store (and I'd like to wait for some of this snow to melt before driving across the state), I learned a lot about John & Kira's this month in my research for the talk I gave about chocolate and sustainability at Chatham University. Their confections are remarkably affordable considering how perfectly smooth the ganaches are and how graceful each bon bon is (with a subtle design drizzled in chocolate on top to indicate the flavor). The little wooden boxes of "ladybugs" and "bees" explode with the flavors of mint from a local school garden, raspberries from a local farm, and lavender honey from a local apiary. And the new "root" chocolates, made with a Pennsylvania-brewed alcoholic root beer, just generally kick ass.

I had a chance to talk about John & Kira's (along with the Grenada Chocolate Company, Amano, Tcho, Guittard, and Guatemalan cacao) recently on WYEP radio in Pittsburgh.

Beyond Twenty Degrees: Can Chocolate Be Local This Far from the Equator?

2010-02-06T22:35:00.007-05:00

As I'm preparing to give a talk on responsible chocolate consumption (titled "Beyond Twenty Degrees: Can Chocolate Be Local This Far from the Equator?") at the new School of Sustainability at Chatham University, it occurs to me that it might be an interesting exercise to explain how a couple of handfuls of Guatemalan cacao beans have allowed me to weather a blizzard in Pittsburgh with an entire chocolate cream tart in my fridge. Here are the various stages of the transformative process:

1. Fernando (above left) of Fernando's Kaffee in Antigua Guatemala introduced me to a farmer named Don Genaro (center) with a plot of land in the Guatemalan department of Retalhuleu, bordering on the Mexican region classically known as Soconusco.

2. Fernando and I made the rainy-season from Antigua down to Rehu as the mild highland summer quickly transformed into sweltering lowland heat, and we picked up about a hundred pounds of dried and fermented beans, many of which came from trees cloned from the patented United Fruit Company cacao variety UF273.

3. I brought a pound of beans back to the States in my luggage.

4. Art Pollard of Amano Chocolate in Utah tested out the small batch of beans in a one-step Santha machine and mailed me about a pound of chocolate made from Don Genaro's cacao.

5. I walked through two feet of snow to my friend Amy's house. Amy, a far more disciplined cook and baker than I, was already at work on a pot of Pho (she recommends dry-roasting the bones and vegetables before adding them to the stock pot), and together we followed Heidi Swanson's Bittersweet Chocolate Tart recipe from 101 Cookbooks.

Cradle of Chocolate: Back to San Francisco

2010-01-11T15:31:00.004-05:00

Just a couple of week's ago, chocolate's illuminating powers seemed to have dimmed. I worried over my mediocre ingredients, mediocre baking skills, and mediocre photos. But things look different in 2010, in large part due to a much-needed (if temporary) change in my (culinary) landscape. I am a reader, writer, and eater who responds particularly to landscape: the volcanoes and histrionics of Guatemala, the desert expanses of Australia. And in this country, though I'm a New Yorker by pedigree, I seem to thrive among the the hilly neighborhoods, burritos, and carefully-selected wine bottles of San Francisco. I not only took enough photos to fill an album (which I've posted on Facebook) but I uncovered enough quirks and romantic details to return to in blog post after article after MFA manuscript chapter for an entire year.

Here's a summary, to be expanded upon in various forms and genres:

Recchiuti Confections: Michael Recchiuti is perhaps both the classiest and the most low key of American chocolatiers. It had been a couple of years since I visited his factory in San Francisco's Dog Patch (the neighborhood which, according to my own cartography, is behind Potrero Hill, which, in turn, is behind the Mission). He's expanded the place since I was last there to include an extra room with an espresso machine for Blue Bottle Coffee and enough space to host regular tasting events. His newest project is an expansion of the dragée line, which already included chocolate-drenched almonds and hazelnuts, into two-kinds of chocolate-coated cherries. On his own blog, he outlines the recipe for the cherries and the process of running them through his new panning machines.

Bittersweet: No one I know can more graciously carry out a calm, intelligent conversation about chocolate than Seneca Klassen, co-owner of the chocolate boutique and cafe Bittersweet. We met at the Fillmore Street branch (just hours before I had an elegantly indulgent dinner down the block at SPQR with my friend Barbara and a couple of her friends) where we discussed Seneca's pragmatic approach to chocolate retailing: sell people the novelties they want whether or not they're any good, but invest time and energy in new stuff that you'd like to see go somewhere (like Askinosie's new white chocolate bar made with goat milk). Seneca's opinion is that no one makes a better chocolate from Madagascar beans than Patric's Alan McClure (who Bittersweet will likely host in an in-store event this month), but I think the most recent batch from Seneca's own Bittersweet Origins is a fierce competitor.

Tcho: If Brad Kintzer (the botanist-bean sourcer-chocolate maker who joined Tcho when Scharffen Berger decamped for Ohio) is telling you how to make chocolate, you're chocolate's going to be good sometime soon. Customers and critics (myself included) have been hard on the four-year-old company for its aggressive techno-marketing before the product is really ready to go public, but Brad introduced me to co-founder Louis Rossetto (who curiously sampled some beans I'd brought back from Guatemala) and a host of other buyers, fondeurs, and rain makers who seem to be doing in earnest exactly what they announce themselves to be doing: taking advantage of technology to communicate with growers and customers as part of a process to reevaluate and improve the whole chocolate-making system. It turns out I'd barged in at the transitional moment when another Tcho founder, Timothy Childs, was taking his leave of the company (as Louis Rossetto, who looks remarkably like his personified icon, just announced on the Tcho blog), but the most interesting thing to me was the Tcho professional line--a couple of wonderfully savory and chocolatey blends that the likes of Michael Recchiuti have taken to using.

Flour Power

2009-12-27T23:06:00.003-05:00

I asked my friends Stephen and Frances D'Andrea (who were kind enough to invite me over for Christmas dinner, during which we sampled some impressively redesigned chocolate bars from Newman's Own Organics and some dubiously "natural" "sea salt" caramels from Lula's Chocolates) if they could help me figure out how to use my camera to take photos for this blog that look more like Steve's artful images. Steve, former art teacher and current amateur theorist working on his master's thesis in art history, responded to the request graciously, though Frances pointed out that it was a bit like someone asking me to show him what keys I push on my computer to turn out good essays. Put another way, it's like throwing crappy forastero beans into Valrhona's conch and expecting artisan chocolate to come out.

Speaking of crap, I wonder if the problem isn't my photos at all but my lackluster baking skills. We poured some of the Newman's stuff into an old chocolate souffle recipe, but the result was a nondescript chocolate blob in a circular container whose appearance was unimpressive and indistinguishable from my last domestic experiment, my great-aunt's chocolate cheesecake.

So, until I can gather up enough mojo to turn out recipes and photos as classy as those on 101 Cookbooks, I'm turning the camera and the kitchen over to Steve, who shares his recipe for the dinner rolls we made after dinner the other night.

Recipes:

Sourdough Cornmeal Dinner Rolls*

1 cup sourdough starter (see recipe below)
1 package active dry yeast
¾ cup warm water (110°–115°)
3 ¾ to 4 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup yellow cornmeal
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup butter or margarine, softened
1 egg
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon baking soda

Bring sourdough starter to room temperature.

In mixer bowl dissolve yeast in water.

Stir in 1 cup of the flour, the cornmeal, sugar, butter, egg, salt, and starter. Beat at low speed of electric mixer for ½ minute, scraping sides of bowl. Beat 3 minutes at high speed.

Combine 1 cup flour and the baking soda; stir into sourdough mixture. Stir in as much remaining flour as you can mix in with a spoon.

Turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead in enough remaining flour to make a moderately stiff dough that is smooth and elastic (6–8 minutes total).

Shape into a ball. Place in greased bowl; turn once to grease surface. Cover; let rise in warm place until double, about 1 ½ hours.

Punch down; divide dough in half. Cover; let rest 10 minutes.

Roll each half of dough to ¼ inch thickness. Cut with floured round biscuit or cookie cutter.** Brush with melted butter. Make an off-center crease in each round. Fold so large half overlaps slightly.

Place 2 to 3 inches apart on greased baking sheets.

Cover; let rise until nearly double, about 30 minutes.

Bake in 375° oven for 18–20 minutes or until golden.

Notes:

*Steve explains: The recipe comes from The Better Homes and Gardens All-Time Favorite Bread Recipes, 1979. I just checked on Amazon to see if it's still in print. Apparently it is not, but someone is selling a used copy for .01. Or there are several copies for sale on half.com for .75. ISBN: 0696012103.

**Steve explains: I used a cookie cutter that resembled a petaled flower, increasing the suggestion of portions of the female anatomy.

Sourdough Starter

1 package active dry yeast
2 ½ cups warm water (110°–115°)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar or honey

Dissolve yeast in ½ cup water. Stir in remaining 2 cups water, the flour, and sugar or honey. Beat until smooth.

Cover with cheesecloth. Let stand at room temperature for 5–10 days or until bubbly; stir 2 to 3 three times each day. (Fermentation time depends upon room temperature. A warmer room hastens the fermentation process.)

To store, transfer sourdough starter to a jar and cover with cheesecloth; refrigerate. Do not cover jar tightly with a metal lid. To use starter, bring desired amount to room temperature. To replenish starter after using, stir ¾ cup all-purpose flour, ¾ cup water, and 1 teaspoon sugar or honey into remaining amount. Cover; let stand at room temperature at least 1 day or until bubbly. Refrigerate for later use.

If starter isn’t used within 10 days, stir in 1 teaspoon sugar or honey. Repeat every 10 days until used.

All in Your Head: Chocolate and Perfectionism

2009-12-14T08:32:00.005-05:00

It's the end of the semester here at Pitt, which means I'm reading a lot. Reading more than usual doesn't increase the pleasure you take in books but it ups the chances that you'll encounter a piece of writing in which the material, the argument, and the voice (and the interaction of all three) make organic sense to you.

Here are two examples from my recent reading life:

"Monsieur," Madame d'Arestel, Superior of the convent of the Visitation at Belley, once said to me more than fifty years ago, "whenever you want to have a really good cup of chocolate, make it the day before, in a porcelain coffee pot, and let it set. That night's rest will concentrate it and give it a velvety quality which will make it better. Our good God cannot possibly take offense at this little refinement, since he himself is everything that is most perfect."
—Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "Official Way of Making Chocolate"

There is certainly what doctor's call a "migraine personality," and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist. "You don't look like a migraine personality," a doctor once said to me. "Your hair's messy. But I suppose you're a compulsive housekeeper." Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.
—Joan Didion, "In Bed"

The juxtaposition is intentional. Does chocolate trigger migraines? Lots of people say so.

Chocolate Cheesecake Uncle Lewis

2009-11-25T18:37:00.005-05:00

I spent a week in Charlottesville with my Uncle Lewis this summer. He gregariously introduced me to one of the Gearhart brothers from the chocolate shop of the same name, but he expressed his own skepticism about bon bons laced with ancho chiles. My uncle is a good home cook, but he prefers basic ingredients and recipes that call for a single bowl, pot, or pan. One of his favorites is a chocolate cheesecake recipe passed down from my Aunt Laura (really, my great aunt). He sent it to me and I made it last week. It had a few of the unanswered-question trappings of transcribed family recipes (how do you soften cream cheese?), but it was very well appreciated in Pittsburgh.

Recipe:
Chocolate Cheesecake Aunt Laura

Place foil on bottom of oven or on a rack below the baking rack to catch drips. Preheat oven to 350. Melt butter in two batches; melt chocolate; soften cream cheese.

Blend:
2 cups chocolate cookie crumbs (1 package Nabisco Famous chocolate wafers, or Oreos)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup (one stick) melted butter

Press crumbs firmly against bottom and sides of a 9-inch springform pan. Chill.

In a mixer or energetically by hand, beat until light:
3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs

Gradually add:
1 1/2 lbs. softened cream cheese

Stir in:
8 ounces melted semi-sweet chocolate
2 Tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon vanilla

Beat in thoroughly:
1 pint sour cream

Fold in:
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) melted butter

Pour into chilled shell. Bake at 350 for 45 or 50 minutes; cake will still be liquid. Remove from oven and chill. Remove rim from pan after cake is chilled before serving.

Trick Questions and Chocolate Treats: November in Context

2009-11-12T08:45:00.005-05:00

It's that time of year again. Halloween, Day of the Dead, All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day, Veterans Day, Midterms, Thanksgiving. Claude Lévi-Strauss isn't around to codify the structures anymore, but we humans, in my opinion, like to commemorate things.

Here's something I'd like to commemorate: It's about a year since a bunch of guys walked into my apartment and forcibly demolished a written-by-committee solid-chocolate tablet that proclaimed our salvation as a species awaited us in a can of Axe body spray. Perhaps to celebrate the one-year anniversary of that paradigm shift, I invited the guys over to my apartment again to play cards and and eat chocolate. (In truth, we do this nearly once a week, but usually at someone else's house.)

This time around, I had some test-batches of the "Fruity" and "Nutty" chocolate from high-concept Silicon Valley chocolate maker Tcho. "Fruity" and "Nutty" in this case refer to "flavor profiles" rather than ingredients, and the Tcho folks wanted feedback on the selection, fermentation, roasting, and blending of their cacao beans. "Tcho encourages you to experience your samples with your friends, family, and colleagues so that you can compare flavor notes and tasting experiences," an email from Tcho told me, adding that "We are also looking for Beta testers who'd like to share their experience on camera." Well, this year, as last, my little digital camera was nearly out of batteries, but I recorded a few moments of our "experience," during which Kristen remarked of the Nutty version 1.9B that "first you taste nothing, then you get sour, then you get bitter, then you get chocolate," and Dmitry commented on Fruity 1.9A that "this is like a Bukowski poem--the grittiness of it." We found some of the questions to be suspect (for example, "How would you rate the cacao content of this flavor?" is both grammatically and culinarily awkward and the only appropriate answer seems to be "65%," which is the number given on the box) and concluded, in response to the final question, that yes, we would buy this chocolate, but only for about two bucks (the asking price is closer to $5).

The next day, I received a large box (waiting for me mysteriously in a locker at my local post office, for which the key had been left in my post office box) containing four made-from-all-Guatemalan-ingredients chocolate bars from Rain Republic. Last summer, I met the proprietor of the not-yet-named brand, Josh Sermos, in Antigua Guatemala. I'd attempted to carry out a survey of my own: Which farms are you sourcing cacao from? Where did you buy your machinery? But, as I recall, Josh didn't want to go on the record--I can't find an interview with the guy on my computer or even messy notes scribbled in a steno notebook. So I turn you, dear reader, directly over to the Rain Republic. (One thing I know is that they're already competing with Carlos Eichenberger, who opened a boutique for his Danta Chocolate in Guatemala City this month).

Zingerman's Chocolate 6, with Whipped Cream

2009-10-26T22:30:00.003-05:00

A very, very, very special thanks to Duff, the Chocolate Lady from Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the last of six inspired posts, she takes Chocolate in Context to the Zingerman's Roadhouse:

The Magic Brownie Sundae is the chocolate dessert you must order when you go to Zingerman’s Roadhouse. Although the choice will be difficult (there are lots of great house-made desserts on the menu), do not waver. When your server asks you if you saved room for dessert the answer should be a resounding "Yes!" followed by: "I would like a Magic Brownie Sundae."

The Magic Brownie Sundae is built around the iconic Magic Brownie from Zingerman’s Bakehouse – a no-nonsense, dark chocolate brownie with toasted walnuts that many people swear by. First, the brownie is warmed (sigh). Then, it is covered with scoops of fluffy, wonderful vanilla gelato from Zingerman’s Creamery, a generous dousing of house-made Scharffen Berger chocolate sauce, whipped cream and toasted pecans.

You and your dinner-mates will probably react like five-year-olds when you see the sundae arrive - breaking into silly grins and squirming in your seats. You might even shriek! Something about the whipped cream piled up just looks like fun – like the dessert of your childhood dreams. But no matter how childish you might feel when initially faced with the most perfect dessert on the planet, when you take your first bite you will quickly realize that this is a very grown-up treat.

Zingerman's Chocolate 5: Zzang!

2009-10-18T16:27:00.004-05:00

I wonder if it's possible to use the word "penultimate" without sounding pretentious. I'll give it a shot. Herein, I give you the penultimate installment of chocolate advice from Duff Anderson at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Duff's final contribution to Chocolate in Context will run next week):

Although Charlie Frank has been making Zzang! bars at Zingerman's Bakehouse for a few years now, he just recently launched his own company – Zingerman's Candy Manufactory. This newly minted company is the eighth business in the Zingerman's Community of Businesses.

Announcement of the Zingerman’s Candy Manufactury is clap-your-hands, dance-at-your-desk news for all of us devotees of full-flavored confectionery because it means that great candy/combination bars are going to get a second run at the American palate.

There are a slew of candy bars out there, but there really aren't any great ones. Charlie and the Zingerman's Candy Manufactory are out to change that. Charlie wants "to make candy the original way, like it was 100 years ago." This means great ingredients, small batches, and traditional techniques.

Currently, Charlie is making three candy bars – the Zzang! Original, the Ca$hew Cow and the What the Fudge. While all three are super tasty, the Zzang! Original is my favorite. Fluffy honey nougat, a generous scoop of Spanish peanuts, muscovado brown sugar caramel and dark chocolate. This is something you Need. To. Eat. This. Year. In Ann Arbor, you can find Charlie's candy bars for sale at Zingerman's Deli, Roadhouse, Creamery and Bakehouse. Don't live in Ann Arbor? Do not despair! The Zzang! bars are available through Mail Order, and at a growing number of retailers around the country.

Zingerman's Chocolate 4: Darling Clementines

2009-10-13T00:10:00.003-05:00

I bought three hundred dollars worth of groceries last week, including an entire tempting box of clementines. I must admit, though, Duff Anderson's latest chocolatey recommendation from Zingerman's is a bit more tempting:

The ultimate indulgence at Zingerman’s Mail Order this time of year is the box of Chocolate Covered Clementines from Italy. One of many foodstuffs that Zingerman's imports from Calabria - a southern province known for hot peppers, preserved figs and great citrus – the arrival of the clementines is especially exciting for chocolate lovers because they are candied and covered in chocolate (Gasp!).

You read it right. These fresh Italian clementines (the darling of the citrus family) are soaked in a bath of simple syrup, cut into quarters, then dipped in dark chocolate. Since the whole fruit is candied, peel and all, the clementines end up sweet and perfectly bitter. Each chocolate covered clementine wedge is the size of a large chocolate truffle, eatable in one bite or two. If you are trying to avoid a mess, I suggest one bite (they are very juicy).

The chocolate covered clementines are available October-February only. Have a friend whose family hails from southern Italy? Tired of the polite, French candied orange-in-dark-chocolate combinations and want something that will dribble down your chin? Wondering what you can contribute to the holiday parties coming quickly around the bend? A box of crazy-good clementines from Italy is the answer. Call Zingerman's Mail Order at 1-888-636-8162 and order a box today!

Zingerman's Chocolate 3: Hot Cocoa Coffee Cake

2009-10-04T15:42:00.004-05:00

Zingerman's Chocolate Lady Duff returns with yet another seasonal suggestion from the Midwest:

The hot cocoa cake is one of a triumvirate of unbelievably good coffee cakes made by Zingerman’s Bakehouse. Available all year long, this is (in my opinion) the not-to-be-missed chocolate goodie at the Bakehouse.

Neither as well known as the Magic Brownie nor as flashy as the Hunka Burnin’ Love chocolate cake, the hot cocoa cake is easy to overlook. But from one chocolate lover to another I tell you: This is it – the must-have chocolate dessert at the Bakehouse.

I love the hot cocoa coffeecake for three reasons:

1. It is the ultimate day-night dessert. You can definitely get away with ordering a slice in the morning to go with your coffee, but you can also serve it warm with fresh whipped cream to discerning dinner guests. It is unassuming, yet impressive.

2. It’s got body, baby! It has all the texture of a moist, dense coffeecake with big chunks of chocolate baked throughout. Let me tell you, running into one of those chunks is pretty fabulous.

3. It isn’t just sweet, it is flavorful. The Bakehouse uses great ingredients like real butter, fresh eggs, natural cocoa powder (from Scharffen Berger), real vanilla and a dash of espresso to give this cake lots of great flavor.

The good news is that if you try the hot cocoa cake and love it, you can try the Bakehouse’s other great coffee cakes, too – Sourcream, Lemon Poppyseed, Gingerbread (fall/winter) and Summer Fling (spring/summer). All the coffee cakes are available by the slice at the Deli, Roadhouse or Bakehouse and available in a cute mini (nosher) bundt cake or a full (fresser) bundt cake online at www.zingermans.com!

Zingerman's Chocolate 2: Dark Chocolate Gelato at Zingerman's Creamery

2009-09-27T12:01:00.004-05:00

It's a cold and rainy fall weekend in Pittsburgh, but some friends of mine countered the impending gloom last night by cranking up the ice cream maker and inviting people over. The folks at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, do exactly the same thing every day.

In the second of several installments from the Midwestern foodie giant, Zingerman's Chocolate Lady Duff returns to recommend "in addition great fresh cream cheese and goat cheese, Zingerman’s Creamery's (est. 2001) unbelievable Sicilian-style gelato":

My favorite is the Dark Chocolate. It is super dense and not too sweet, like perfectly chilled chocolate mousse.

Gelato is ice cream’s distant Italian cousin - variations in the ingredients, process and serving style of gelato give it a unique texture and flavor. At Zingerman’s Creamery, we use milk from a local dairy – Calder Dairy – to make each batch of gelato. With great milk as the first ingredient in the Dark Chocolate Gelato, we’re already off to a good start! Then we add a hefty dose of natural, unsweetened cocoa powder from Scharffen Berger, a little sugar, give it a spin in our single-batch gelato machine and voila! The best chocolate gelato this side of The Pond.

Zingerman’s Creamery and Zingerman’s Deli stock the Dark Chocolate Gelato year-round, so you can stop by and try a spoonful anytime. But here is the real news. During the month of February – and February only - the Creamery makes a bunch of extra special chocolate gelati. Chocolate Balsamic Strawberry, Turtle, Rocky Ride, Chocolate Heat... I look forward to February all year just for the arrival of these flavors. And for me to say that I look forward to the fourth of six long months of winter in Michigan should give you an indication of how great these chocolate gelati really are! Maybe you want to strategically plan a mid-winter visit to Ann Arbor?

Zingerman's Chocolate: El Rustico Askinosie Bar at Zingerman's Deli

2009-09-20T23:26:00.005-05:00

This has been a long day. In fact, it's already 12:30am. That's frightening, since what still feels like tomorrow promises to be an even longer day. So I think I'll turn things over post haste to Duff Anderson from the foodie haven Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her official title is "Chocolate Lady."

This is the first of several installments reporting on the state of chocolate at the various Zingerman's location around Ann Arbor (including the famous Deli, the Bakehouse, and the Creamery). I'd like to especially thank Duff for sending her report from the front during a hectic Jewish Holiday sandwich-making extravaganza (while, she tells me, she was also working on Zingerman's annual Paella Party).

I give you, Duff:

Last February, Zingerman’s Deli and Askinosie Chocolate launched El Rustico Chocolate Bar, inspired by the traditional foodways of the vanilla-growing regions of Mexico. We named it El Rustico – the rustic one – a Mexican style chocolate bar with delicate bits of whole vanilla bean.

There isn’t anything else like this bar out there in the chocolate universe right now. I proclaim this with a little bit of a proud-mommy complex (I helped develop it) but mostly as a completely objective observer!

We did no conching and very little refining on this chocolate, which gives it a really nice, crystalline texture. We are using Askinosie’s bean-to-bar Soconusco Mexican cacao to make El Rustico, partly because there is much great choco-history in that region (the Aztec’s sourced their cacao there) but mostly because we love its flavor!

But we didn’t stop there. We decided to sprinkle the bar with tiny morsels of super supple, hand-chopped (by yours truly and a very patient chef at the Deli) whole vanilla bean. Now, using whole bean vanilla (including the pod) in a chocolate bar – to amp up both flavor and texture – is crazy and delicious. So crazy and delicious, in fact, that no one else is doing it.

Askinosie Chocolate and Zingerman’s Deli are about to begin production on the next batch of El Rustico (the first batch sold out!), so you should see it back on the Deli shelves sometime in October. The bar will also be available online at www.askinosie.com.

Virginian Chocolate

2009-09-06T17:48:00.003-05:00

In July, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists engaged in an ongoing debate on the Association for the Study of Food and Society listserv about the definitions of and differences between the words criolla and criollo. One respondent argued that both are (differently gendered) versions of the same adjective derived from the Portuguese Brazilian crioulo, and someone else surmised that "criollo in general refers to someone born in the Western Hemisphere to parents who came from Spain" while "criolla refers to grapes (aka 'mission grapes') brought to California (and other places in the Western Hemisphere) by the Spanish in the 16th century and planted there for the purpose of wine-making." My own contribution to the conversation was that

As high-end chocolate becomes more mainstream, marketers like to draw attention to criollo cacao beans (as opposed to forastero and trinitario beans, though, as several people have already mentioned, cacao plants are naturally genetically intermixed) as the "purest" and "finest" cacao--that is certainly an oversimplification. A couple of facts that challenge/complicate that characterization: 1. Juan C. Motamayor has actually proposed that there are ten rather than three "genetic clusters" of cacao, in his paper "Geographic and Genetic Population Differentiation of the Amazonian Chocolate Tree (Theobroma cacao L)" (http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0003311), and 2. My own experience in rural Guatemala was that people used the term to refer to cacao that came from trees that were wild and that they believed to be of inferior quality (whether that cacao would turn out to be genetically "criollo" is not clear to me), as opposed to "hibridos," known hybrids (often introduced in the 1940s or 50s, I believe, by the United Fruit Company) that they understood to be superior.

Implicit in my argument is is the assumption that the word the chocolate industry is concerned with is criollo, not criolla.

Brothers Tim and Matt Gearhart either disagree or are misinformed. Quite possibly, they simply don't care about semantics. The signature bon bon at their Gearhart's chocolate shop in Charlottesville, VA, is the "Criolla": a ganache of El Rey couverture and Shenandoah cream, combined with cacao nibs. The Gearharts treat chocolate the way that winemakers in the Jeffersonian stomping ground of the "Monticello Region" that surrounds Charlottesville treat grapes--they turn out a good product without self-consciousness or pretension.

In addition to the Criolla, former Marine cook Tim Gearhart makes fifteen other confections (Matt handles the business end), including maple pecan candies, an earl grey bon bon I'd like to make another trip for, and an orange-, cinnamon-, and ancho chile-infused ganache that borrows a lot of its flavor from the Green & Black's Maya Gold bar. The second Gearhart's location is scheduled to open in Richmond later this month.

Grad School Chocolate: Down and Dirty Sacher Torte

2009-08-06T15:13:00.005-05:00

This is the life of a graduate student: I sit in front of this computer trying to catch the juice from a farm-fresh peach topped with mascarpone and honey before any combination thereof drops onto the expensive camera that I've neglected for at least six months, which I've connected to this computer now so that I can finally upload those backlogged photos, load it up anew, and use some of those new photos on this blog. I have no doubt that this objectively appears to be a pretty sweet deal to the guy who's been climbing around on my roof all day re-laying neglected bricks on my crumbling chimney. But it is subjectively quite arduous for me. I have mentioned that I'm working on my MFA thesis. Long, long days of procrastination. Less time perfecting the production of this blog. But a fellow grad student breezed through town last weekend and helped me whip up one of my favorite desserts in under an hour: Sacher torte. I pulled a recipe from the February 2002 issue of Bon Appetit out of a pile, but the original recipe calls for several hours of baking, assembly, and general patient waiting. Here's the grad student version:

Buy a "Pound Plus" bar from Trader Joe's.
General Note: I move into my final year of graduate school a big fan of the local Trader Joe's. Twice in one week, I have ended my morning run (a new, productive development) at Trader Joe's where I bought supplies for lunch (today: a box of quinoa, a guacamole kit, and some tofu: in a recipe vaguely inspired by 101 Cookbooks, I cooked the quinoa with some ginger and some of the jalapeno from the kit, then topped it with cubed avocado and tofu and some soy sauce and sesame oil). But I digress. Even before I was a fan of Trader Joe's, I was a fan of Trader Joe's private label chocolate--I've liked the stuff since I saw it at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon. (I'm not sure who makes it, but they do a good job.) Allow me to stand on a soapy chocolate box for a moment: talk of chocolate has become very elevated in the past 24 months, but I find it helpful to think that there are three large categories of chocolate: bad, good, and really damn good--when you have the time to spend thinking about the nuances of the flavor profiles and the money to pay for it get the really damn good stuff, otherwise eat good chocolate and enjoy it. Trader Joe's sells you over a pound of good chocolate for about four bucks.

When you get home, preheat the oven to 350. Melt about two thirds of the Trader Joe's bar in a double boiler (it helps if you're doing this on a hot day and the chocolate is already soft by the time you get home)--once it's melted remove it from the heat. Then prepare two nine-inch-diameter cake pans (or the closest thing to it) by buttering them, cutting out two rounds of baking paper to insert inside each pan, and buttering over the paper (I suppose you could skip this step if you don't have the paper--just butter the pans really well). Then separate 8 eggs, leaving both the yolks and the whites in large mixing bowls. Whisk the yolks together with a stick of butter melted in the microwave (cooled slightly, if possible) and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Add a large pinch of salt to the egg whites and beat them with the appropriate electric device, then gradually add 3/4 cup of sugar and keep beating until the whites are stiff but not dried out. Quickly whip up a cake batter by alternately folding portions (about 1/4 of the total in each portion) of the egg white mixture and sifted portions (again about 1/4 each time) of 1 cup of sifted flour into the chocolate, until everything is combined. Dump the batter into the pans, dividing it as evenly as possible, then throw the pans in the oven. Bake for 20 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean.

Make sure you have some good jam on hand, for later.

Now, throw together a glaze by mixing about 2/3 of the remaining Trader Joe's chocolate, 1 and 1/2 cups whipping cream, 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar, and about 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of light corn syrup in a pot and bringing the mixture to a boil; then reduce the heat to a simmer and keep it going for five minutes. Whisk an egg in a bowl, pour in a bit of the chocolate mixture, whisking continuously, then add the contents of the bowl back to the pot; keep the glaze-in-progress over low heat, whisking, until it thickens but doesn't boil. Remove from heat. Add a cavalier dash of vanilla extract, whisk. Don't worry about cooling the glaze.

Twenty minutes should have gone by by now, so pull the cakes out of the oven. Since you're not going to cool them, they might be puffy and/or lumpy, but you're going to assemble a layer cake that looks a bit like a hamburger--ah, well. Invert the first cake (so that the flat, bottom, side is facing up) onto a cake plate or a regular plate. Smear a lot of jam on top. Wriggle the second cake out of its pan so that you can place it, flat/bottom-side-down on top of the other cake. Pour the glaze over the top with as much grace as you have the energy for--it's okay if you have a glaze puddle on the plate, but spoon or sponge some off if it starts to overflow.

The Sacher torte was absolutely delicious--only a few more hours of staring blankly at the computer before I can serve up the leftovers. I'm going to run downstairs right now to take pictures of what remains of the cake. I'll include one at the top of this post. And I'll even upload a selection from those months-old neglected photos to the new Chocolate in Context Facebook page.

Enjoy!

Pittsburgh to New York: Pickled Chocolate

2009-07-16T06:13:00.004-05:00

I was almost inadvertently in New York this past weekend, and though Amy Rosenfield of the local-to-me-now-in-Pittsburgh shop Mon Aimee Chocolat had some good Brooklyn chocolate suggestions (Nunu, Liddabit, Fine and Raw, the Mast Brothers) and I stumbled upon the West Village headquarters of the smoke-and-mirrors operation Pure Dark (with overstuffed chairs, products of unnecessarily mysterious provenance, and meaningless slogans like "Chocolate Harvested from Nature"), I found myself eating many more pickles (pickled peppers at the Spuyten Duyvil, horseradish pickles at the DUMBO farmers market) than chocolate bars, so it seems only fitting to run this leftover interview with Rick Field of New York-based Rick's Picks about pickles and Pittsburgh. (I have little recollection of how or why Rick and I got into this conversation and whether or not any of it is true, but, then, I'm interested in the themes of truth and memory in nonfiction writing.)

Emily: Let’s go, tell me about the pickle hat.

Rick: It’s not covered in chocolate, though.

It’s alright, give it a try.

Alright, so I went to a wedding in Pittsburgh. It was an interesting weekend. There was a convention of muscle, um, body builders there, all covered with cocoa butter.

Mm.

So every time we went down in the elevator, we experienced these enormously overdefined people with gross cappuccino-colored skin, all greasy and basically naked. We needed some relief, and we went to Pittsburgh’s noteworthy vintage and used clothing arena and I was fortunate enough to find a beautiful large green felt hat, which was a good thing for me to find because I am in the pickle business...

A pickle impresario, some might say…

Yes, and I thought that this hat could be something that I could really become known for. So I wore the hat for the balance of the weekend and received many compliments and enjoyed wearing it. Sunday, I returned to the Pittsburgh airport after the wedding was over in a cab, and was somewhere between consciousness and sleep for most of the cab ride, and got out of the cab, paid the guy, went to check in, got to security, and realized I’d left my hat in the cab.

Aaaah!

So, of course, since it wasn’t a business trip, I didn’t have a receipt, so I called the cab company—I believe it was Ace Cab of Pittsburgh—and asked them if they knew where my hat was. They said, “well, did you get a receipt? Do you know what cab it was?” And I said “no, I don’t.” I said, “good god, man, you must put out an APB to all cabs! Find the green hat.” And about two minutes later somebody called back and said that they did have my hat in their cab and they would return it, but the hat had to come back to the airport at human pricing. So I agreed that the driver would turn the meter on and my hat was brought back to the airport for twenty-eight dollars, thirty with tip. And I recovered my hat and it was a very happy ending. And that’s the story of how a thirty-dollar-wedding-weekend-hat became a sixty-dollar-wedding-weekend-hat.

Can Anyone Write a Better Chocolate Book than Sophie Coe?

2009-07-09T23:06:00.004-05:00

I met with one of the members of my thesis committee yesterday, and she told me that "you've done enough reading. It's clear. You don't have to do any more. Please stop." I'd just turned in forty pages chronicling my adventures and misadventures with chocolate in Guatemala--forty pages which referenced Richard Rodriguez, Joan Didion, Daniel Chacón, and, of course, Sophie and Michael Coe. In my experience, any magazine article, quirky novel, or scholarly monograph about chocolate inevitably draws on the culinary-historical-archaeological synthesis in the Coes' The True History of Chocolate. That's because the culinary-historian-and-archaeologist couple, who drew the title of their book from Bernal Díaz del Castillo's The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, were meticulous about going back to and making sense of the primary texts about the chocolate-related intersection of European and American cultures: Díaz, Thomas Gage, Fray Bernardino de Sahugún. Marcy Norton, a historian at George Washington University, sets out to build on or redirect that true chocolate history in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. The pairing is less familiar to our modern minds than coffee and cigarettes, but Norton's concern is that the two new-world products cacao and tobacco migrated to and transformed the old world simultaneously. "The question that drives this book," she explains, is, "What, exactly, did it mean for Europeans--bound as they were to an ideology that insisted on their religious and cultural supremacy--to become consumers of goods that they knew were so enmeshed in the religious practices of the pagan 'savages' whom they had conquered?"

Norton's attempt to intertwine the cultural and psychotropic stories of cacao and tobacco is compelling, but the book often seems to be an amalgam of already studied and published facts. She doesn't have a terrible amount of evidence to suggest that the link between the her two colonial commodities was anything more than theoretical, and her comparisons are often strained and repetitive. In the absence of a more concrete relationship, the book might have benefited from more creative juxtapositions. For example, Norton mentions that "[w]hen Indians on the island of Hispaniola (probably) offered Columbus a bouquet of dried tobacco leaves, it did not stimulate great excitement," but she misses the opportunity to draw a connection to the explorer's similarly blasé response to cacao. In The True History of Chocolate, the Coes write that "the first European encounter with cacao took place when Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage, came across a great Maya trading canoe with cacao beans amongst its cargo," and they later provide an account of the contents of the canoe (including the cacao beans or "almonds") written by Ferdinand Columbus, the explorer's son:

For their provisions they had such roots and grains as are eaten in Hispaniola, and a sort of wine made out of maize which resembled English beer; and many of those almonds which in New Spain are used for money. They seemed to hold these almonds at a great price; for when they were brought on board ship together with their goods, I observed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.

The definitive history, it would seem, is the Coes' history. Even Norton suggests, in a footnote to her introduction, that "[f]or a synthesis on pre-Columbian chocolate, see Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London: Thames and Hudson 1996), 11-104." She goes on to mention that "[s]ince the publication of the True History, there has been a boom in pre-Columbian chocolate studies, well represented by the contributions in Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao."

I came home from my meeting yesterday and read a good portion of the Chocolate in Mesoamerica anthology, edited by Cameron L. McNeil (who references the Coes in her first paragraph), which includes specialized articles about the Sonconusco region of Guatemala and about the uses of the alien-spacecraft-like cacao-relative pataxte. But then I did stop reading--I had to, in order to start writing.

Novel Guatemalan Chocolate: Who Is Carlos Eichenberger?

2009-03-29T14:28:00.004-05:00

Well, for one thing, he's the guy who gave me a ride from Guatemala City to my old hometown of Antigua the day after I spoke about this blog at the first (annual?) symposium on cacao hosted by the organization FundaSistemas in December of 2008. The focus of the conference was how to increase the tonnage of cacao exported from Guatemala by a factor of at least several hundred and thereby speed up economic and political development in the country. That's a process I would be fascinated to observe, but I'm reluctant to suggest that I have either a position to take regarding how to do it or expertise in advising anyone else to take up such a position. I am always happy, though, to talk about the nuanced implications of producing and consuming the materials in the developing and developed world that fuel the (increasingly international) small-scale artisanal chocolate industry.

I've been doing a lot of research in Guatemala over the past year on exactly that subject, though I haven't written much about it. In the midst of conducting a Top Secret Project about the Revival of Chocolate in the Ancient Maya Birthplace of Chocolate, I found that there were several other people doing the same thing. But, as I've mentioned recently, being the first person to the story isn't all that important to me. The literary world's general reverence of Proust, for example, (whom I still have not actually read) has little to do with the notion that he was the first person to remember things past. So, I figured, if other people want to talk about chocolate in Guatemala, let them have at it.

That said, I might as well speak up from time to time. So here goes: Carlos Eichenberger, of Danta Chocolate, is producing a bean-to-bar chocolate in the country of origin, in this case, Guatemala. When I met him at the symposium last year, he was buying beans through a broker. I introduced him to the owner of a farm called las Acacias in the Guatemala/Mexico border area often referred to (among chocolate fanatics) as "Soconusco" (Shawn Askinosie produces a Soconusco bar). I haven't had a chance to try one of Danta's Acacias bars yet, but I've had Carlos's chocolate and I've had las Acacias beans. Both are some of the finest specimens of their kind. The combination is a novelty worth writing about: Danta mentioned on the Chocolate Life, Danta mentioned in El Periodico.

Chocolate Month: February Musings

2009-01-29T10:06:00.010-05:00

I started the year by looking simultaneously backward and forward. Such a back-and-forth glance is an expression not only of my general inability to catch up but of the inherent tension at work here between journalistic and imaginative instincts. Put another way, novelty is overrated while renewal (while nearly impossible) is inspired. So, for the second month in a row, I will attempt to reinvigorate resources from years past.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Tim McCollum at Madecasse, asking about their "tree-to-bean-to-bar" chocolate made in Madagascar. My response is that I savored each carefully packaged and labeled sample that Tim sent but I undermined the scientific tasting process by indulging myself in them before bed, letting the 63-70% products mingle among the books on my nightstand. I will say that I agree with all of the characterizations of the chocolate that Tim included in his letter to me: the not-yet-released 75% is more subtly roasted (and thus packs a more nuanced flavor) than the currently-available 75%, and the 67% is the most impressive of the lot. If asked to give my own analysis, I would say that the 67% has a flavor that unexpectedly suggests raspberries. However, I'm reluctant to take that kind of tastes-like cataloging any further today. My reasons lie in the conclusion to the ekphrastic essay by poet Mark Doty Still Life with Oysters and Lemon:

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.

Metaphor expands, embodies creativity. Clinical explanation reduces, boils down insight to keywords. To call my taste experience "raspberry" is the opposite of rendering the inchoate, ineffable sensory experience of tasting in metaphor. I would rather say it sent me moving through a viscous somnambulance. You can invent the raspberries on your own.

I've received a number of other tidings since the beginning of 2009, among them, word of stalwart Valrhona's naming of San Francisco chocolatier Michael Recchiuti as their American chocolate "ambassador," timed to the release of what I understand are some brand new blends and bars. (Recchiuti, along with a lovely Guatemalan cacao farmer named Neto Porras and several other chocolate professionals in several countries, no doubt has come to the conclusion that I'm either deeply disturbed or deeply ungrateful since I've been utterly out of touch since our last meetings--please accept my apology, guys--I was just looking for the right words.) Amano has a new chocolate (in new packaging) too: it's called Jembrana. The sultry New Orleans chocolatiers Sucre sent me an early Valentine: a box packed with half a dozen ganache-filled hearts. And Ten Speed press sent up a flair about their new publication, called Give the Bitch Back Her Chocolate. It's a series of word-and-vintage-image pairings, most more sleazy than seductive, and I hope you won't make such a very direct connection between this writer and that title, but the collection give me a wonderful image to ruminate on.

As I take another look back, I recall that Scharffen Berger (whose Ibex logo has served as my muse cast in chocolate) announced its sale to Hershey within days of me starting this blog over three years ago. This post is timed to the news that Hershey will close the beloved Berkeley plant. I mourn the loss absolutely, but prefer to focus on smaller pleasures. Like metaphors that may or may not include raspberries.

New Year, Old Bread, Claudio Corallo Chocolate, and Coconut Oil

2009-01-01T10:38:00.004-05:00

A while ago--I can't remember exactly when, but I can tell you it was another year--a man who had recently left his family's scrap metal business to pursue a career as a scrap metal sculptor asked me what I wanted in life. "I want to always have new experiences," I said. "And I want to have a constant sense of who I am and what I'm doing."

"Are you listening to yourself?" this guy asked me. "How can you always be doing something new and be constant?"

By harvesting contraction, I suppose. And by recognizing the human willingness to become trapped in such contradiction. I'm leery of announcing that I want anything in particular for or from the year 2009 (and yet this very writing suggests that I am somehow compelled to announce that very thing), but what I want hasn't changed much since that conversation with the sculptor: change, consistency. And, in fact, I have the same plans for Chocolate in Context, as the blog moves from 2008 into 2009. I'll still be writing about chocolate as it relates to cooking, travel, society, pleasure, pain, and other things. I'll make announcements, changes, regular updates, irregular updates. I'll rest comfortably on what I've already done, and then do something uncomfortably different.

As you, reader, look forward to everything new in 2009, you'll no doubt have to rely on a couple of things that are old as well. As you begin to think through that contradiction, I recommend that you whip up a batch of Lunatic French Toast, developed by Robinson Crusoe-esque chocolate maker Claudio Corallo (he lives on the volcanic African islands of Sao Tome and Principe). The recipe calls for coconut oil (which gives the breakfast dish a wildness that's almost symbolic) and "old-ish bread," which you may have left over from 2008. Claudio Corallo's US distributor, James Clark (whom I interviewed a few months ago) generously shared the recipe:

Lunatic French Toast
1 Egg
1/2 cup milk
Slices of old-ish bread
Coconut oil or butter
Your favorite Claudio Corallo Chocolate

Directions:
Whisk the egg and milk together. Heat a heavy skillet and melt some coconut oil or butter in the bottom. Soak your bread in the "custard" and fry gently on both sides over low to medium heat. When each slice is done, remove it from the pan and place on top a piece of chocolate the size of a pat of butter

After a minute or so, the chocolate should be melted enough to spread over the top of your French Toast. You won't need any syrup. If you are using the 100% cacao, you might enjoy sprinkling a tiny bit of granulated sugar on top. Now think about it: your bittersweet chocolate is less insulin-y than a gob of syrup would have been, you have protein from the egg...nutritionally you're set, and if you used coconut oil, you're jammin'. But obviously nobody eats French Toast because it's good for you...

Revise and Conquer: Chocolate Heroes and Heroines

2008-11-14T13:19:00.008-05:00

George Saunders, MacArthur Genius Award winner and a liberal-minded quick-witted model citizen of the 21st century, has written that "the best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker." In the optimistic (despite this semester's "narrating war and protest" theme) and frenetic freshman composition courses that I teach at the University of Pittsburgh, I obsessively quote Saunders, along with the heady and graceful poet/memoirist Patricia Hampl ("it still comes as a shock to realize that I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know"), and I present revision as the divine route to, if not salvation, at least understanding. At the beginning of the semester, I tell my students that "revision is much more than copy-editing--it is an informed return to a piece of writing, an opportunity not only to refine but to reconsider your writing." Toward the end of the semester (that is, right now), as projects get longer and questions get more complex, I emphasize that "while writers often approach revision as a way of looking back, revising can also be about looking forward."

I don't always follow my own advice. In the free-wheeling rant I posted on this blog a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'm not writing very much right now. What I do write, I don't tend to revise. This semester, I tend to give my work a quick scan, followed by a long sigh, and then I send it off to where it needs to go (this website, a professor's mailbox, an editor's inbox), hoping I won't have to look at it again any time too soon. But what would have happened if I had reread and revised my post about "Barthes and the Chocolate Man"? I might have found that my philosophical bafflement over Roland Barthes was actually the key to a provocatively original analysis (anyone similarly hoping to turn frustration into epiphany may want to consult the heartening textbook for introductory classes much like the one I'm teaching The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, by Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue). I also might have concluded--perhaps more importantly, in this context--that my comment that "while food industry insiders find chocolate to be the greatest thing going, I'm finding the conversation to be a bit banal" was incomplete, worthy of more elaboration. I could have said, instead, that the oversaturated market makes the search for transcendent experiences in chocolate more challenging.

But there are, of course, transcendent experiences to be had. That is, there are still heroes and heroines in the chocolate world. Last weekend, I made my annual trip to the Annual New York Chocolate Show, where I discovered a chocolate-outfitted Wonder Woman, a new(ish) California chocolatier named Christopher Michael (and Food & Wine magazine reports on yet another one: Eclipse Chocolat), and several old friends and allies, including Jeff Shepherd of Lillie Belle Farms, who told me that my purchase of his new "Red Velvet Almonds" would go toward his daughter's college education.

And I've gotten--in addition to bogus chocolate tablets imprinted with PR slogans--some terrific chocolate samples in the mail in the past couple months. Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate sent me his latest 67% and 70% mircobatch Madagascar bars--the stuff is currently more expensive than Valrhona and it's not (yet) as good as Valrhona, but Alan is dedicated enough to get there. The utterly unpretentious staff at Michel Cluizel's US outpost sent me the company's new 85% and 99% "ganaches" (or ganache-filled bon bons), packed tightly into a handy little box that's no bigger than a pocket reference book--the ganache itself was a bit too dry and grainy for my tongue, but the little box is an absolutely delightful marketing feat.

Looking back is useful, helpful, necessary. So is looking forward. Sometimes, you can take your work, rearrange it, make it work better. And sometimes, you have to break the whole structure apart. One of the most vindicating moments of the last month was when a bunch of guys (mostly roboticists and nuclear power plant engineers) whom I invited over to play poker took it upon themselves to forcibly demolish the Axe chocolate tablet.

Barthes and the Chocolate Man

2008-10-30T11:17:00.005-05:00

My decision to start this blog was arbitrary. I liked chocolate, I talked about it in ways (both high and low) that other people didn't seem to, and I had a lot of free time. I imagined that, perhaps more than taste-testing the substance itself, I would write about obscure things peripherally related to chocolate. If the blog had taken that trajectory, I might have sat down sometime over the last month and written about the ludicrous commercial I saw at the cinema, for the new chocolate-scented Axe body spray. I might have written about how--perfectly timed with my viewing of the ad in which women flock to and then consume parts of a man who appears to be made of chocolate--I received an email from a publicist for Axe, telling me that "more than 70 percent of women around the world ranked chocolate as more irresistible than shopping, jewelry or even sex. Based on this insight, AXE created new AXE Dark Temptation, both a bodyspray and a shower gel for guys that is as irresistible as chocolate." (That publicist sent me a box of samples several weeks ago, and I only this moment realized that the box contained not only the shower gel, which I have been using on myself, and the body spray, which I have not, but also an enormous block of chocolate on which the above PR slogan about women, chocolate, and sex is printed.)

However (as regular readers of this blog must have noticed) I've spent the past month writing nothing at all.

Perhaps the reasons for my silence come not from chocolate at all but from an existential crisis about the act of writing itself. But, read another way, that crisis has everything to do with chocolate. At exactly the time that I started this chocolate blogging endeavor a few years ago, the (artisan/artisanal/high-end/origin/high-cacao-content/call-it-what-you-will) chocolate industry and the business of writing about it mushroomed from a sideline fascination into a full-fledged cultural phenomenon. So instead of writing about chocolate-laced advertising campaigns, I started to write about individual pieces of candy, their flavors (or lack thereof), and the importance (or lack thereof) of their cacao percentages. And people read this stuff and wrote back, and I, in turn, kept up the dialogue by writing yet more about the subject. (Even during the month when I wrote nothing here on Chocolate in Context, Imbibe magazine deemed me an expert on the subject--though you'd have to find a hard copy October issue to read it.) Lately, though, while food industry insiders find chocolate to be the greatest thing going, I'm finding the conversation to be a bit banal.

In my mind, the (at least pre-financial-meltdown) astronomical growth of the specialty chocolate market has resulted an extraordinary increase in the production of mediocre chocolate, or products that employ artisan techniques yet have neither the taste nor the generally laudable creativity of the first wave of contemporary American chocolate makers. On my last trip to San Francisco, I asked the astute Seneca Klassen what he thought about all of this. He answered that

There's a fundamental problem with the whole concept of artisan chocolate making at this time, and that is that one of the components that I generally associate with artisanal processes is that they're intergenerational, and that there are skills that are passed down from person to person. And that's been erased over the past hundred years of chocolate's history because of the industrialization of the product. So there aren't people to go ask how to do this stuff. So what does artisan mean, then? So we're at the point where anybody entering this pursuit has to basically start from scratch and cobble together what knowledge they can, however they can, and hopefully build relationships over time that improve that body of knowledge. But it's a pretty weird set up because basically we're all fishing in the dark, trying to achieve really high quality, amazing things, but the results are radically different. And that's only within the small community of people who really give a shit. There's a broader community of people who just want to be able to more effectively market and label their products.

The Axe Chocolate Man is just such a person. I am meant to infer (though this is certainly not what I or anyone watching this ad would actually feel) that this (artificial) image of a man made out of (artificial) chocolate is sexy, or somehow sexier than sex. I'm not talking about chocolate anymore. I'm talking about some kind of body spray that's not made of chocolate and doesn't even smell like chocolate, but rather smells like the very distinctly non-artisan artificial aroma that, as a result of those hundred years of industrialization in the food industry that Seneca referred to, Americans now associate with chocolate. Well, isn't this what I set out to do with this blog anyway? To make sense, as a chocolate fan, of representations of chocolate? Perhaps. But what's the point? "[T]his is the point:" writes Roland Barthes, whom I take entirely out of context, "we are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification. Mythical speech is made of material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth (whether pictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, that one can reason about them while discounting their substance." Here, I might have been inclined to lapse into an anecdote about my-only-partially successful attempt to fill up my empty writing hours with reading hours and about how I found Barthes's Mythologies to be some combination of useful and baffling. Such an anecdote would have allowed me to wrap my self-deprecating characterization in a bit of classy prose in which I dismiss my inability to apply my reading of Barthes to the Axe ad in anything but the most coincidental of ways. I might have done that, except that, in his essay "Blind and Dumb Criticism" in the same book, Barthes asks,

...But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic? To understand, to enlighten, that is your profession, isn't it? You can of course judge philosophy according to common sense; the trouble is that while 'common sense' and 'feeling' understand nothing about philosophy, philosophy, on the other hand, understands them perfectly. You don't explain philosophers, but they explain you.

Why be a critic, indeed? I don't know, man, but I think it's a question worth my time to figure out. And that might take another month (or more) of not writing about anything. For the moment, I'm resolved to sit here a bit bored and a bit baffled, reading the enormous chocolate tome presented to me by the Axe Chocolate Man. ("Eighty-two perfect agreed that chocolate is a temptation that is hard to resist," it tells me.)

Robert Steinberg

2008-09-24T11:28:00.004-05:00

Robert Steinberg, the San Francisco physician whose own diagnosis of lymphocytic leukemia propelled him into the chocolate business (and eventually into founding Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker with John Scharffenberger in the 1990s), died this week.

In the 2006 cookbook The Essence of Chocolate, Steinberg wrote that

Since we began Scharffen Berger, I've received many letters from people who are coping with an illness of some sort. Whenever I can, I write back. Many of the letters praise my openness about my leukemia as "courageous." But I don't see myself as courageous. Cancer is such a charged topic in our society, it's easy for an illness to become sort of a dynamic event, but not very easy to shrug off the kind of stigma we assign people with cancer. To talk openly about my illness is simply to talk about an integral part of my being. It's kind of hard for me to imagine trying to direct a conversation away from the topic without being closed and mysterious in a way that is foreign to my sense of self. Being open about my leukemia also lets me acknowledge what I know for sure from my years of practicing medicine: every one of us has challenges to face. The deeply felt and beautifully written letters that have been sent to me connect me to people in an unusually personal way. For those who have asked me how to approach life with an illness, I can say this: there are no useful generalizations, but to the extent that your illness and life circumstances allow, try to be yourself and understand that in accepting who you are, you are likely to become more accepting of others. It may not be readily apparent, but that sort of compassion is a reward in itself.

In a tribute on the Scharffen Berger website today, John Scharffenberger wrote that

The chocolate world has lost a great visionary, and I lost a good friend.

I met Robert Steinberg as a friend and neighbor in Mendocino County. It was later, however, as his patient, that I came to recognize his focused and thoughtful intellect. These powers of analysis and investigation set him apart from any doctor that I had encountered and became the basis of my absolute trust in his judgment and taste.

Among many others, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and Serious Eats have run obituaries.

Rushing to Get to Slow Chocolate

2008-08-28T07:57:00.005-05:00

It's Thursday morning, 9am. I find myself stuck in an airport. I'm hoping that I'll get out of Pittsburgh, through Chicago, and on to San Francisco without too much trouble. I'm also hoping that all of that will happen before 6pm West Coast time, so that I can show up on time for the Chocolate Forum, taking my place on a panel next to (clockwise from the top left) Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate, Seneca Klassen of Bittersweet Cafe and Bittersweet Origins, Alex Whitmore of Taza (pictured with his cofounder Larry Slotnick), Art Pollard of Amano. Formal and informal talks about chocolate will continue throughout Labor Day Weekend in the Bay Area, since Seneca from Bittersweet is heading up a chocolate pavilion at the frenzied Slow Food festival, and he's also planning to cap the whole thing off with a chocolate roundtable at the Fort Mason building in the San Francisco Marina area.

(Photo of Alan McClure by LG Patterson)

The Great Guatemalan Pataxte Experiment

2008-08-23T22:10:00.007-05:00

I spent five weeks this summer in Guatemala, moving from cacao farm to cacao farm, and spending the requisite downtime in my old hometown of Antigua. Martin Christy of SeventyPercent.com also blogged about his adventures in Central American cacao this summer (we crossed paths), and he does a good job of sticking to the facts, rather then moving into the kind of "esoteric and quasi-philosophical" writing (as one of my family members put it last night) that I tend to do. But I do have one story worthy of some fairly straight-forward news reporting: Pataxte.

"Pataxte" is a local name for theobroma bicolor, a largely uncultivated cousin of cacao, whose oddly textured pale green pods could be props for alien brains in a B movie. Guatemalan chocolate makers sometimes replace some of their cacao with pataxte to bring down their costs. The stuff doesn't have a very glamorous profile locally, but international chocolate makers have been buzzing about the possibility of making candy with theobroma bicolor, since the seeds are pure white. When I drove to the coastal department of Retalhuleu with my friend Fernando (who was buying hand-peeled cacao beans for a new confection he's making at his Fernando's Kaffee in Antigua), cacao farmer Genaro Maldonado (a man with a careful hand at grafting cacao trees, knowledge of fermentation that he picked up in Honduras, and a generally phenomenal sense of how to lay out an orchard) cut down a couple of pataxte pods for us to experiment with. Back at Fernando's place, I enlisted the help of Josh Sermos, an American transplant who's whispering rather loudly about starting a bean-to-bar chocolate company in Guatemala, to process the stuff. Josh's plan was to churn out a pataxte bar, a project that was (arguably) so novel that it was worthy of a video:

A few days later, our foray into pataxte processing had yielded a couple of handfuls of semi-fermented, slightly burnt white beans. Josh wasn't confident that he was the man to grind, conch, and mold our microbatch of pataxte after all. I popped a roasted, peeled, pataxte bean into my mouth. It tasted vaguely like Passover matzo, which is to say that it didn't taste like much. Fernando and I had to come up with something creative.

Well, it turns out that, with a little salt, pataxte makes a decent mid-afternoon snack.

Obama Chocolate: Campaigning with Good Taste

2008-07-27T12:05:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama and his wife Michelle are known for being genuine, and they seem to genuinely like artisanal chocolate. The salted caramels from Fran's Chocolates in Seattle have become an edible symbol of the campaign, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's culture blog reports that owner Fran Bigelow is an avid Barack supporter. Carly Baumann of Cosmic Chocolates in San Francisco also has a sweet spot for the candidate, and Obama is one of her "Cosmic Icons" (along with Oprah, Al Roker, Madonna, Bono, and Snoop Dogg). And while the New England chocolatier Larry Burdick may appear to be impartial with a special election collection for each candidate (Arizona Citrus, Hot Pepper Tequila, Peanut Butter, and Kentucky Rye for McCain vs. Hawaiian Pineapple, Kenyan Coffee, Kansas Corn Crunch, and Tennessee Sour Mash for Obama), he has in fact hosted Obama campaign events in Walpole, NH, where his factory and one of his L.A. Burdick shops are located (the other is in Cambridge, Mass). In a 2007 article in The Walpolean, Burdick praised Obama's approach to health care and employment benefits and then stated that "He’s got my vote based on the amount of chocolate he eats!"

Chocolate Think Tank: Fancy Food Show Interviews

2008-07-18T16:30:00.004-05:00

Chocolate maker Steve DeVries (left) operates according to the slogan "100 years behind the times." In the context of DeVries Chocolate, that means, returning to preindustrial artisan methods. But in a larger context, the phrase is perfectly suited to my own life because it suggests mindful work, patience, and sometimes just simply running behind schedule. So a full three weeks after the event, here are excerpts from my conversations with Steve and some of his colleagues at the annual Fancy Food Show in New York:

DeVries Chocolate
Tell me about the chocolate meeting yesterday?

Steve DeVries, founder: It was a meeting of the FCIA, Fine Chocolate Industry Association. Art [Pollard, from Amano] was there, and Shawn [Askinosie, from Askinosie Chocolate] was there, and Alan [McClure, from Patric Chocolate] was there, and Larry [Slotnick, from Taza] was there, and I was there, and Gary Guittard [from Guittard ] was there. Frederick [Schilling, of Dagoba] was there. So that was seven or eight small chocolate makers. And Gary is not a small chocolate maker, but he’s like fourth generation! I mean, I don’t even know what my grandfather did for a living! You know, and he’s probably working with some of the same equipment as his grandfather.

So here’s a question, do you want to get bigger and distribute more, or do you want to maintain this equilibrium between small production and high quality that you have? Because it’s kind of cool.

Steve: Well, I can only speak for myself, but I really am trying to work with being able to do as good a chocolate as... I’m still in the process of learning what good chocolate means. The chocolate that we’re dealing with today is really the result of 100 years of industrialization that I don’t necessarily think was good for chocolate itself. In the plantations, there was 100 years of unlimited competition between cocoa growers, and they were just beat to death. Cocoa prices in the 1950 were like forty cents a pound. We saw those same prices in the late 1990s! People said "Don’t worry about quality, give us quantity." So, I mean, everybody’s going to be different. We cannot compete with the big companies on quantity. So it’s obvious that you’re going to have to stay with better quality. For me, it kind of all started with the heavy anomaly of bringing cocoa beans back from Costa Rica, roasting them in my oven, and grinding them. It was a rustic chocolate but there was a complexity of flavor that I’d never tasted in chocolate before. So the starting thing was "how could this possibly be? There’s companies with a couple hundred years' experience, multi-million dollars, and they’re flat compared to what I’m tasting here."

--

Grenada Chocolate Company

Can you tell me, why did you start the chocolate company, why chocolate, and what’s the distribution chain?

Mott Green, founder: Okay, well, I lived in Grenada for many years, just tinkering around, growing food on this mountainside, living in a bamboo house. I fell in love with cocoa trees and processing cocoa, at the time in a very simple way, which I learned in Grenada, actually--just to make a beverage, what they call "cocoa tea" in Grenada. And I fell in love with Grenada too. And I saw the whole cocoa crop in decline, and all of my cocoa-farmer friends were hardly getting anything for their cocoa, despite the fact that it was getting exported at some of the highest prices in the world. Because they were exploited and because the economy of scale of growing cocoa in Grenada is difficult. And for one reason or another, it went further into decline and the government kind of let go of agriculture. So over the years I developed this dream of making a small-scale, homemade chocolate factory right in Grenada, as a radical way to revolutionize the connection between growing the bean and the finished, highest-value product. And I had that dream for a long time, and then in '99 started researching and picked up a tinkering partner named Doug. And we went to his place in Oregon, and we started building machines and learning to make chocolate on a small scale. And over the years ended up a combination of antiques and machines that were sort of designed for other things and homemade machines, and then after years of work with kind of a shoestring startup, the budget took us to September of 2001, when we started the company. And we’ve been growing slowly. We went organic in 2003, thanks to the connection of a big cocoa farm down the street from the chocolate company, called Belmont Estate. And we helped them certify organic, to create the first organic-certified cocoa in Grenada. And we more recently started a cooperative, and now we have five organic farms, and every year we're trying to get more organic farms so we can grow. Our growth is very slow because we have to literally go through all the work of certifying one farm at a time, and we want to stay organic. As far as the distribution chain, it’s been really limited, we’ve only until now exported a small percent of what we’ve made. And we’ve made until recently about ten tons a year. And now all of a sudden we’re making thirty tons a year. And we’re going to export probably about two thirds of that. So things are changing. So far, we’ve just sent small air cargo shipments to people like Steve, our distributor here in Manhattan, and to a guy in California, a guy in Oregon who does some web sales, a couple of specialty shops in London. Very isolated little distribution. The reason we’re here [at the Fancy Food Show] is that we’re just getting to the next step where we’re, in a month, going to send out our first container, with probably about seventy-thousand bars, and stockpile that with an importer, and actual connections will start hopefully with regional distributors, and then we might start to get into a little bit bigger markets like Whole Foods and more places around the country. So we’re really in transition.

--

Taza Chocolate

Tell me about the chocolate event yesterday that everyone's talking about.

Alex Whitmore, co-founder: A bunch of us new bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers, more artisan chocolate makers, in the United States, we all tried to get together and gather. And it’s kind of the first time that it’s happened that we’ve all been in one place and we all wanted to talk about maybe forming some sort of an organization or trying to work together to really make people aware that this whole movement of new chocolate-making exists, that we’re really different from all the other chocolate that’s out there. So that’s the big reason that we all got together. And then there’s all sorts of other reasons, like dealing with various issues of cocoa-bean sourcing, and all the stuff that we all have to do on the farm level or otherwise. And this is something that happened 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, with the craft brewing industry for the beer guys. I mean, when they first started out, there were all the big breweries. And then there were like a few little guys making amazing beer. But they weren’t being recognized. So they all banded together and really generated awareness of what craft brewing was. And that’s sort of what we’re trying to achieve ourselves.

Alright, so what’s happening next?

Alex: Well, we don’t quite know what’s happening next. We had a very productive meeting. We took a lot of notes. And we’re all going to stay in communication over the coming months. And hopefully we’re going to regather again out in San Francisco at the end of the summer.

--

Claudio Corallo Chocolate

James Clark, US Distributor: People are discovering that chocolate has distinct flavors depending on where it’s from, and how it’s processed, and who grows it, and everything else. Claudio’s chocolate is one of two, maybe three, companies in the world that actually do a plantation-to-bar operation.

Who are the other ones that you know of?

James: There’s one in Madagascar, and then El Rey in Venezuela.

I’ve read about Claudio Corallo in Mort Rosenblum’s chocolate book, but I’ve never seen the chocolate anywhere. So that’s changing, I take it?

James: Yep, Yep.

Where is it available and how are you facilitating that?

James: Well, because we’re physically located on the West Coast that’s where we started distributing. We have several shops in Seattle, wine shops, specialty cheese shops, obviously specialty chocolate shops. Also in San Francisco, Portland, you know, those areas. We have one in DC now. The New York market we’re finding difficult to break into.

I think it’s a funny market.

James: Yeah, yeah, it is. Fickle market. So we’re not quite established here in New York, but we’re working on it.

And you can buy the stuff online?

James: Yeah, there’s a couple of websites actually. There’s claudiocorallo.com, which is done by Claudio, that’s more informative about the whole process. And then there’s claudiocorallochocolate.com, which is the e-commerce site, and you can buy it online.

Boston Chocolate: The Best and the Most Generous

2008-06-21T10:38:00.004-05:00

"I have to find Lee Napoli," I said as I walked out the door of my old roommate Paige's apartment in Boston last Saturday. I'm not sure how I expected to find her, since I all I knew was that her less-than-one-year-old chocolate shop was in the South End, as was the apartment I was walking out of. But I guess the fates were smiling on me that morning because as we walked down Tremont Street we came right up to an easel sign advertising the ChocoLee shop around the corner on Pembroke.

Paige and I walked in and found Lee hard at work, wearing her James Beard Award chef's jacket. I told her that someone at Boston University's gastronomy program had insisted I come to sample her confections. I decided not to mention that I was the keeper of a chocolate blog--it seemed a bit superfluous on a Saturday morning.

"What are you making?" I asked. They were Earl Grey bon bons, and Lee (a self-taught pastry chef and founder of the Professional Pastry Guild of New England) graciously began to explain the concept of infused ganache, but I already knew that the bergamot perfume that Earl Grey brings to dark chocolate makes that kind of bon bon one of my favorites. "Ohh, can I have one?" I asked with just a streak of teenage girl. Lee dipped two squares of ganache into a pot of tempered chocolate, waited a few seconds for them to set, and drizzled white chocolate over the top. She waited a few more seconds and offered them to us.

I asked Lee whom she thought the best chocolatiers in the area were. "The best chocolate in Boston is right here," she said, "there's no one else." I laughed. "I say that jokingly," she said, "but I do believe it." And a week later, after trying what was on offer at competitors like the new Aroa on Washington Street, I believe it too.

I asked Lee how much we owed her, and she said not to worry about paying for two little pieces of chocolate and sent us on our way. Paige and I were headed to the chocolate buffet at the Langham hotel. To get there, we had to follow the route of the annual Boston Gay Pride Parade, which was delightful--I'd forgotten that Massachusetts, with civil rights advocacy and health insurance for everyone, is such a wonderful place to live. The Langham buffet(with its frilly yet average desserts) is really better suited to teenage girls than chocolate bloggers--the best part of it was Paige being such a good sport in taking me there.

As usual, I ran out of time before I could do everything, but I did find my way to the Taza factory across the street from a commercial laundry facility in Somerville (near Cambridge). I'd tried their signature "stone ground" chocolate bars before but I'd always thought the unconched chocolate was just a gimmick, an attempt to do something different that sacrificed one of chocolate's greatest European innovations (conching is what transforms gritty chocolate into the smooth stuff that you can roll around your mouth). But co-founder Alex Whitmore (in between answering my questions about cocoa butter, pesticides, and antique machinery) explained that Taza's goal is interact more fully with cacao's places of origin than their competitors, not only by developing strong relationships with growers (they pay above the Fair Trade price for beans) but by creating a product that stays close to traditional recipes for preparing cacao. That's why Taza uses small molinos (grinders) from Oaxaca and turns out an unconched product. "I think we make the best Mexican chocolate in the world," Alex told me, "but I'm sure many people in Mexico would disagree." I'm not so sure--I tried the discs of vanilla- and cinnamon-flavored drinking chocolate intended to be blended with milk or water, and not only did I prefer them to Taza's chocolate bars but I preferred them to any drinking chocolate I've tried in Mexico or Central America.

By the time Alex and I had finished talking, it was about one in the afternoon. I had a flight to catch at three. I think Alex's partner Larry Slotnick asked if I was crazy and I think I said yes. So I helped Larry pack up some samples he was about the mail to Minnesota, I got into his car, breezed by one of the farmer's markets where Taza staff sell chocolate and meet customers one-on-one, and then rode back to the South End with Larry, who generously dropped me off at Paige's front door.

Some Day We'll Find It, the Praline Connection: Candy and Other Indulgences in New Orleans

2008-06-13T06:50:00.002-05:00

Five days is not enough time to spend in New Orleans. Five days is especially not enough time when you've curated a comprehensive collection of Cajun and Creole food suggestions from chefs, critics, and chocolatiers, and when you're visiting the city with every other hungry participant in the Association for the Study of Food and Society conference. I arrived, put down my bags, met a few of my colleagues, and announced my plans to head straight to the Praline Connection. I received a chorus of "that's just a candy store" replies. I believed otherwise, but it didn't seem polite to argue, so I followed a buoyant group of young sociologists and agronomists to Coop's, a cheap eats hub known for its rabbit jambalaya. Over the next several days, I also made it to Petunias in the frenzied French Quarter for spicy pain perdu (with so much sausage that I turned the leftovers into lunch while I was locked up in the hotel editing my conference paper), Iris in the neighborhoody Carrollton area (for sublime foie gras, beautiful snapper, and some kind of cocktail that included New Orleans rum, Campari, and prosecco), holes in the wall like Cafe Maspero (for muffulettas) and Johnny's (for Po Boys), and a privately catered crawfish boil amidst the mountable dinosaurs and Marilyn Monroe statues at Mardi Gras World. New Orleans foodie insiders recommended that I meet resilient B&B owner Patty Marino (of Bijou) and Slow Food organizer Poppy Tooker, but there just wasn't time.

Still, I did meet Mischa Byruck from the sustainable food organization Market Umbrella, who, after asking what I was interested in, got on the phone to an exgirlfriend and announced "I'm hosting this group of culinary tourists and they want chocolate!" She sent me to Magazine Street, toward Bittersweet Confections and Blue Frog--unfortunately, holding to the Big Easy's Catholic roots, both shops (along with many others) close on Sunday, the day I decided to visit. But down the block at Sucre, I got a hearty Southern welcome from food blogger Blake Killian of Blake Makes, owner Joel Dondis, and Joel's lovely wife Gretchen. Joel brewed me a cup of tea, pushed a plate of ethereal macaroons in front of me, and then invited me into the kitchen to sample chef Tariq Hanna's latest experiment at combining chocolate with the untranslatable bayou flavor known as "nectar."

And before the five days were out, I'd walked from the French Quarter towards the Bywater, passing the NOLA Rising free public art event, and finally settling in for lunch at the Praline Connection--not just a candy store. They had catfish, they had ribs, they had collard greens and mac and cheese, they had red beans and rice, they had gumbo--and, with the help of Howard, my uncle from Lafayette, Louisiana, I ate all of it.

The Praline Connection is also a candy store. And I've heard murmurs that they take so much pride in their sticky pecan patties that they've sometimes contracted out to other factories (including at least one in America's chocolate capital of San Francisco) to ensure the best quality craftsmanship for their classic New Orleans confections. Howard bought a box of chocolate pralines for his daughters, but after that lunch, I was done eating for a while.

I might have left New Orleans--and this story--without ever tasting a praline. I came up with the title for my adventures in New Orleans before I'd lived them out. Don, the Omni Royal Orleans' concierge brought everything together for me. As I sat in the lobby of the hotel, ready to head to the airport with a handful of other well-fed gastronomers, Don brought out a plate of pralines from the kitchen--the chef's secret recipe.

(Photo of Mardi Gras World courtesy of Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World and NewOrleansOnline.com. Photo of Joel Dondis, Emily Stone, Blake Killian, and Joel's wife Gretchen courtesy of Blake Killian.)

Back to Pittsburgh Chocolate: Greenhouses and Pink Flamingos

2008-05-30T18:53:00.000-05:00

In the course of a week, about half a dozen people emailed me about the Phipps Conservatory's chocolate exhibit here in Pittsburgh. So just as summer weather was setting in, I walked through Schenley Park to the glass house that is perhaps as famous for the collection of Chihuley sculptures leftover from a recent exhibit is it is for the rare plants that it houses. The current exhibit, called simply "Chocolate!" takes a playful approach to the botanical history of cacao, showcasing plants like the vanilla orchid and chocolate mint. There are a few odd things about the exhibit. First, the cacao tree that lives at the Phipps year-round gets scant attention. Second, official exhibit materials get some of the facts wrong, facts as important as the location of Ghana (the world's second-largest cacao producer) on a world map. And third, there is absolutely no connection between chocolate and the exhibit's central motif: pink flamingos.

The second thing is disappointing, gravely disappointing. The third thing, though, isn't that much of a problem. It might be an asset. I've never met a lawn flamingo that I didn't like.

Exhibit designer Michele Frey McCann puts it this way: "I needed a way to light-heartedly represent our obsessions. I was searching for someone (or something) to dive into colorful pools of flowers to candy coat the 'chocolate;' someone (or something) to dip fruits into a 'chocolate' fondue fountain; someone (or something) to immerse oneself into the pleasures of a 'chocolate' spa treatment; someone (or something) to represent one’s favorite 'chocolate;' someone (or something) to shower oneself in 'chocolate' flavors; someone (or something) to enjoy chocolate desserts in a 'chocolate' garden where the pavilion, table, chairs, and other garden ornaments are all made from 'milk chocolate' and many of the plants feature 'chocolate' in their names. And at that moment... a vision of pink flamingos sporting rubber garden boots popped into my head…from that point on, these awkward looking summer birds became the stars of the show."

Fair enough.

Notes from Under the Pile

2008-05-21T21:20:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, I acknowledged that during the academic year I never watch TV yet constantly fall behind. For the past nine months, my filing system has been made up of a set of interconnected piles of paper. Well, the dark days--and both semesters of the 2007-2008 academic year--are over. I had one appointment today, only one, and it lasted only fifteen minutes. I don't have a single deadline to meet for another two weeks. Since I leisurely crawled out of bed about twelve hours ago, I've idled the day away by watching television (or episodes of TV shows that I rented from Netflix and wouldn't ordinarily admit to watching) and moving papers off the floor and into the two new file cabinets that I bought.

Here's what I found in the chocolate pile (pictured):

Volume 116, Number 21, of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, contains an editorial by doctors Norman K. Hollenberg and Naomi D. L. Fisher warning that "If the [chocolate] industry wants us to use chocolate as a health food, then they will have to change their behavior. Specifically, what the world needs is a label on each package that describes the flavanol content of the chocolate. It should be obvious that the percent of cocoa, like the color of chocolate, does not represent a measure of flavanols at all."
The Grand Tier Restaurant at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center will serve the Viennese signature dessert, Sacher Torte, from June 30 to July 3 in honor of The American Ballet Theatre's staging of The Merry Widow.
The April 19 issue of Britain's learned magazine The Economist reported on the latest San Francisco bean-to-bar company, Tcho, of which Wired magazine co-founder Louis Ressetto is co-founder.
Home Miami magazine reported the opening of an Argentine restaurant called Chocolate.
A spam-like website offered an earnest news item about the coming of a chocolate festival to the Portuguese town of Obidos in February of 2009.
The website of South Pacific-based Islands Business International magazine ran a piece in April about cacao growers in Fiji hoping to jumpstart a chocolate factory in the country of origin--they also hope to win support for a movement to display the cacao pod more prominently (apparently it already is displayed in some manner) on the nation's coat of arms.

Now back to watching television.

Escape to New York: Sleuthing Mast Brothers Chocolate Bars

2008-05-14T09:16:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned to my friend Emily Testa at an impromptu chocolate tasting last night, I have a couple of chocolate informants in New York. The first is Rob Valencia, who's weathering the financial crisis as Citigroup's official pastry chef. Rob pointed me toward the plebeian Treats Truck driven by Kim Ima, who took an eight-hour round-trip bus ride just to check out the compressed-natural-gas-fueled vehicle that she now uses to deliver sandwich cookies and five varieties of brownies to fans at various street corners in Manhattan and Brooklyn. My second informant is David Arnold, a free agent in the chocolate industry, who suggested that we meet at the Food Emporium Fine Chocolates shop on Third Avenue, which opened just after this year's New York Chocolate Show because the supermarket struck a deal to exclusively distribute the German Coppeneur line in the New York area. The shop now carries bars and confections from fourteen different countries, and David recommended that I pick up Swiss company Felchlin's Bolivian Cru Sauvage 68% 60h (which means that the sixty-eight-percent-cacao mixture is conched for sixty hours, an usually long time), something I likely wouldn't find elsewhere. I'm munching on some of this "savage" bar now--it's velvety, and to use language that's equal parts pretentious and goofy, orange creamsicle notes underscore the solid structure of the chocolate. Still, David and I agreed that the shop lacks all the romance of West Coast chocolate boutiques like Bittersweet and Cocoa Bella. And while the Food Emporium has found good customers on Manhattan's Upper Eastside despite the financial crisis, we worried that too many products on the shelves were stale or out of temper. According to my informant, if I went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I might find a couple of guys who were doing something more inspiring: The Mast Brothers.

A former Jacques Torres employee and his amenable sibling, the Mast Brothers may be Brooklyn's first bean-to-bar producers. I started doing some research on the guys. According to their website, they sell their products at the Artists and Fleas market, which is open every Saturday and Sunday from noon to 8pm. I found that information on Sunday at around ten, so I decided depart the Upper Eastside and get on the L train to Williamsburg. Down the street from the insanely enticing Surf Bar on North 6th Street, I found the arty flea market. I made my way through a book dealer's impressive collection of contemporary fiction and a display of red velvet treats from the Kumquat Cupcakery, but I couldn't find the chocolate brothers. A jewelry maker pulled out a couple of Florentine paper posters advertising the Mast Brothers, but she told me the guys were only coming to the market on Saturdays because they're working on a new project. She referred me on to the Spuyten Duyvil Grocery in the Williamburg Mini Mall around the corner. I walked over, but the place didn't open until 1pm and I had to be back in Manhattan for brunch--it was Mother's Day. So I took the L back to Union Square, ordered an omelet, and then invited my mother to come back to Williamburg. She accepted, we returned to the grocery, met the proprietor, George, and picked up a Venezuelan 72%-cacao bar, a 60%-cacao milk chocolate bar, the toasted hazelnut and milk chocolate bar, and the punny "Wyeth and Berry" bar (named for two streets in the neighborhood, with dried cranberries mixed into white chocolate). A couple of days went by before I staged my impromptu tasting back in Pittsburgh. We liked the chocolate well enough, and the packaging--the same Florentine wrapping paper from posters without any official ingredient or nutrition info labels--were charming. But I can't claim any orange creamsicle notes. The stuff tasted like, well, the vaguely familiar result of an attempt to do something different with artisan chocolate. I keep turning back to the same story--when John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg brought their homemade chocolate to a Berkeley farmer's market, they were doing something new and inspiring. Now there's an entire micro-industry of micro-batch chocolate maker, and the Mast Brothers are competing with Amano, De Vries, Askinosie, Patric, and now Bittersweet Origins.

I hope they make it. Rumor has it the Masts are planning a shop on North 3rd street in Williamburgh.

Academic Chocolate

2008-05-07T08:22:00.001-05:00

I once had a subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It wasn't so long ago. In December, over my first grad school Christmas break, I felt inspired by my new status as an academic and signed up. Then the semester started again and I barely had time to finish the reading assignments for my own classes before turning to the weekly stack of essays that my undergrads dutifully turned in. The Chronicle languished in the corner. On top of that, I admit to a twinge of embarrassment over the uncool vibe that such a publication languishing in the corner might send to visitors. It's bad enough that she doesn't watch TV, friends might have said to themselves, but she also sits around and reads the Chronicle of Higher Education on Saturday nights. (If only I'd had that kind of free time on Saturday nights). So I cancelled the subscription.

Of course, the Chronicle of Higher Education does sometimes run articles about chocolate. And one of my professors, who rightly shares none of my neurotic paranoia about being seen with this academic newsprint, kindly clips those pieces and passes them on to me. In March, a reporter focused on a introductory class at Southwestern University titled "Multi-Chocolated: An Aesthetic, Historical, and Scientific Journey into the Wonders of Chocolate," in which freshman explore theobroma cacao across the disciplines by using the move from dark to milk chocolate as a metaphor for evolution and study a chocolate airdrop into West Berlin as part of a European history lesson. Last year, the Chronicle profiled a biology instructor at Olivet College, affectionately known as "Doc Choc;" but I can't find that clipping and--the catch--you can only read it online if you're a subscriber.

You can read the Chronicle at the library, which is where I'll be spending a lot of time before I head off to the annual Association for the Study of Food and Society conference in New Orleans next month. ASFS maintains a food studies listserv (whose members include Bay Area chocolate legend Alice Medrich and the Boston-based chocolate-influenced gastronomer Beth Forrest), to which cultural anthologists occasionally write in to ask for advice on researching the concept of terroir in the chocolate industry.

Subscriptions to the Chronicle of Higher Education start at $40. The ASFS listserv is free and anyone can apply to join.

Chocolate Consultation: A Meeting with Joan Steuer

2008-04-07T23:02:00.000-05:00

Almost a year has gone by since I made a spring trip out to the Bay Area to attend the San Francisco International Chocolate Salon. And before I turn my attention to the 2008 version of the event, I'd like to look back for a moment. I was one of the official judges last year, and I quickly filled up my scorecard with incoherent scribbles and chocolate smudges. But one of my fellow judges was Joan Steuer, the chocolate industry consultant who greeted the task with a stack of typed-up evaluation forms and a complete set of cross-referenced zip-lock bags in which she stashed samples of the chocolate bars, truffles, or bon bons we were assigned to evaluate. Once she wrapped up her rankings, she let me interview her about her methodology and her passions.

Emily: My first question for you is about your tasting method, which is absolutely fascinating to me. What are you looking for?

Joan: I checked with Andre and his team just to see if there was any quantitative methodology, because what I try to do is take subjectivity out of it as much as possible. There were some chocolates that I’d already tasted in my other life and some that I hadn’t. And when I tasted them side-by-side I wanted to make sure that I had samples from everyone and that I was able to compare likes to likes, so that I wasn’t comparing a bar to a truffle, or a caramel to a ganache, etcetera, so that it really was somewhat in the same ilk.

And those tasting sheets that you brought...

So I have rudimentary all the way up to professional hedonic rating scales depending upon what the "sensory evaluation" needs are. These were basic sheets for each chocolatier on appearance, aroma, mouth feel, flavor, overall flavor, aftertaste, those kinds of things. It was fun. I love it.

Can you give me an example, maybe with one chocolatier, of something that you picked up and made a note of?

I made notes on all of them, which is probably why I was—I didn’t mean to be rude—but I try to focus just because you’re tasting (what did we taste--about a hundred?) you know easily a hundred chocolates in a three-hour, four-hour period. And you’re catching me at the end of a few days where I’m sort of wiped out. I don’t know if I could, without my sheets, if I could recall exactly one specific chocolatier. I did have a three-way tie for truffles. I thought there were some really, really good truffles there, and I often look at the truffle as the quintessential chocolate experience because it’s so pure. At least it should be.

So you’re talking a ganache enrobed in couverture?

Yes, or rolled in cocoa powder. Piped and rolled, or balled and rolled, or scooped and rolled, any of those. The definition of a truffle is certainly up for grabs, but I always believe it involves ganache, which generally should be chocolate and cream, with or without butter.

In a truffle, what do you look for taste-wise, what do you look for appearance-wise?

Well, that was one of the reasons that I brought in the quantitative criteria because so many different people call a truffle something different. There were lots of shapes, even some with screen-printing on them or with transfer sheets, etcetera, and they were still called a truffle. So one of the things I look for, if it is a molded chocolate, is a shine, that the chocolate’s actually in good temper and has a high gloss. If it is more of a traditional truffle, that it’s what I call "imperfectly perfect," that it’s irregularly shaped much resembling the original fungal truffle and it’s dusted in cocoa powder to replicate the earth or the dirt that surrounds the real fungal truffle. And then texture is really critical. There were a couple of truffles that actually had broken ganaches, which means that it wasn’t creamy and smooth; clearly there were some emulsification issues. When you add liquid to chocolate, as you know, it can break. So that’s something that I would put in my disqualify category.

Oh, wow.

At least for the best. It can taste good but it won’t have that really silken smooth texture.

What about in a chocolate bar--what are the characteristics that you’re evaluating?

In a chocolate bar, I’m also looking for surface shine as well as any breaking or creasing or holes when you break it open, no bubbles or anything like that. Certainly the aroma is one of the things I do before I taste. I think aroma is really critical, and it often isn’t as much an indicator of flavor to come as you think, as I know you know. There’s a hint, which may or may not play out more fully in the taste, but I think that aroma is such an important factor in our appreciation of any food, chocolate particularly. So certainly aroma, mouth feel (Is it smooth? Is it creamy? Is it gritty? Is it sandy? Is it coarse?), and then the actual flavor release I find quite fascinating. And it’s very different--it depends if it’s a blend or a single-origin. Is it one note that hits your mouth or is the flavor layered? This is too much detail...

No, it’s great.

Oh, mouth feel, aftertaste, off notes, any type of off flavor, overall flavor, chocolate flavor...

I’m curious because you work with so many different types of companies so far across the spectrum in the chocolate world, with companies of such varying identities from really big companies to something that’s not quite as big. And the quality of the products...

Somebody told you who I work for? I’ve never even shared that.

Well, I feel like I know.

You might, you might. But seriously, I can’t even have it one my website.

Maybe I don’t know, but I feel like I do.

You might. I work with little guys, I work with big guys. I work with manufacturers, I work with retailers. I work with lots of companies.

Here’s my question that I’m not asking very successfully: The products you work with go across the spectrum, from a very from a very artisan chocolate to a more mass market bar. So what do you look for in a mass market bar where the emphasis is not the same as with a high cacao-content product? What do you look for there? What’s a success?

Without saying who I work for, because I really can’t do that, generally, one of the areas that I specialize in is trends. So it’s really predicated on, What is the consumer looking for? And as you could tell there’s a wide range of knowledge among people who are attending something like this event. They all love chocolate. Some are super snobs and really truly, truly only go for extremely bitter chocolate and/or extremely refined chocolate that’s made by artisans who really know what they’re doing. Some just love chocolate and they want as much as they can have for the price that they just paid. So I think that what I try to do is help companies create products that will have either broad or deep appeal, depending upon what they’re trying to accomplish, to everybody who loves chocolate, so that there’s something for everybody. And that is absolutely my passion. My passion is to create products that chocolate lovers love.

That’s really interesting. I didn’t ask you that to make you uncomfortable.

No, I know, and I mean that. This is my truth, truth, truth, truth, that drives me every moment from the moment I wake up.

And it fascinates me because I’m not involved in the marketing aspect at all and it’s not something that I can kind of philosophize about on my own.

It’s funny. Trader Joe’s had colorful chocolate-covered sunflower seeds. And the definition of marketing to me is, What makes someone choose one product versus another? What is it that makes it different or better than something else? And to me there’s a wholesome perception of a sunflower seed, even if it’s covered in a candy coating. There’s chocolate there, but I think there’s that forgivability there because it’s made from a sunflower seed. So, that’s okay. I think it’s the same person who’s buying those big caramel-coated apples drenched in everything. Well, it’s an apple! There is that whole wholesome, healthful indulgence that I think the mainstream American consumer justifies. And it’s not necessarily chocolate as hero--those of us who are really seeking a different chocolate experience look at chocolate as the hero.

So you’re looking for a chocolate that works. And in the artisan chocolate industry...

Creativity. I mean, there are some things that people do with chocolate that just amaze me. Different forms, different flavors, different occasions. Matching sweet and salty...

Now, how do you know Jeff from Lillie Belle Farms, which is a fascinating friendship to see?

Oh, Jeff Shepherd? I know him through this industry, have actually visited his farm, have offered to pick fruit. Many of these guys and girls in there, I love what they do and I just chose to support them in whatever ways I can. Whether I get paid by them or not. No, it’s true. I just love what they do. That’s why I don’t do PR for companies. I’m never going to represent someone because my goal is to be fairly unbiased. It’s a lot easier to talk about companies whom I like.

So that’s where you draw the line?

You know, at this point, there are many little artisans that want public relations or they want you to help them with buyers. And I know a lot of the buyers as well, but I can’t talk about individual products that way. I just consume them and when I like them and if someone asks me I tell them I think they’re great.

So how do you describe what you do?

I have a consulting firm and I specialize in trends forecasting the future, and really what will sell and what won’t. I actually specialize in the strategic part of marketing which is trying to figure out where these people can play, where there is what we call "white space opportunity" for a company to go into, whether it’s the premium market, the mass market, the mass premium, the super premium, wherever it is, what makes them different or better than someone else. And then the product development piece is truly my love--conceiving something out of air and then actually working with the team to create it.

Joan isn't judging this year and neither am I, but some of last year's award-winners (including Charles Chocolates, Poco Dolce, and the Xocolate Bar) are returning to the Chocolate Salon this Sunday, April 13.

…

Chocolate Homecoming: Guatemala, (St. Louis,) Pittsburgh, New York

2008-03-30T07:29:00.002-05:00

I spent the last week in my old stomping ground of Guatemala. I missed just about every deadline imaginable, but I took the time to prowl around some local cacao trees, thinking about where I've been before and where I might go now.

Of course, the Guatemalan Maya were the people who brought chocolate into the world, grinding fermented and roasted beans in much the same way all the major chocolate companies do now, and then mixing the resulting paste with water and various thickeners and spices. These days, though, not too much Guatemalan cacao makes it to the international market. The small-scale products in my old hometown of Antigua took up most of my attention: Tony from the Tostaduria Antigua is doing some strange stuff with local cacao beans and cinnamon, and Greg and Nikol from the Bagel Barn, who were good enough to put me up at their house, carry hand-molded products from the Artesanal Chocolate Diego collective and drinking chocolate packaged at the Finca Azotea.

On my way back from Guatemala, I was headed to the annual College English Association conference, to speak on a panel called "Bringing it Home: The Travel Writer Returns to the Motherland." In my paper, titled "What Part of Your Trip Are You On Now?" I wrote that

[M]y expectation is that my arrival in St. Louis will be a kind of homecoming. There are a physical, practical ways in which St. Louis is "close to home": unlike in Canada and Guatemala, I can throw my passport in the trash bin here without compromising my ability to return to the place where I live. But, of course, I am speaking primarily in theoretical terms. The concept of home has to do with community as well as with physical location. The traveler is a hybrid character whose home is a theoretical space. Home is Antigua and Deià, hybrid places that are neither inside nor outside, but havens for eccentrics, adventurous eaters, and travel writers. Those travel writers, we travel writers, use language to render images of those places with precision and complexity. If the language is convincing enough, then the writer and his reader can occupy the same space. The travel writer creates his home by describing it to other people. His language serves to make images of that place more and more precise. If language transforms the foreign into the familiar for the reader, then the writer has succeeded in expanding his community.

But the FAA had other ideas, and they grounded my connecting plane (A McDonnell-Douglas aircraft) and a couple hundred others in Atlanta. Still, I came back to Pittsburgh to find a package of ginger fudge from New York, sent by Painter Girl Chocolates' Monica Passin, waiting in my mailbox, with a note that read "Happy Spring! Love Monica." A nice homecoming after all.

(Cacao tree photograph by Earl De Berge.)

Slowing Down: A Canadian Chocolate Inn

2008-03-09T21:31:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, thanks to the generosity of the local tourism board, I attended the Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival. On Friday, I sat in on a lecture by California winemaker Paul Dolan (where I got to taste his biodynamic Deep Red blend), and then I spent a steamy, naked afternoon at Miraj, North America's first hammam (again, thanks to the generosity of Tourism Vancouver), and managed to eat my way through two multi-course dinners. In the process, I met Margo Pfeiff, a photographer and freelance journalist who specializes in the Arctic and who tipped me off about Cocoa West, an artisanal chocolate shop and one-room inn on woodsy Bowen Island. It was a quick ferry ride away, Margo told me.

At around noon on Saturday, at a showcase of wines from British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, I ran into Candice, an upstart editor at Westjet airline's in-flight magazine, Up!, and a Vancouver native visiting home from Calgary. "I'm thinking about going to Bowen Island," I told her. I was hoping she'd be patient enough to give me directions. "I love Bowen Island!" Candice said. "I'll go with you!" It was true that the place was only a quick ferry ride away, but we had to get to the ferry, get on the ferry, find the chocolate shop, and then do all of that in reverse, sure to be back for a 5:30 dinner reservation. Who would agree to that? Candice. Candice is awesome.

We ditched the wine tasting, dropped into Candice's favorite thrift shop in downtown Vancouver long enough for her to buy a new scarf, stopped at her hotel where she changed her shoes (I should have thought to ask why she was doing that), and picked up a taxi. I asked how long the ride was. About 25 minutes, the driver told me. The ferry was scheduled to leave in exactly 25 minutes. We drove through Stanley Park, then onto the highway. We pulled into an enormous ferry terminal, where I paid the driver while Candice bought tickets. And then we ran--Candice in her sneakers, I in my stiletto boots--up three flights of stairs and down a gangway that must have been a quarter of a mile long.

I collapsed onto a bench with a view of the car deck below (where a man sitting with his golf clubs in a BMW convertible passed the time by reading the weekend paper) and the Pacific Northwest vista ahead. Twenty minutes later, we scrambled off the boat in Bowen Island's Snug Harbor, with a small outpost renting sea kayaks and a sign advertising "Tacos/Ice Cream." We started up the hill, along a dirt path--again, Candice in her sneakers, I in my stiletto boots. A nice your man in a beat-up car filled with camping equipment pulled over and offered us a ride to the village.

Cocoa West was vexingly popular. Candice grabbed one of the tightly-packed tables and I huddled in line between mothers with little girls in tow and bikers still in their leathers with helmets in their hands. I ordered a couple of hot chocolates (there are about half a dozen varieties on the menu) and demanded to speak to the owner at once. My journalist persona is a perplexing combination of phlegmatic traveler and wired New Yorker--I don't make plans in advance but expect everything to happen instantly. Had I been the woman working behind the counter, I would have dismissed someone behaving like me as annoying and narcissistic (many people do), but she patiently offered to get the proprietress on the phone. So, sitting across from Candice, still out of breath, I was introduced to Joanne Mogridge through the shop's cordless phone. She apologized for not being able to come see me in person, but she was spending the afternoon with three four-and-a-half-year-olds--her daughter and two friends. She explained that she uses organic chocolate for all of her bon bons and chocolate drinks (though it's corporation-made Callebaut organic), that the recipe for the Poblano hot chocolate I was sipping came from her husband's Mexican grandmother, and that she was turning a pretty profit despite the fact that, statistically, Bowen Island's population is too small to support a business like hers. I asked if I could take a peak at her B&B operation, the Chocolate Suite, which she described as outfitted in "rich chocolate, milk chocolate, and ivory" colors. No, she said, it was occupied this weekend. What if I just took a look from the outside? I asked. It was just around the corner, right? But she told me that the door was unmarked, to ensure her guests' total seclusion. I'd like to say that it was out of respect for their privacy that I didn't go snooping around, but it was really because I was out of time. If Candice and I were going to make the next ferry, we had to run. We didn't even have a moment to buy candy for the road--we just took one last look and vowed to come back. Then we hitched a ride down to the dock.

The Chocolate News from Melbourne

2008-02-21T11:08:00.000-05:00

Across the international dateline in Australia, Thursday the 21st has already become Friday the 22nd, which is the opening day of this year's Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. The Saturday-morning chocolate workshop with Frenchman Thibault Fregoni of Monsieur Truffe (who gets the endorsement of the Melbourne blog Tomato) and German transplant Arno Backes of Koko Black is already sold out. But eager participants who hang around the doors of the Council for Adult Education downtown on Flinders Lane might get a lucky break. And word on the street is that Backes is about to open his own shop in the upmarket suburb Toorak.

February Chocolate: The Mighty Heart and the Almighty Egg

2008-02-14T13:48:00.000-05:00

In a conventional nod to Valentine's Day, I posted a survey of the (chocolate) heart on Serious Eats this week.

In a less conventional nod, I would like to take a moment, here, to reflect on what I believe is an equally valuable ingredient this time of year: the egg. The egg will save your soul when it's Sunday night, it's three degrees outside, you have friends coming over for dinner, and you haven't restocked the fridge in two weeks: just whisk together all the eggs you can gather up with some breadcrumbs and grated Parmesan, that spaghetti squash you forgot about, half a Spanish onion, half a bag of Spinach, a handful of pine nuts, and that two-week-old goat cheese, and you've got it--a grand frittata. And when you're spending Valentine's Day writing three different papers at once, then all you have to do is whisk an egg yolk together a tablespoon of sugar, one and a half teaspoons of flour, and a pinch of salt; heat one third of a cup of milk and six tablespoons of heavy cream (use more milk if you're out of cream) to just below the boiling point; slowly add the hot milk and cream to the egg mixture, whisking constantly; return the custard to the pot and simmer, still whisking, for a minute or so until thickened; remove from heat; add an ounce and a half of chocolate; let stand for a few minutes; whisk to combine; pour into a jam jar; wait a few hours; and eat the stuff right out of the jar. (I got this recipe from Gourmet and it's very versatile: you can add cacao nibs or ground nuts, or any liqueur or extract, when you add the chocolate; and if you're sharing, just multiply all of the ingredients by the number of guests.)

Election Season: Casting Votes for Chocolate, the Presidency, and Academics

2008-02-05T11:57:00.000-05:00

Combining the voting fervor of Super Tuesday with the gluttony of Mardi Gras, the online foodie magazine Culinate has launched the Death by Chocolate Contest. Anyone who enters is eligible to win a trip to Napa for the Copia Center's chocolate festival later this month. What's more, readers can also vote to send the person behind their favorite blog--in this case, I hope that's Chocolate in Context--on the same trip. Since Chocolate in Context is not (yet) among the top ten in the contest, readers have to click through to see the "Detailed Standings" in order to cast a vote for this blog. Vote early! Vote often!

I started off my day by casting a very important vote of my own--not in a presidential primary but in an English Department meeting. My limbo existence is keeping me somewhere between being a resident of New York and a resident of Pennsylvania, and while New York has an election today, Pennsylvania doesn't. The vote I participated in was for a new tenure-track faculty position at Pitt. The process was absolutely fascinating and my participation in it was almost absurd--I'm a grad student, not a professor! But our department is blazingly democratic. It was a secret ballot, a closed meeting. I won't discuss it further.

More Pittsburgh Chocolate

2008-01-28T22:10:00.001-05:00

A couple of months ago, a reporter from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review asked me to comment on the allegedly legendary "chocolate belt" of small confectioners in Pennsylvania and Ohio, such as Betsy Ann and Bolan's. I gave what I thought was the perfect response: I guffawed and exclaimed, "I have never heard of a chocolate belt in Western Pennsylvania." I was neither quoted nor mentioned in the article. I suppose my behavior was not very neighborly.

This time, I will not pass judgement. I will simply announce: A new chocolate shop is opening in Pittsburgh, within walking distance of my house. The place is called A Taste of Chocolate: Exquisite Cocoa and it's on Center and Highland Avenues, next to the bridge that comes over the railroad tracks between East Liberty and Shadyside. The owner is a bar-room friend of my thesis advisor, and I hear he's an interesting character.

Chocolate Linguistics Part 5: Ganache

2008-01-19T12:20:00.000-05:00

In defining the terms "truffle" and "bon bon" for Chocolate Linguistics Part 4 all three of my respondents mentioned "ganache." I decided to continue the Chocolate Linguistics tradition by asking three ganache gurus for their input. The question:

In your own words, how do you define " ganache"?

Michael Recchiuti
Owner of Recchiuti Confections and writer of the Recchiuti chocolate blog

Ganache can take on many forms, based on its application as a medium. Ganache can be made with only using chocolate and cream, in a variety of viscosities. This very basic version is normally used for the glazing of cakes, éclairs, or a basic truffle interior. Other forms of ganache are made with chocolate, cream, and butter. This combination will give you a much silkier mouth feel with a higher fat content. Ganache can be made and cooled to a consistency of cake frosting, and used to ice and decorate a cake, or to do something as simple as pipe onto a muffin or cookie.

What I'm trying to say about ganache is that it's extremely versatile and temperature sensitive, which affords you an array of decorative applications. You can always make ganache, and just eat it with a spoon with friends, yum...

John Doyle
Owner of John and Kira's and the man behind the Valentine Lovebugs

Ganache is a little bit of chocolate magic – a delicate emulsion of chocolate and cream perfectly combined with butter and natural flavorings. When done correctly, the silken texture is absolute divinity.

Andrew Shotts
Owner of Garrison Confections and favorite at the James Beard House

A ganache is an emulsion of Chocolate, Cream, and Butter. Now, with that said, one could argue, and I am sure some will as those who read this blog or who have been asked to participate are very passionate about chocolate so therefore they are emotionally wrapped up in chocolate therefore very opinionated about chocolate, that it could have other things included, and I agree. You could steep tea in the cream, add fruit to the emulsion, blend in some praline of some sort. There are infinite possibilities to what a ganache could be flavored with. At the end of the day what you want is a chocolate of some sort blended with hot cream, until dissolved, and cooled to the proper temperature and finished with butter. What we call a well made ganache, here in our kitchen, is "beautiful chocolate mayonnaise." It has the same texture, elasticity, and shine, you just can't make a sandwich with it.....wait a minute....hold that thought and I will get back to you.

Chocolate Award Season

2008-01-13T17:01:00.000-05:00

My first job out of college was at a movie magazine. If I had stayed there instead of taking off after my first year to travel in Latin America, perhaps I would be more invested in the impending Oscar nominations. But, frankly, I'm more interested to know which food blogs will get Bloggie nods on January 22nd.

In other award news, Kalen Delaney won the prize that I raffled off as part of Menu for Hope--a stash of eight mini artisan chocolate bars and a $50 gift certificate to Mon Aimee Chocolat here in Pittsburgh. Congratulations, Kalen!

Lessons Learned: Chocolate Metaphors for Teaching and Writing

2008-01-08T10:43:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the generosity of Chuck Siegel at Charles Chocolates, Jacques Dahan and his team at Michel Cluizel, Andrew Shotts at Garrison Confections, Fritz Knipschildt at Knipschildt Chocolatier, and Monica Passin at Painter Girl Chocolates, I wrapped up the fall semester (my first teaching Seminar in Composition at the University of Pittsburgh) by sharing boxes upon boxes of chocolate with my students. Before I get too deep into the spring semester, which started yesterday, I'd like to talk about that final, chocolaty class in terms of my overall pedagogy. Call it a teaching philosophy statement cast in chocolate:

1. Prepare and overprepare:
This is good advice for both students and teachers. You want to write a paper using a primary source that's guarded by a dragon-lady librarian in a special archive that's only open on Wednesdays and Sundays from 2am to 5am? Better not wait until the day before your paper is due. You want to do a new activity in class where students stand on one foot reciting poetry while copy-editing blog entries on their laptops? Better give that one a trial run. I don't always follow this advice, and my lack of preparation has led to the occasional disaster.

One person who seems to blithely avoid disaster at every turn is Charles Chocolates' Chuck Siegel. When his holiday orders grow exponentially from one year to the next, he has ample time to recruit friends and family to help out in the factory. When the construction materials for his booth at the Fancy Food Show don't arrive in time, he's there early enough to replace them. When I emailed Chuck to ask if he would donate some of his confections for my final class, he sent an enthusiastic response that included an intricate calculation of how many pieces of chocolate 18 freshman would need (200, or four edible chocolate boxes). Before the end of December, well before the last day of class, a UPS man delivered the four chocolate boxes in an enormous (inedible) cardboard box. And then an amazing thing happened: the next week, another box containing four chocolate boxes arrived, bringing my total to eight chocolate boxes! I've been so busy grading papers (and then recovering from grading papers over winter break) that I haven't even had a chance to call Chuck about the second box of boxes. I don't know if it was a last-minute fit of generosity or just an accounting error. I'll tell you one thing, though: Thanks to Chuck, I was exceptionally well prepared for class.

2. Make time for your own work:
The English department at Pitt has an extraordinary number of tenured faculty members who are as committed to teaching as they are to their own research and writing. I asked both members of a faculty husband-and-wife team (something else the department has an extraordinary number of) how they do it, and they told me that you have to accept that you won't get a lot your own work done when you're teaching--and, for that reason, you also have to accept that you need to dedicate some time to life beyond teaching.

Around the same time that my shipments from Charles Chocolates came in, Drew Shotts of Garrison Confections sent me an oversized box from his latest seasonal collection. When I wrote to Drew to tell him of my plans to bring his chocolate into school to share with my students, the response came back, "forget the students... spend next Sunday in bed eating it with a friend." Point taken.

3. Be willing to sacrifice free time and free love:
What friend? And what bed? To be clear, members of the writing program (and its parallel programs in the English department) make wonderful friends, several of whom I did share Drew's chocolates with on Saturday night. But not a one of them is the kind of friend with whom I share my bed. I also really don't have a bed. In August, I left my stop-gap job at Epicurious in New York for orientation in Pittsburgh, and I've been reading and writing, taking and teaching classes ever since. I managed to bring a mattress with me, which is in the middle of my bedroom floor. I haven't had time to buy a bed frame yet.

4. Write passionately:
My students and I arrived at the last day of class exhausted, and, despite our best intentions, a bit overworked and underprepared. Since I hadn't written a class plan in advance, I asked the students to bring to class something about which they were passionate, so that we'd have something to discuss. Dayne brought in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Adrienne brought in a Grey's Anatomy DVD, Lexie brought in a very important lyric poem but for the life of me I can't remember which one it was, Andy brought in his wrestling clothes. This was not, I insisted, merely a regression to show-and-tell. As college writers, my students are going to have to find subjects, themes, ideas, or problems that they want to write about again and again, in different ways, in longer and longer pieces. That's what I do with chocolate, I told them.

5. Be inquisitive:
Writing is about contemplating ideas that defy easy questions and easy answers. It's about layering your insights, complicating your conclusions.

On the last day of Seminar in Composition, our chocolate spread including Chuck's chocolate boxes, handfuls of Laissez Les Bon Bons Roulez from Painter Girl Chocolates (which provoke spirited responses with their hot pink foil wrappers), and three varieties of Couverture Mini-Grammes (astronomically high-end chocolate chips) from Michel Cluizel. I just had to look at how the chocolate was arranged on my students' desks to see that they were interested in exploring subtle connections and contrasts.

6. Never piss off administrators:
Never! Don't ever do this. Even if you have a direct line to the most important person in your department (even if you are the most important person in your department), you should never do anything that even slightly perturbs the people who deal with mail, paychecks, books, and copy machines.

But--I am going to express my frustration over an administrative fumble that delayed the arrival of a package from Knipschildt Chocolatier so much that the truffles missed my last-day-of-class party. I am going to open myself up to seriously regrettable repercussions, I'm going to risk sabotaging a carefully cultivated professional relationship with Fritz Knipschildt (an energetic and impressive chocolatier with whom I have no personal qualm whatsoever), and I'm going to say, here on this blog, in this public forum, to the administrators at Knipschildt Chocolatier: Guys, you missed the deadline, your didn't do what you said you were going to do, and that's lame!

7. Break the rules
Look at the essays of Jamaica Kincaid, Lauren Slater, and Rebecca McClanahan, which we read in my class, and you'll find sentences that defy grammatical conventions, that are alternately too long and missing verbs. Artists don't follow all the rules. Artists know what the rules are, they follow the ones they need, and they take risks to break others.

I know my blatant defiance of my own rule about not pissing off administrators is going to cause me trouble at Knipschildt, but I'm doing it for the sake of artistic expression.

8. See the larger context:
Evaluating work fairly is an essential part of being a good teacher. That doesn't necessarily mean that the best writers always get the best grades--engagement in the class and in the writing process are just as meaningful to me as writing ability. But it does mean that it's important to encourage talented writers and to resist holding a grudge against students for any reason. A really great piece of writing that comes in late is still a really great piece of writing. Likewise, delicious chocolates that arrive late are still delicious chocolates. So I didn't relegate the chocolates in the Knipschildt signature truffle collection to the garbage can after they missed class. Instead, I brought them to the final session of my Seminar in Pedagogy, a graduate course for first-year teachers like me. My professors and my fellow grad students seemed to enjoy them.

9. Write honestly
I've been lucky enough to spend a little bit of time with George Saunders, one of the most remarkable writers and writing teachers out there. I also assign readings of some of his work to my students. In the essay "Thank You, Esther Forbes," Saunders writes that "[w]orking with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one.... [T]he process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and, most important of all, tells us what we really think."

In my mind, good writing is honest writing. I once saw Vivian Gornick (who has been rather absurdly lambasted for compressing actual events into reconstructed scenes in her nonfiction) talk about the difference between "fact" and "truth." Fact is simply what transpired. Truth is the meaning of what transpired. In some cases, fact and truth can be the same. In other cases, one can obscure the other. Both as a writer and as a teacher, I have come to see what a waste of time fact without truth is. That's why I was so angry when a Knipschildt administrator told me that the reason my chocolates hadn't arrived was that a train had been delayed in a snow storm. And that's why I was even more angry when she followed up with an email that read, "I contacted UPS and they informed me that at this stage of the shipment they are unable to accelerate the package. Sorry about any inconvenience this may cause." I'm sure those things are facts, but, in my interpretation, the truth was "I've had almost a month to do this, and I didn't, because I just don't care." So when I showed up to the final meeting of my graduate class Seminar in Pedagogy with my hair disheveled and my final paper only half written, I did not offer as my explanation that my heat had gone out the night before. It was a fact: my heat was out in the middle of winter and I am a creature who cannot survive in temperatures below 75 degrees Fahrenheit for periods of time exceeding five minutes. But the truth was that I would have come to class with only half a paper and disheveled hair even if my heat had been working and cranked up as far as it would go. The truth was what I said to my professors and the rest of my class: "I came to graduate school not so much to write as to work on the writing process. And I've really enjoyed thinking about how to work through ideas with my students in Seminar in Composition and working with them on the process of revision. This paper isn't finished," I said, "but I think I've gotten closer to what it is that I really want to write."

Celebratory Chocolate: New Year's Truffles

2007-12-31T16:50:00.000-05:00

Chocolatier Fritz Knipschildt has ensured an elegant start to my new year. He recently shared his Classic Truffle recipe with me. The following instructions are easy to follow, but anyone who would like a more hands-on lesson could register for Clay Gordon's (quickly-filling-up) Chocolate-Making Workshop with Fritz Knipschildt at Fritz's Connecticut cafe, Chocopologie.

Recipe:
The Chocopologie Classic Truffle

Set up for rolling chocolate:
   Bowl of melted chocolate
   Deep hotel pan of cocoa powder or toasted coconut
   Sheet pan with parchment paper
Needed utensils:
   Steel bowls
   Rubber spatulas
   Towels
   Gloves
   Sheet pans
   Deep hotel pans
   Small stock pot
Ingredients:
   2 lbs 70% dark chocolate
   1 qt heavy cream
   250 gr sugar
   1/4 lb butter

The Classic Truffle:
Boil heavy cream and sugar. In a separate bowl, add your finely chopped chocolate. Once cream has been brought up to a boil, pour it slowly over the chocolate while whisking, then add the butter once the mixture has reached body temperature. Once combined, set aside in a cool place, but not in the refrigerator. When the ganache has set (approximately 6 hours), then you can refrigerate the ganache, however cover tightly with plastic wrap before refrigeration. Leave refrigerated for 1 hour before rolling the ganache in small balls. Place the small ganache balls in the refrigerator for approximately 20 minutes. In the meantime, melt 250 grams of dark chocolate and cool it down until it is body temperature. You will be using this for dipping the chocolate ganache balls.

Wear a plastic glove and dip your finger tips in the melted chocolate. Thereafter take a ganache ball and smother the ganache ball in chocolate. Then roll in cocoa powder. Allow the truffles to set for 5 to 10 minutes.

Serve and enjoy!

The Coconut Truffle:
Same procedure as above, but add toasted coconut to the mixture.

For dipping truffles, have some chocolate melting over a double boiler. The water should be simmering and not boiling or you will burn the chocolate. The ganache can be piped onto a sheet of parchment paper in small dollops and chilled slightly or it can be scoop out with a small teaspoon and rolled by hand, or use our Me a Chocolatier kit small hollow chocolate shells.

Puerto Rican Chocolate

2007-12-28T13:56:00.000-05:00

It took me three days to get there, but I spent my winter break under a sun umbrella, above the beach, at the new Flamboyan Guest House on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. In the early part of the twentieth century, Vieques was covered in sugarcane. Later in the twentieth century, it was covered in US-government-issued weapons, used in maneuvers on the military base that replaced the sugar fields. These days, it's covered with travelers who go to sail, swim, hide out from law enforcement, or (like me) read books without anybody bothering them. One thing Vieques is not--and never has been--is covered in chocolate. I never even saw a Hershey's Tropical Chocolate Bar.

However, on my way to the island, I did find the new Corne Port-Royal Chocolatier at #204 San Justo Street in Old San Juan. The proprietors are a Belgian man trained as nurse and his Puerto Rican wife who has some experience working behind the counter in Brussels chocolate shops. Corne Port-Royal is an old fashioned business based in Belgium, and the lovely wife told me that the San Juan shop has exclusive rights to import the bon bons, cookies, and jarred preserves. They opened seven weeks ago and they're slowly learning the ins and outs of management, marketing, publicity, accounting, and importing. Their last shipment ran into trouble in the Panama Canal and arrived several months late, but otherwise, they told me, things are looking up.

I thought about suggesting that they move on from Belgian chocolate. Why pay so much money to send candy weighed down with sugar and preservatives across the high seas? In Puerto Rico, you could buy domestic. Why not open an account with a newsworthy chocolatier in San Francisco, or Philadelphia, or even Providence, Rhode Island? Better yet, just bring in a fine American couverture and develop your own line of bon bons.

But it wasn't my business. This couple wanted to open up a Belgian chocolate shop in Old San Juan, and so they have. The chocolate-covered bit of marzipan I bought to eat on the spot brightened my day, and I'm sure the bon bons will have the same effect on many more tourists. Belgian chocolates may not be the most innovative in the world. And after their trip across the Atlantic, these Corne Port-Royal bon bons may not be the freshest. But the husband and wife won't let quality slack. On the second floor of the colonial building that houses their shop, they've built a secure cold room to protect their chocolate from the balmy Puerto Rican climate--if the temperature rises, an alarm will sound and emergency repair men will be dispatched to the scene within minutes.

Charitable Chocolate Deadline: Menu for Hope Ends Today!

2007-12-21T13:02:00.000-05:00

Today is the last day of Menu for Hope! Started in 2004 by Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim, Menu for Hope is a collaboration among food bloggers to raise money for the UN World Food Programme. Last year, the organizers raised over $60,000. Here's how it works: between December 10 and 21, hundred of bloggers like me sell (via the fundraising site firstgiving) $10 raffle tickets for an array of foodie prizes. At the end of the campaign, we select one winner for each prize.

I just bid on three items: a pair of tickets to Madrid Fusion, dinner for two at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and a $100 gift certificate to D'Artagnan. I'm also donating a prize of my own: a $50 gift certificate to Mon Aimee Chocolat in Pittsburgh with a selection of mini artisanal chocolate bars. Shipping's free anywhere in the world and Menu for Hope organizer Pim has tagged the Chocolate in Context/Mon Aimee Chocolat prize as one with good odds.

The Chocolate in Context/Mon Aimee Chocolat Prize Code is UE41.

To buy a raffle ticket for this prize only, go directly to firstgiving, entering 'UE41' in the 'Personal Message' section. To find out more about other prizes on offer, please follow the directions below.

To Enter

If you're interested in buying into the raffle, here's what you need to do:

1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from our Menu for Hope at http://www.chezpim.com/blogs/2007/12/menu-for-hope-4.html

2. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope4 and make a donation.

3. Please specify which prize you'd like in the 'Personal Message' section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code. Example:

Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02. Please write 2xEU01, 3xEU02. Example:

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Check back on Chez Pim on Wednesday, January 9 for the results of the raffle.

Thanks for your participation, and good luck in the raffle!

Holiday Discounts, Cheer, and Generosity

2007-12-15T16:08:00.000-05:00

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Charles Chocolates has cooked up a holiday promotion for Chocolate in Context readers. To receive a discount of 15% on everything from the an $8 box of mini chocolate squares to a $90 deluxe assortment of bon bons, please visit the Charles Chocolates online store and enter the code CHOCCONTEXT when placing your order. The promotion runs through Monday (December 17).

In New York, Financial District chocolate shop Christopher Norman is hosting an after-hours tasting this week. In addition to chocolatier John Down's signature hand-painted bon bons, hot cocoa, hot mulled cider, and espresso will be on offer. To join in, stop by 60 New Street in Manhattan. The tasting runs from 6pm to 10pm on Wednesday (December 19).

And here in Pittsburgh, retailer Mon Aimee Chocolat has collaborated with Chocolate in Context to raffle off a selection of bite-sized artisanal bars and a $50 gift certificate. Mon Aimee Chocolat's donation is part of Menu for Hope, a kick-ass fundraiser for the UN World Food Programme that has already raised $24,000 this year. To enter, please follow the instructions that I posted on Monday or visit the Menu for Hope headquarters at Chez Pim for even more details. Menu for Hope runs through December 21.

Chocolate for Hope

2007-12-10T11:07:00.000-05:00

This year, Chocolate in Context is participating in the web-based charity event Menu for Hope. Started in 2004 by Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim, Menu for Hope is a collaboration among food bloggers to raise money for the UN World Food Programme. Last year, the organizers raised over $60,000. Here's how it works: between December 10 and 21, hundred of bloggers like me sell (via the fundraising site firstgiving) $10 raffle tickets for an array of foodie prizes. At the end of the campaign, we select one winner for each prize.

The winner of the Chocolate in Context/Mon Aimee Chocolat Prize will receive a selection of ten mini chocolate bars and a $50 gift certificate redeemable for anything in stock at Mon Aimee Chocolat. The Pittsburgh chocolate shop carries a carefully curated collection of Amedei, Domori, Guittard, Pralus, Scharffen Berger, Theo, Valrhona, and Vosges bars that have calmed my cravings since I moved to this steel town. Now owner Amy Rosenfield is offering up her goods and services as part of Menu for Hope. Indulgences on offer include the universally beloved fleur de sel caramels from Fran's Chocolates, seasonal bon bons from Garrison Confections, and the private-label "Les Amis Savories" (sage-, tarragon-, and sea salt-flavored M&M-like candies) made for Mon Aimee Chocolat by Koppers Chocolate. Amy doesn't take online orders, but she'll be happy to attend to you personally over the phone. Whatever you choose, the shipping's on me--even if you live overseas.

The Chocolate in Context/Mon Aimee Chocolat Prize Code is UE41.

To buy a raffle ticket for this prize only, go directly to firstgiving to buy a raffle ticket, entering 'UE41' in the 'Personal Message' section. To find out more about other prizes on offer, please follow the directions below.

To Enter

If you're interested in buying into the raffle, here's what you need to do:

1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from our Menu for Hope at http://www.chezpim.com/blogs/2007/12/menu-for-hope-4.html

2. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope4 and make a donation.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Check back on Chez Pim on Wednesday, January 9 for the results of the raffle.

Thanks for your participation, and good luck in the raffle!

Elizabeth Falkner's Rocky Road Cupcakes

2007-12-08T19:14:00.000-05:00

I'm going to a culinary student's birthday party tonight. Under my arm is a copy of Elizabeth Falkner's Demolition Desserts: Recipes from Citizen Cake. I'm hoping the gift will pay out some sweet dividends, like a batch of Falkner's Rocky Road Cupcakes.

Recipe:
Rocky Road Cupcakes
dark chocolate cupcakes, dark chocolate buttercream frosting, marshmallows, walnuts
makes 12 cupcakes

The basic components of rocky road—chocolate, walnuts, marshmallows—work across different dessert formats, including ice cream, brownies, and these cupcakes. The cupcakes themselves are basic chocolate and, like the buttermilk ones in Lemania Cupcakes (page 173), can be taken in lots of directions. They have wonderfully pure flavors and are already over the top, so I don’t think any filling is necessary.

You can make some components in advance:
Up to 1 week before
– make the marshmallows
A few hours before
– make the cupcakes
– make the frosting
– frost and garnish the cupcakes

Dark Chocolate Cupcakes
1 cup (5 ounces) all-purpose flour
3/4 cup (2 ounces) unsweetened cocoa powder, preferably natural
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons (about 4 ounces by weight) buttermilk
3 tablespoons water
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
8 tablespoons (4 ounces) unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, preferably 70% cacao, coarsely chopped (about 1/2 cup)
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (6 ounces) granulated sugar
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons (3 3/4 ounces) firmly packed dark brown sugar
2 (3 ounces by weight) large eggs, at room temperature

To Make the Dark Chocolate Cupcakes
Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 325°F. Line a 12-cup standard nonstick muffin pan (or two 6-cup pans) with paper liners.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and baking soda. Add the salt and set aside. In a large bowl, stir together the buttermilk, water, and vanilla and set aside.

Bring a few inches of water to a gentle simmer in a saucepan. Combine the butter and chocolate in a heatproof bowl and place over (not touching) the simmering water (or use a double boiler). Heat slowly, stirring occasionally, until nearly melted, and then remove the bowl from the heat and whisk until smooth. Add the granulated and brown sugars and stir until blended. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition until combined. Scrape the chocolate mixture into the buttermilk mixture and whisk until smooth.

Add the flour mixture to the chocolate-buttermilk mixture in three additions, beating after each addition just until combined. Divide the batter evenly among the prepared muffin-tin cups; each paper liner will be filled almost to the top.

Bake the cupcakes, rotating the pan after about 10 minutes, for 20 to 22 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the center of a cupcake comes out clean. Let cool in the pan on a cooling rack for 10 minutes, gently loosen the cupcakes from the pan, and then let them cool completely in the pan before removing them.

Dark Chocolate Buttercream Frosting
Buttercream Frosting (page 217)
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, preferably 70% cacao, coarsely chopped (scant 1 cup)

To Make the Dark Chocolate Buttercream Frosting
Make the buttercream frosting as directed. Melt the chocolate as you did for the cupcake batter, and then whisk the chocolate into the frosting. You should have a generous 2 cups.

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, preferably 70% cacao, coarsely chopped (about 1/2 cup)
2 teaspoons canola oil
6 marshmallows, made with gelatin (page 212) or xanthan gum (page 213), each cut into eight 1/4-inch pieces, or 48 store-bought miniature marshmallows
1/2 to 3/4 cup (2 to 3 ounces) walnut halves or pieces

To Frost and Garnish the Cupcakes
Melt the chocolate as you did for the cupcake batter. Add the canola oil and whisk until smooth. You should have 1/4 cup.

Using an offset or icing spatula, frost the cupcakes and then garnish with the marshmallow pieces and walnuts. Finish each cupcake with a drizzle of chocolate.

Reprinted with permission from Elizabeth Falkner's Demolition Desserts: Recipes from Citizen Cake by Elizabeth Falkner. Copyright (c) 2007 Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA. www.tenspeed.com.