First, to update from previous posts. The chef’s knife that I won has been working out fantastically.  The edge is sharp, and the weight of the knife has been a welcome addition to all my cutting.  It certainly came in handy over the gustatory celebration known as Thanksgiving.

I had a great seasonal recipe published on a local site, featuring more delicious sweet potatoes.  I’ll leave it as a tease now, but I’ll be posting a copy (with links to the original post) very soon.  This is one to bookmark and share with your friends for the holidays and any time you find great sweet potatoes.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, chocolate has been taking over my life.  First it was getting involved with Dan Schreiber.  At some point I started noticing a small, artisan, bean-to-bar chocolate maker out of Somerville, MA–Taza Chocolate.  They’re on Twitter (@tazachocolate), and apparently if you’re in the area, they offer tours of their facility and have a Chococycle that they pedal to local markets and events.

Let’s face it, there are a lot of great chocolate makers out there.  One way that Taza distinguishes themselves is by putting their values in the forefront of what they do.  Their chocolate is not merely fair trade, but Direct Trade.  They work directly with the people who grow their vital raw material–theobroma cacao.  Not only do they pay them more generously than fair trade standards require, but they work with them to ensure they are using organic, sustainable growing practices.  So far, all their chocolate (other than a recent limited release) has used chocolate from a single coop in the Dominican Republic.  In addition to holding their suppliers to high standards, they work for sustainability and eco-friendliness in their own operations, reusing, recycling, and composting wherever possible.  They even work with a local organization to help keep their community green.

Their process is very manual, using vintage machinery that they put a lot of love into.  At the end of the line, the chocolate is wrapped by hand.  Their bars are sealed with a label that has a number corresponding to the batch of chocolate your bar is from.  On Taza’s website, you can put in this number and see all the details of where everything in the bar came from, when it was made, even the signature of the cacao grower the beans came from.  Click the image on the right of one of the bars I had to see all the details for batch #218.

When you unwrap one of these bars, you’re greeted by a shiny bar of dark chocolate.  Each section snaps loudly as you make your way through the bar.  The chocolate has texture, character, owing to the hand-hewn stone grinders they use at Taza.  Pressing it to the roof of your mouth, it slowly melts and the flavors of this 80% dark chocolate unfold with delicious notes of fermented flavors, a surprising brightness (acidity?) and unexpected tropical fruit flavors, like banana.  Before having real artisan-made chocolate, I never experienced chocolate like this.

Their other primary product is Mexican Chocolate, sold in adorable disks pressed with the company name and hand-wrapped in pairs.  They are all 55% cacao, since they are intended for making drinking chocolate, though they are tasty on their own.  For these decadent disks, they offer several flavors on top of their cacao puro, including classic flavors like vanilla, cinnamon, and guajillo chile.  They also offer, for the slightly more adventurous, a yerba maté infused chocolate.  If you’ve enjoyed the bitter South American beverage before, it’s a really neat combination.

Now, I mentioned drinking chocolate, not hot chocolate.  The recommended recipe is one disk to 6-8 ounces of milk, or water if you want to be traditional.  This elixir is intense.  If you love chocolate, this will change your life.  If you snack on the dark stuff every once in a while, and you think it might be too much, share it with a friend.

One of the typical ways that people all over the world enjoy this decadent beverage–from cafes and street carts in Spain and Mexico, to chocolate mexicano advocates like Rick Bayless in his Chicago restaurant, Xoco–is with churros.  I remember having churros in my high school cafeteria, but if you’ve never had them they are essentially fluted tubes of fried dough.  They are often dusted with sugar, maybe cinnamon, and if you’re going over the top, like Bayless does, rolled with finely ground cacao nibs.  Warm churros, with their crunchy exterior and (usually) softer, interior, are delicious on their own, but this classic combination is a winner.  The way the fluted edges hold just enough chocolate to soften them ever-so-slightly is a testament to why this is a lasting match.

As long as you’re not afraid of piping dough into hot frying oil, churros are easy to make.  Most recipes I’ve found make a dough that is too hard to pipe out of anything I have–most churros are extruded from large metal churreros, not plastic piping bags that most of us have access to.  The traditional dough is similar to pâte à choux (you know, the stuff eclairs & cream puffs are made from) without eggs  or butter.  Boil oil, sugar, and water, then turn off the heat, dump in flour and stir, stir, stir.  Bayless’ recipe is available from StarChefs.com (and probably elsewhere).  Since it was way too thick to pipe with my jury-rigged zip-top-bag-with-the-corner-cut (I do screw on a star tip), I added a couple eggs, which softened up the dough enough to allow for precise piping.  Pipe it into hot oil (watch out for splashing), and cook until lightly browned.  Watch the oil temperature though.  If it’s too high, the insides won’t cook enough, and I’ve heard that if it’s too low, they will explode as the outsides will set before the moisture inside has a chance to escape.

If you’re having visions of drinking delicious hot stone-ground chocolate, explore Taza’s online store or ask around at local stores.  In the C-U area, I found some of the Mexican chocolate disks at Art Mart in Urbana.  I’ll be hosting a give-away of some Mexican chocolate disks (and maybe an additional surprise), but it won’t end until after the New Year (expect details in the next week), so if you want some before the holidays, go ahead and order some.

Disclosure: Taza sent me some free samples of their products (see below), with no request or expectation of a review, positive or negative.  I have since bought my own chocolate from them, beyond what they sent, which is why I have some to give away. I like the chocolate and believe in their mission and their quality, which is why I’m spreading the love.