I got some interview questions a while back from a local newspaper reporter doing a story on Dan “the Chocolate Man” Schreiber.  The article was published today, and I thought that it was a great piece on what he’s doing and where he’s headed.  I was quoted, briefly, in the article, but I wanted to share some of what I wrote in response to Meg’s questions.  The first was “Why is what Dan’s doing with chocolate important?”

My response:

Dan is a scientist.  He’s a really smart guy.  As much as he deals with high technology in his work & studies, he has a very deep appreciation for the traditional, some may say “old-fashioned” way of doing things.  He makes fermented foods, like sauerkraut, that most people just don’t make any more.  He is making chocolate using modernized traditional means–motorized stone grinding.  Much of the chocolate we buy in stores is mass-produced from a set of industrial candy-making materials including chocolate, flavorings (often artificial), emulsifiers, and sometimes other chemicals as well.  It’s made on a scale that requires consistency–every Hershey’s milk chocolate bar will taste the same.  They blend cacao from different places and roast it and treat it in such a way that it will give the same taste and texture experience every time.  There’s some value to that, but you also lose a lot of the characteristic flavors that chocolate can have.  Once you pay attention to it, you can taste things in a hand-made single-origin chocolate that you’ll never taste in the Hershey’s from the checkout lane.

I’ve come to realize that it’s somewhat like wine.  If you want to buy the cheap stuff, sure it will be “wine” and it can get you drunk, but the experience of even a $12 or $20 bottle can be so much more.  Yes, artisan chocolate is more expensive, but like fine wine you (can) get what you pay for.  Dan has an excellent reference “flavor wheel” on his site describing all the different flavors that may be found in your chocolate.

Aside from all that, Dan has already shown success in making great chocolate.  If/when he can manage to grow this into a larger business, our community will benefit from it.  Look at the Urbana farmers’ market, Common Ground Co-op, the various CSAs available–our community values high-quality, local, handmade food.  Dan’s chocolate fits the bill.

I’m sure you’ve already read my recent posts about chocolate, including roasting and winnowing beans, and grinding nibs into chocolate.  In this installment of my chocolate adventure, we’ll go to what is perhaps one of the most important processes chocolate goes through, and one that you can do at home.  Yes, most of us won’t ever buy raw cacao or grind up nibs into chocolate (though they do make a good snack on their own), but if you ever want to mold chocolate into shapes or coat something with it, you’ll have to melt it.  Once you melt chocolate, you need to make sure to keep its temper (or know how to get it back).

Tempering is the process of heating and cooling chocolate in a specific way to form the right kinds of crystals in the cocoa butter.  Wikipedia tells me there are six types of crystals that can be formed, all based on temperature.  The problem is that all crystals take time to form.  If we just melt our chocolate and let it sit, most of the crystals formed will make our chocolate soft, dull, melt easily,and won’t have that pleasing snap when broken.  If we melt all the crystals and then hold the temperature at a certain point where we’re forming the crystals we want, then voila!  We’ll end up with firm chocolate with a glossy finish and a resounding snap when broken.  Dan “the Chocolate Man” Schreiber has written about his tempering experiences on his blog, where you can see what ill- and well-tempered chocolate can look like.

There are a couple traditional ways to temper chocolate.  One is the “tabling” method, where you spread most of your chocolate on a smooth surface, like marble and spread it to cool to a given temperature.  You can watch a video of Dan doing this here, or click through some photos at the bottom of the post.

You can also use the “seed” method, where you melt a bunch of chocolate, then drop in a chunk of well-tempered chocolate.  You can read a full explanation of this method, including some photos at Cooking for Engineers.The idea here is that by dropping in the right crystals, it will encourage the melted chocolate to form the same “good” crystals.

Chocolate chip cookies are probably the most classic American dessert after apple pie.  You can get them at any grocery store, coffee shop, or even freshly baked at a bakery, but the best chocolate cookies are the ones you make at home.  In part, it’s because it’s a recipe anyone can do with minimum equipment and little investment.  I’m sure you’ve tried the ubiquitous Toll House recipe printed on the back of the chocolate chip bag, and those are good, if only because it means people are getting back into the kitchen and baking real cookies.  As you grow up, though, maybe you want a cookie that’s a touch more refined.

Enter Thomas Keller, chef and restauranteur of such three-Michelin-star restaurants as the French Laundry and per se.  He’s written a few cookbooks in the past, with recipes coming from the menus of those restaurants.  He has another cookbook coming out in November based on his family-style comfort food restaurant, ad hoc.  This book, he promises, is geared toward the home cook.  It has recipes that you’ve had, maybe even made, before–biscuits, pot pie, beef Stroganoff.  I don’t have any inside info on all the contents, since I don’t have a press kit, but Food Gal Carolyn Jung got one.  Lucky for us, she shared a few recipes, including one for grown up chocolate chip cookies.  Go to her site for the full recipe for Thomas Keller’s chocolate chip cookies.

There are a few big differences to this recipe from most chocolate chip cookie recipes.  First is in the ingredient list–there’s no vanilla!  Now, you could certainly add some, but the large amount of brown sugar in this recipe gives the cookies a more grown-up molasses flavor rather than the more in-your-face vanilla kick most cookies have.

Next is the chocolate.  The recipe calls for chopping up two different types of good chocolate.  I did this the first time I made these and the different flavors from the chocolate make the cookies much more interesting.  This may add a few dollars to your cookie budget, but it is well worth it.  You could use chips as I did this time, but I really recommend trying it with good chocolate as the recipe recommends.  Please, don’t use milk chocolate, and if you’re going with chips, don’t use the Nestle morsels.  Use at least a half-way decent chocolate, like 60% Ghirardelli chips.

At a glance, the mixing instructions are a little different, telling you to add the butter in stages and beating it very thoroughly.  I think the intent here is to make sure that you cream it enough, beating enough tiny bubbles into the butter that will expand later as they bake.  Other than that, the rest of the ingredients and the procedure are really the same as any other cookie recipe.

When I make cookies, I like to chill the dough a bit until it’s firm, but not completely hard.  Taking a tip from Alton Brown, I use a scooper to dish out my dough evenly.  Even scooping means they cook evenly and end up about the same size.

I made a double batch and handed some out to some friendly food fans.  After all, who can resist home baked cookies (especially when you’re not doing the work)?  I got a lot of positive comments on them.  In my family, these are our new favorite chocolate chip cookie.

Wikipedia tells me that Theobroma, the “food of the gods”, is a small genus of plants native to Central and South American tropical forests. The one species we all are familiar with is the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao. After growing for at least four or five years, this tree produces fruit (pods) with seeds (cocoa beans) that are fermented, dried, and then finally roasted to develop the flavors we associate with chocolate. In an average year, an average tree will only produce enough seeds to make about 4.4 pounds of chocolate. According to the World Atlas of Chocolate, Americans consume over 11 pounds of chocolate per year.

Most people don’t think too much about the chocolate they eat. After all, you can get pounds of the stuff in the checkout lane in every grocery store. There’s a difference, though, between chocolate and candy. While many still cling to the overly-sweet candy put out by so many huge manufacturers, the purists are finding more and more high-quality bars available.

Chocolate has progressed in this country to something that, for some people, is like learning about wines. Different regions of the world have different climates, they may grow different cacao varieties (there are 3 main varieties), the beans may be processed differently. All of these things may bring out a different character in the cacao. More companies are now making “single origin” bars, sourcing beans from a single source instead of blending from a wider range.

You may have noticed bars with cacao percentages, indicating the ratio of cocoa solids in them. They can go from 0% (white chocolate) to 100% (baking chocolate). Other than cocoa solids, chocolate bars should only contain a few other ingredients: sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla, and milk solids for milk chocolate. Personally, I like dark chocolate. My usual choices are in the 62-74% cacao range.

No cacao grows in the USA, but across the country, there are a number of companies making “bean-to-bar” chocolate. Many companies will just buy chocolate, maybe add some flavorings, and then pour it into their own molds. There’s nothing wrong with this, there are plenty of great chocolate makers putting out great products. A very small, but growing, number of people are making chocolate using traditional methods and equipment from single origin chocolate in small batches.

I recently heard about a local guy who was interested in this. His name is Dan Schreiber, and he’s a grad student at the local University. He started a project on Kickstarter, a site where entrepreneurs can go to put out their ideas and get some start-up funds to make them happen. You can visit his project via the link on the right. The basic idea is that he’s asking for start-up funds to purchase the equipment he’ll need to be able to make artisan chocolate.

His goals are modest, to make great chocolate bars by hand and start distributing them locally. From my correspondence with him, his passion for this is clear. Like other local artisans, like Larbo from This Little Piggy, Dan is driven to revive old traditions and make something great. His journey will involve some learning along the way, but as he pointed out to me, even some of the bigger producers of fine chocolate, like Scharffen Berger and Patric Chocolate started out in a kitchen.

One of the benefits to supporting people like Dan is that we build on our local wealth of knowledge. Perhaps in the future, our town will be able to support a kitchen incubator to give food entrepreneurs a way to get their products to market faster. With the numbers of people interested in slow, local, artisanal products around here, I’m sure that will happen eventually.

I would urge everyone interested to click and donate some money to Dan’s project. You can donate as little as $1, but for $10 you will get some free chocolate when it’s ready. Every little bit helps. It may be a while before Dan has perfected his methods and finalized packaging, but I hope to see his products in coffee shops and other stores in the area before too long. My first request beyond a great dark chocolate bar would be something using flavors inspired by Indian cuisine with balance and subtlety.

Mo’s Bacon Bar

It’s my favorite chocolate bar when I’m not having good dark chocolate. Yeah, it has real bacon in it, and I like it with a peaty Islay Scotch, which pairs well with the smokiness of the bacon and the salt in the chocolate.