“1000 Year Old Food Club” sounds like a dangerous place to be eating anything, but I attended this curiously named event this past weekend and enjoyed food most people will never get to try.  The idea is not old food in the sense of aged or rotten, but in the method behind it.  I forgot my camera, so all the photos you see in this post are courtesy of artist and fellow local food lover, Bonnie Fortune and her iPhone.

yogurt, miso porridge

Think about the foods you love and think about how they’re made.  If you’ve read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food you will already understand the difference between how modern versions of old foods like yogurt are different from what our (great-)grandparents ate.  Modern products labeled as yogurt are often made “yogurt-like” with additives that add texture or mouth-feel and flavored with artificial flavors and too much sugar.  Fat-free yogurt is a poor attempt at latching onto the public’s fear of fat, and doesn’t behave the same as the real thing.  Real yogurt, made from raw milk and natural bacterial cultures is good stuff.  There are even different types of cultures that can be used to make everything from watery to stiff yogurt to a slimy, mucus-y substance like the Nordic specialty, viili.  There’s a video showing what the texture is like… watch it if you dare.

chorizo (front L), salami (front R), sauerkraut (rear R)

The whole premise of this tasting event was to take a trip back a thousand years or so to taste foods made in traditional ways.  There was homemade miso, with some mixed into a porridge.  I really liked how the funky umami flavor of the miso dispersed into the creamy porridge.

There were two sauerkrauts on the table, provided by Dan H. Schreiber.  One was a plain cabbage sauerkraut (which I, regrettably, didn’t try) and another one made with mostly white cabbage but colored deeply with beets.  Sauerkraut is often made with unnecessary additives, rendering it much less healthful than the original fermented formulation of cabbage and salt.  Dan’s is all-natural and tasted fresh and still crunchy.  Sure it was sour from lactic fermentation, but it was a wonderful flavor unlike any sauerkraut I’ve had before.

The meats were, of course, provided by the masterful meat manipulator, Laurence, of This Little Piggy fame.  The chorizo was a solid interpretation of the Spanish cured meat, but the salami was my favorite.  I was told it was a fennel salami, but the peppercorns in it gave little bursts of peppery kick when you met one.  It’s the kind of salami I could munch on all night.

raw milk, scary!

Then there were the dairy products.  This is where the crazy regulators get all antsy in their seats just wishing they could barge in the door and tell us how un-pasteurized milk is dangerous stuff and pour bleach all over everything in sight.  Fortunately this is purchased directly from a farmer who cares about preserving the 1000 year old food that comes out of his cows’ udders.  I was able to advocate for raw milk that night, convincing another attendee that she could drink raw milk just fine, despite her lactose intolerance.  You see, raw milk still has all the stuff that is needed to digest it, including some bacteria and enzymes like lactase (which is what LI folks can’t produce enough of).  I was really happy with the milk, and will definitely be obtaining some in the future.

raw milk cheddar

The other delightfully raw dairy came in the form of a raw milk cheese made by the same aforementioned farmer.  It was a cheddar style, and was by no means a refined, commercial product.  I imagine this is cheese that he makes with extra milk he has for his family to enjoy.  With some age, maybe heavier salting, this could be great cheese.  As it was, it was amazingly light from lack of age, but the flavor of the milk was concentrated.

There are no pictures of it here, but there was a selection of Dan’s chocolate as well as a mint fudge prepared by his business partner, Bill.  If you haven’t heard, Dan is already in the process of finding the right equipment and the right space to start up his own micro- (nano-?) chocolate factory right here in Urbana.  He’s already started making certified (i.e. by the health department, so he can sell it in retail stores) chocolate, drawn up business plans, and by the time I’m writing this who knows what else he’s accomplished?  Keep an eye on his blog to find out all the latest.  Congrats Dan on all that you’ve accomplished so far, and all the success that is sure to come!

This event was “sponsored”, supported, and publicized by the newly resurrected Prairie Table organization.  Prairie Table plans on holding more events like these, tasting excellent locally available products, as well as many other community-building opportunities.  I am already involved with them and hope to be a part of bringing more local food opportunities to the community.  If you’re in the Central Illinois area and are interested in hearing more, go to the website and look around.

EDIT: Of course there are so many things that I’ve nearly forgotten, like home-brewed beer (the stout was tasty).  If anyone in attendance remembers something I didn’t, please let me know!

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.

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.