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Celebrate Valentine’s Day with us

February 3, 2012 by

We’re teaming up with Love & Luxe, a beautiful jewelry store by the site of our Valencia Street space, to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Join us next Saturday night, February 11, for A Love Supreme from 5 – 10 PM at Love & Luxe, 1169 Valencia Street. Admission to the event is free and you’ll find unique Valentine’s Day gift ideas all around. We’ll be there with our chocolate and Blue Angel Vodka will offer samples of their own.  Even better, 5% of Love & Luxe jewelry sales and proceeds from the sale of work from the Visual Aid Pillow Project will go towards Visual Aid. It should be a blast and I hope you can come by.

Back to Madagascar

January 19, 2012 by

Things move quickly around here. So quickly, that it’s been a few months since Cam and I went to Madagascar and he first posted about getting there. I made it a day or two behind Cam, after missing my first flight. Taking the trip on my own kept things interesting! I found myself texting Cam from the tiny port of Ankify, desperately hoping that he’d find me. I haven’t had many happier reunions.

Here are a few different clips from our trip. I’m starting with my favorite. It showcases my pro pod-opening skills.

Cam was not a pro.

Truthfully, neither of us was really that good.

After the pods are opened, the workers pull the beans from the pods.

At SOMIA, we watched a worker move the beans between fermentation boxes.

After fermentation, the beans are raked into an even layer and dried in the sun.

At Millot, workers hand sort the broken beans and junk from the good beans.

We also saw beans being washed. This gives them a cleaner appearance for later enrobing.

This video shows the beans emptying from the washer. It also shows how our stomachs felt at the time…

Millot’s distillery smelled amazing. They distill lemongrass, ylang ylang, and a few other essential oils. I wish we had smell-o-vision.

That’s just a taste of my stories from Madagascar. The lemur pictures are still to come.

Good Food Awards

January 13, 2012 by

We’re back in the factory, some of us still in our party clothes from the Good Food Awards. Cam’s back to work at the temperer, but couldn’t wait to change out of his tie and fancy shoes. It was a fantastic night, full of people who love what they do, and I’m pretty happy to be among them.

Todd accepted our award for our Costa Rica 70%, Batch 2, and we got our first medal. It’s pretty awesome, in the shape of a chocolate bar with a big bite out of it. Tonight it’s hanging on one of our shelves, keeping us company while we winnow a big batch of Madagascar and make a few more bars for the morning. Now that our temperer’s working again, we’re working really hard to get ahead and it feels great to be making bars.

Tomorrow you have two chances to catch us. Todd and I will be at the Good Food Awards Marketplace from 9 AM – 2 PM at the Ferry Building. Our regular Saturday customers can find Cam and Chiann at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market. I think the excitement of tonight should carry us through to tomorrow’s early start.

 

Market Update

December 8, 2011 by

It’s been a long week… and it’s only wednesday. For the last few months, we’ve been scrambling to keep up with demand (great problem to have!) but this week one of our machines (our temperer) started acting up. This has put  a pretty big dent in our production capacity and, while we’d love to come to the market, we have some outstanding orders from our wholesale clients and we can’t let them down.

So, that means we’re going to have to skip tomorrow’s Mission Community Market in order to make more bars. We’ll miss you all but you can still grab our Madagascar bars as part of the market gift boxes.

While it’s not a market, we will be doing a small tasting outside Bi-Rite from 3-6 on Saturday. Stop by, say hello, and try our new Colombian bar! It has a lot of the same super-chocolatey flavor that we loved in the Venezuelan, but it definitely has its own soul. Hope to see you there!

 

Back from Seattle

October 26, 2011 by

Cam and I are back from our weekend in Seattle at the Northwest Chocolate Festival! Thanks so much to the organizers- the event drew thousands of excited chocolate fans.

We started the weekend by setting up our booth at the Seattle Center and taking a walk up to Chocolopolis, a clean and beautiful shop on Queen Anne that sells our chocolate. We met the owner, Lauren Adler, a few months ago in D.C. and we’re lucky to be featured in her store. She has our bars on display and in her craft-makers tasting kit!

From there, we went to the “Meet the Makers” reception on Friday night. We got to chat with other makers and friends. We sampled a bunch of bars, which got us excited for the weekend ahead. Then, at 10 AM on Saturday, there was a line of hundreds of chocolate lovers waiting at the door, all clamoring to come taste bars and confections. While each of our bars has its adamant supporters, the Madagascar was our biggest seller this weekend. In a room full of people who know and eat great chocolate, it’s easy to see why so many people are drawn to a bar with bright, bold flavor. Also, apparently Kristy Leissle, the Doc of Choc, has been talking us up! A number of people came up to our booth saying, “I’ve heard I have to try your bars.” It was a great feeling. Thanks, Kristy.

We came home at the end of the night pretty tired. It was all I could do to stay up later than Cam’s 3-year-old nephew. Fortunately, we were able to enlist his help with our accounting, and get our work done quickly for the night!

We’re home now, with lots more work to do. We’re looking ahead to November, getting ready for the holidays and the Fall Chocolate Salon. It’s time to get back to making chocolate!

Noe Valley Harvest Festival

October 10, 2011 by

We started selling our chocolate at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market a few weeks ago, and it’s been an awesome opportunity for us. It seems like there are lots of chocolate lovers in the neighborhood. This Saturday, we’ll be at the Noe Valley Harvest Festival from 10 AM – 5 PM, on 24th Street between Church and Sanchez. We won’t be at the farmer’s market that morning, so if you have an early morning chocolate craving, you’ll have to wait until the festival opens at 10. But, we’ll be there!

The Doc of Choc

October 7, 2011 by

A few Fridays ago, Kristy Leissle, a.k.a. Dr. Chocolate, stopped by to interview us for a book she’s writing about great chocolate. She’d been working at a writers’ retreat near Palo Alto and decided to come down to the city for a day to find a little inspiration. We had a blast talking to her. We gave the full tour, showing her the process we use to make a test batch from start to finish. She got us talking excitedly about making chocolate and working together. I’m pretty sure Cam gave her plenty of highly-quotable comments to use in her book. In the meantime, she put up a fantastic blog post about us.

She took a picture of one of my favorite parts of the chocolate making process. We test the microns of each batch before we take it out of the melanger. This ensures that the chocolate has a perfect, silky texture, not gritty or too fine. I love this test because it requires eating a spoonful of molten chocolate. There are parts of the process that Todd, Cam, and I will each try to avoid, but this isn’t one of them. Kristy also snuck a spoonful of the Madagascar batch in the melanger that day, and went back for a second before she left. It’s that good.

We’re excited to see Kristy again soon at the Northwest Chocolate Festival in Seattle, on October 22nd and 23rd. We’ll put more information about the festival up soon. For now, it’s up on our locations page.

Piscolate

October 5, 2011 by

A friend of ours, Nico Vera, writes a blog about Peruvian food called the Pisco Trail. I met him a few months ago at an event at 18 Reasons. Now, he’s using our chocolate as an ingredient in one of his recipes. Last week he created the Piscolate, a Pisco infusion made with our cocoa nibs. I haven’t had a chance to try making my own yet, but his looks delicious. You can find his recipe and description here. We’re also really excited to have a first recipe made with our chocolate. Someday, we hope to wholesale our chocolate as an ingredient to chocolatiers, chefs, and anyone else with an idea for a delicious chocolate creation!

Sustenance

September 23, 2011 by

It’s a late night of chocolate making, getting ready for the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market tomorrow morning. Todd made some snacks to keep us going! Ahh, yes, the perks of working at a chocolate factory.

Come visit tomorrow morning at 3861 24th Street, between Sanchez and Vicksburg Streets from 8 AM – 1 PM.

See you tomorrow!

September 19, 2011 by

We’re headed to Fog City News tomorrow for a lunchtime chocolate tasting. We’ll be at the shop, at 455 Market Street, from 12-2 PM. We’re excited to share a few details about our process and samples from our new batches from Costa Rica and Madagascar. One of the toys we’re bringing is our magra. We’ll demonstrate a bean cut-test, and let everyone see what our beans look like on the inside. This is the easiest and most effective ways for us to examine our beans’ fermentation and ripeness. Come take a look!

We also made a limited edition of our Tanzanian chocolate for Adam at Fog City News a little bit ago, and we’re bringing the last few bars from this batch to him tomorrow. Hope to see you then!