Archive | process

The Magic of Maya Mountain: Making the Bar

February 27, 2017 by Elman Cabrera

Elman Cabrera, one of our lead chocolate makers, developed the flavor profile (i.e. bean roasting parameters, and more) for the newest harvest of beans from Maya Mountain Cacao, Ltd. Here, he tells us about what the process was like, and what it meant for him to work with beans that came from so close to home. Our first batch of bars hit shelves a few days ago, so be sure to drop in for a taste! In a few days, look out for the next installment of this story, wherein Elman heads to origin to meet the folks at Maya Mountain Cacao Ltd. who helped produce these beans.

I’m Guatemalan. I’m 100% percent sure some Maya blood runs through my veins, and I’m really proud of it. I come from a family of farmers (about half of us are, at least), and as a Guatemalan with Maya roots and a childhood that was surrounded by chocolate, I think chocolate represents an important part of who I am and where I come from. Cacao is and has been sacred to my ancestors for over a thousand years, and I like to think I’m honoring them in some way by working with it, and sharing it with the world.

Chocolate is an important part in the Guatemalan diet, so I’ve always been surrounded by it. At home, we often consumed it as a beverage during breakfast or dinner, or to soothe cold nights and sore throats. You’ll also find it in arroz con chocolate (chocolate rice) or chocolate-covered bananas. For a long time, I never dreamt of working with it professionally; I was pretty sure my future lay between lines, erasers, plans, measurements, and designs, and that I was destined to be an architect. I have this wild idea that my ancestors had different plans for me: to walk down the chocolate path.

When I moved to the U.S., I had the chance to really work with chocolate for the first time. I took a job working as a machine operator in a truffle-making company, making thousands of truffles each shift and melting hundreds of blocks of Belgian chocolate. It was a glimpse of the pleasure that is working with chocolate, but of course, nothing comes easy, and all it takes is one attempt to temper a huge tank of molten chocolate to realize your dream job can turn into a cocoa butter nightmare.

I came to love working with chocolate in that job, but before joining Dandelion, I didn’t realize that it could taste like so many different, interesting flavors.

When Karen, my manager, approached me with the offer of developing a new bar profile—making dozens of test batches and designing the final roast profile we would use on those beans—I was excited and happy to have such an amazing opportunity. Every time we make a bar from a new batch of beans, someone within the company becomes the “bar owner,” responsible for seeing the test batch process from start to finish, asking for feedback on flavor, and deciding on the final roasting parameters for those beans. Finally, I was going to be able to learn even more about the flavor development of chocolate, and get an even deeper look into the vastness of flavor possibilities that cocoa beans hold.

Of course the beans have a natural range of flavors, but these can be enhanced or brought to center stage when we manipulate temperature and roasting time. I discovered that the Maya Mountain beans pack so much flavor in them that I could have taken them in so many different ways, from really fruity to creamy and chocolatey. The flavors that came forth depended mostly on how hot and how long I roasted the beans, and my early trial runs at different temperatures were so different but so delicious. How was I to choose?

Running a few taste tests.

It is good to have beans that are this versatile, but narrowing down to the flavor you like best from so much variety is also challenging. I ran different sets of tests and tweaking my settings here and there to get to where we wanted to go: a fruity but chocolatey bar. All this was a great learning experience, I bugged my co-workers to taste all of my tests at every stage, and it was incredible to see how palate varies from person to person; someone can get notes of honey or strawberries and cream that you never tasted, but when you taste the chocolate again, that flavor is totally there. In the end, I found the sweet spot: a fairly chocolatey bar with notes of sweet honey, rich caramel, and strawberries and cream.

Minda teaching me to temper by hand, like a boss.

These beans were such a joy to work with, for their flavor and their story. As I made batch after batch of chocolate with them in San Francisco, they transported me south, to Central America, and back in time to the world of my ancestors. I thought my traveling would end there, in my mind, but before I knew it I’d find myself right in the heart of things, among the hills, farmers, and trees that made these beans what they are. But, more on that in my next post. Stay tuned!

The Postharvest Life of a Cocoa Bean in Cahabón

October 24, 2016 by Kelsey

Drying Cacao Beans from Adioesmac

The final flavor of a cocoa bean depends on a lot of things, including how we roast and refine them in the factory, but beans taste the way they do largely because of how they’re handled just after harvest. Sadly, the steps of post-harvest processing, fermentation, drying, and roasting, happen thousands of miles away from where the chocolate is being made, which means we don’t get to see them every day. As much as we would love to pick up our Valencia street factory and move it to the tropics so we could be a part of the day in and day out of fermentation and drying, I don’t think that is going to happen anytime soon… although don’t quote me on that.

And so, we learn everything we can through producers, and through our Chocolate Sourcerer Greg, who visits them often. Sometimes we’ll even travel with him and take a shot at shoveling fermenting beans ourselves. The craft chocolate industry is generations behind the coffee and wine industries—which are both similar to chocolate in many regards—but that means we’re still in our infancy phase, waddling around and learning our primary functions. There is still so much for us to learn about chocolate on this side of the supply chain, and because every partner at origin we work does things differently depending on the geography, weather, and politics in their region, collecting as much information as possible is critical to doing things better all around.

One partner we work with who is addressing the growing pains of the industry is Cacao Verapaz (CV) located in Cobán, Guatemala. They’re the ones responsible for getting us those unique and tasty beans in our Cahabón bar.

Started in 2014, Cacao Verapaz is a cacao buyer and exporter that invests in the technical, logistical, quality and market support for farmers from different micro-regions of Alta Verapaz in Guatemala. They work with the small and diverse farming communities tucked away along the steep mountains and lush riversides of northern Guatemala. I was fortunate enough to be sent down there for a few months to live in these primarily Mayan communities to create a transparency report for one of our partners.

Within the Cahabón region, Dandelion buys beans from a community of just over 35 families who all share a fermentation and drying space up the side of a mountain, called Adioesmac. To get there, I hitchhiked up the main switchback road, hanging off the side of a pickup truck which was crammed full of people, chickens and crops, to get sort of close to it. After receiving a very typical rural community-like list of directions along the lines of “go to the corner of the road where the big rock is to the left of the Tigo sign and Pedro will meet you,” I somehow jumped off the truck at the right time and was picked up by the incredibly welcoming Pedro Tiul on his motorcycle who brought me down the rest of the semi-constructed road to the Adioesmac community. Needless to say, I neglected to tell my mother those details about my little adventure until after I returned safely to my apartment in Cobán.

: I’m restricted by my inability to zoom in further on Google to highlight the exact location, but this is the gorgeous view from Pedro’s home.

: Chillin on my bed (hammock) at Pedro’s house with the house pet (giant Turkey).

Historically, cacao-growing regions focus on increasing production over improving quality because there was no market for high quality cacao. As the demand for high quality cacao (meaning good flavor with few defects, such as mold or insects) from chocolate makers increases, there is direct incentive for farmers to continue increasing the quality of their production, partly because because higher quality fetches a better price. Cacao Verapaz positions themselves as resource to support farmers in increasing the quality of their cacao. CV has developed a tiered pricing system, offering more for A quality beans and a little less for B quality. But with the youthfulness of the industry, CV is simultaneously learning about what that means for each community through diligent feedback and data tracking. To describe all that CV does would fill a book, so I’m going to oversimplify some of the process in service of covering a broader slice of their work.

Field Support

Cacao Verapaz’s third employee, Roy Fraatz, is the technical assistant whose job is to spend most of his time in the field at the the 15 different associations that CV buys from. He teaches producers about best practices in the post-harvest process, and acts as a liaison between farmers and buyers. His role came about due to the demand for increased quality and reliability in cacao.

Quality Lab

The investment in their brand-spanking-new quality lab is a really exciting thing for the crew at Cacao Verapaz, chocolate makers like us, and producers. The lab looks not unlike our own R&D lab here at the Valencia Street factory, which makes our quality and flavor team drool (in a totally food safe way) a little.

: Entrance to CV’s quality lab

: Physical evaluation and cut test station

: Roaster and de-husking space

: Molds to create lot taste tests

: Mini-melanger used to make cacao liquor and paste

: Organoleptic (sensory) development characteristics station

Ultimately, the space is going to be used to develop better quality control systems for lot-by-lot tracking and data analysis. Among the many social and market based statistics they are gathering, the lab allows them to generate a better understanding of the cacao they’re buying and create quality standards for fermentation and drying to set their beans apart. A quality report is created for each lot that enters the lab, which is given to the farmers for feedback. Going forward, they hope to use this information to develop flavor profiles for each micro-region to be shared with chocolate makers.

“Our goal is to give feedback on the quality of cocoa to our suppliers and know the characteristics of taste and quality of our different suppliers.”

Marlon Ac, Director, Cacao Verapaz

Fermentation

Fermentation check cut test

We’ve seen fermentation done in so many different ways, many of which come about through trial and error. For example, the community of Adioesmac received beautiful and structurally sound fermentation boxes as a donation from John Scharffenberger years ago, and as part of Cacao Verapaz’s system for quality development, measurements like temperature, internal and external mold percentage, fermentation rates, moisture and seed indexes are all collected for each lot.

Tiered fermentation boxes from Scharffenberger

Fermentation temperature check

Once Cacao Verapaz began working with the community and testing fermentation statistics, they quickly realized that the boxes were way too tall to evenly rotate the cacao and some of the beans were getting too hot and unevenly fermented. Instead, the community reverted to two smaller boxes in the corner of the fermentation space. Now the larger boxes sit empty and serve as a reminder of their growth — or possibly a funky art piece.

Drying

More traditional style of drying – note the impending storm!

Stopping fermentation at just the right time, with just the right amount of acetic acid so that beans aren’t too bitter or astringent is, in a way, a lot harder than it seems. This is where we find another opportunity to develop better systems, and once again it happens through trial and error.

Traditionally, farmers in these communities had dried directly on the dirt backing their homes. Not only did this mean a prominent amount of rocks and critters were able to easily get mixed in, but there was a significant impact from human and animal contact that could disrupt the the drying process. The cacao was also extremely vulnerable to weather as it was constantly exposed to the geography of the tropics.

In order to address the inconsistencies of quality found in each family drying their own small lots, the community pooled together to dry communally on a concrete bed, reducing the amount of rocks, other crops and overall damage. The cacao here was still vulnerable to animals as well as exposed to weather which could cause the beans to mold. In response to this, Cacao Verapaz financed a raised and protected drying space.

The angled roof creates a slight greenhouse effect to promote quick drying, with plastic on the side that protects beans from weather and animals, and can be moved to allow for more consistent airflow. It’s also raised to guard against ground animals and curious children. And hey, it’s ergonomic!

Pedro Tiul working in the new drying space, while his son watches him from old, concrete beds.

Education

Farmers from the small community, Asochivite, visit the privately owned larger farm, Finca Los Planes.

Cacao Verapaz, as of this year, works with nine tiny communities and four larger, privately owned farms. Taking advantage of this relationship, CV coordinates regular “field trips,” if you will, with representatives from the small communities to visit larger ones for a more hands on approach to learning about best practices.

Cacao Verapaz also opens the door for farmers to learn from chocolate makers, and for chocolate makers to learn from farmers, by coordinating association visits.

Our Chocolate Sourcerer, Greg, discussing fermentation, drying and quality at Adioesmac.

One of the most frequent conversations I had with farmers went along the lines of “Hold on, what exactly do you do? What happens after you get the beans? I know how we use chocolate in a drinking form, but *while holding up a Dandelion chocolate bar* how does it get like this? How much does it cost? Why is it so expensive?”

Women of Adioesmac trying Dandelion chocolate made with their cacao.

For some farmers, the first time learning about what happens to their cacao, often their primary source of income, comes from a broken translation between English to Spanish to Quechi. That would be like me making chocolate all day (which I do) and having someone explain to me, twice translated, how it gets to a customer’s hand. As chocolate makers, we’re fortunate we don’t really have that gap. So, in my absolutely non-expert opinion, creating the space for inclusivity within the industry, between farmers and chocolate makers who may not be able to talk every day, seems to deepen the motivation for us all to create high quality relationships and high quality products, especially when we get the chance to learn together.

The experimentation and meticulous data collection Cacao Verapaz is doing is part of our industry’s effort to improve the quality of cacao, and our ability to communicate about what’s working. Ultimately, the more information there is available, the better able we’ll all be to make the best chocolate we can. That’s a win-win for everyone, including you!

What Does the Word “Artisan” Mean?

October 5, 2016 by Kristy Leissle

Kristy Leissle, PhD, known to many as Dr. Chocolate, is faculty in Global Studies and African Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. She researches and writes about the global cocoa-chocolate industry, especially West African agriculture and contemporary craft makers in the US and beyond. We’re big fans of Dr. Leissle, and thrilled to feature her voice on our blog. Below, she looks at the origin, power, and uses of the word “artisan,” and asks: What does it really mean?

Chocolate and the Industrial Revolution – (c) BNPS.co.uk – courtesy of Bill Fredericks

In the US today, our relationship with food is changing. More than half a century ago, when our country witnessed the rise of industrial agriculture and its chemical-propelled grain monocultures, our diets responded. Seeking food security after World War II, the US strove to grow more for less money, leaving anyone who eats food in the 21st century with a bevy of questions that were lost in the drive to make food cheap:

Who created this food? What were their priorities? Where are they and when did they harvest or process the food? How and why did they do that?

Around the same time that these questions began to get more public attention, I noticed the word “artisan” appearing more frequently: most often on food packaging, but also in newspaper and magazine articles about food – especially food that was locally grown or made, and sold by someone who had been part of that process. Loaves of bread were artisanal, as were cheeses, pickles, jars of jam, sauerkraut, and cuts of meat. “Artisan” was everywhere, attempting to communicate…something. What I didn’t understand was exactly what it was trying to say. My interest in finding out led to a three-year research inquiry about the meaning of “artisan” for chocolate. This post is among the first publications of my findings.

I focused my methods on language, and made the most comprehensive list I could of all the new, non-global, bean-to-bar chocolate makers who were founded since 1997 (when Scharffen Berger opened) and selling commercially in the US. As of August 2015, I had identified 129. I searched their websites and bar packaging (exhaustively) for the word “artisan.” Nearly half – 48.8% – used it. At the 2014 NW Chocolate Festival in Seattle, I surveyed approximately 100 attendees for their understandings of “artisan.” Finally, I compared those findings to the historical meaning of “artisan.”

Historically, the definition of an “artisan” was specific, and concrete. Before the Industrial Revolution, “artisans” were a defined socio-economic group in Europe comprised of people who had reached a certain level of skill. To become an artisan, a person – almost always, a man – first had to be admitted to apprenticeship, either with a family member or acquaintance, or in a guild. Even then, the apprenticeship was long, and entry to “artisan” rank was tightly guarded. The apprentice worked towards mastering a craft: the ability to replicate a product precisely and reliably. Only when the trade master was satisfied with the apprentice’s skill level would he be awarded the title of “artisan.” The level of skill and quality required of artisans meant that consumers knew they could trust what those artisans made—including shoes from cobblers, wares from a blacksmith, and more. For the most part, “artisans” made things that people could not make for themselves, like horseshoes and work boots. For the many pre-Industrial peasants who grew and processed their own food, there was hardly such a thing as artisanal food.

As you can probably guess, the historical definition of “artisan” doesn’t exactly correspond to our contemporary ideas about what the word means (consider: artisanal yogurt, French fries, shampoo). The old, concrete definition contrasted with my research findings, which were wholly inconsistent. It seemed that chocolate makers who used “artisan” on their packaging were trying to communicate a variety of things.

Some used the word to convey a sense of history, others to indicate process (such as hand-wrapping bars), but mostly they suggested a host of different meanings, none of which pointed to a common “definition” within the industry. In these cases, “artisan” signified a range of things: for example, that the company was family-run, used local ingredients, or made chocolate that tasted delicious. My findings confirmed the hunch I’d started with: “artisan” had become a “floating signifier” in the world of chocolate marketing, which is to say that it had no stable referent in the real word. Compared to, say, “bread,” which consistently refers to a baked, edible, grain-based loaf, “artisan” didn’t refer to anything fixed. Chocolate makers used it loosely, in whatever way fit their story.

The consumers I surveyed had more consistent ideas about what an “artisan” is and does. Most of them defined “artisan” as someone who understands chocolate’s flavor and texture, and only a few linked “artisan” to a level of training or skill. Most of them associated the word with quality in a way that pitted “artisan” against “industrial” chocolate. Despite what seemed to be a pattern, even consumers were not totally consistent: when a question included an option to define “artisan” as a handmade process, respondents chose that, over any reference to flavor. Overall, it seemed there was hardly any agreement to be found, especially between chocolate makers and shoppers, about what the word meant.

At first, I interpreted that loss of meaning in a negative way. Chocolate makers weren’t answering important questions, or really saying much, by calling themselves “artisan,” and something about that felt disappointing. I thought it would have been more powerful to find that makers were using “artisan” to refer to something defined and distinct: maybe the company had only a few workers, or maybe their craftspeople had mastered every step of the chocolate-making process. It seemed to me that “artisan” needed a fixed meaning to have any power, in marketing or otherwise. If all or even most chocolate makers had offered a consistent definition, consumers would have specific, verifiable information about the product they were buying. But these days, “artisan” could mean anything, which is to say it means nothing at all. In my mind, the loss of meaning was a loss of power.

Photo courtesy of National Geographic and Confiserie Sprüngli Ag

But then, I realized that it wasn’t. Though chocolate makers offered different ideas about the word’s meaning, nearly all companies that used “artisan” to describe their chocolate did something equally as important: they told their story. On websites, at festivals, even on packaging, “artisan” chocolate makers shared many stories, about themselves, their processes, and their motivations. Regardless of its content, the fact of sharing this background or context seemed to add an indefinable value to the chocolate. Instead of offering a fixed meaning, “artisan” seemed to be a way of saying, “At this chocolate company, we can answer your questions about this food.” By using the word, “artisan” chocolate makers were making it clear that they were real people who cared about the food they made and could talk knowledgeably about it. If consumers wanted to know more about the chocolate they were buying, the “artisan” was there to share their expertise. In doing so, “artisans” set themselves implicitly against an anonymous factory of machines that churned out anonymous chocolate bars that told only the fictional story of a brand. This is, I believe, the same suggestion that consumers were making when they responded with “industrial” as the opposite of “artisan” chocolate. Instead of the historically fixed and universal meaning of “artisan” as someone who had achieved a master skill level, “artisan” now confirmed that real-life individuals were behind each chocolate bar. Factory machines did not dominate the process, people did.

One maker may use “artisan” because she prioritizes bringing out a certain, delicate favorite flavor profile with each batch, another because he is constantly experimenting with new inclusions, creatively pushing the “known” boundaries of chocolate’s flavor and texture. Some use it to express motivations. The word “artisan” applies to both those who make chocolate because it fulfills a need to work with their hands, and to those who want to work side by side with loved ones.

I discovered that a word with variable, unstable meaning can have more power than if it had a fixed meaning, because the people who use that word can wield it in different ways. In the case of “artisan,” consumers don’t seem to need a fixed meaning; the general feeling that it conveys, of real-life individuals making chocolate bars, seems to be enough to create trust.

That different stories converge upon the word is certainly a break from its historical definition, but that variability seems to work in the makers’ favor. Today’s new chocolate represents a shift away from the predominance of abundant, cheap food in the 1950s, and the word “artisan” communicates something of that shift to consumers. I think it tells us that the maker desires a more meaningful relationship with their craft than industrial monoculture and huge factories allow. By purchasing “artisan” chocolate, consumers are indicating that they too support an ethos of knowing one’s food, regardless of what particular meaning the maker evokes in his or her story.

Though chocolate makers and chocolate shoppers may not always agree on what “artisan” means, it nevertheless represents an agreement – a signal between them – that they are both reaching for meaningful food. And that is indeed a promising new beginning for the word.

Further results of my findings are forthcoming in the journal Food, Culture and Society.

New Pastry: Fig Tart!

September 27, 2016 by Lisa Vega

I love figs. When I was growing up in my mother’s house, we had a Black Mission fig tree in the backyard that produced the most delicious, plump little figs in the summertime. I especially love how they pair with chocolate—that syrupy sweetness with a tart edge on top of a classic, chocolatey chocolate. When figs came into season this year, I knew I wanted to do something with them.

To start, we grabbed a few Adriatic figs, which are a little rounder, greener, and sweeter than most (at least to me they are), some classic Black Mission figs, and opened our pantry door to see what we could make.

A tart is a perfect way to layer flavors and textures, and it offers a million ways to build dimension into your dessert. We started our R&D with a honey ganache in an almond sable crust, topped with sliced figs. It was delicious, sure, but a little too plain. To cut through those soft, sweet layers, we added a bit of goat cheese mascarpone on the bottom. Now, all it needed is a little texture: honeycomb! We boiled up some honey, sugar, and water, whisked in the baking soda and let it set into a flaky, crunchy honeycomb that melts on your tongue.

Like all good things, fig season won’t last forever. If I had to guess, I’d say we’ve got two more good weeks left until the figs are gone and the pumpkins are here. So drop in soon and get one while they last!

Tasting Everyday

May 23, 2016 by Alex Voynow

To all my future acquaintances, bus seat neighbors, Tinder matches, and curious onlookers, the answer is “Yes.” No, seriously. It’s true. As a chocolate maker, it’s my job to eat a lot of chocolate every day. I have to. I understand how this looks; from a distance, my job probably seems like an alternate universe where dreams come true, everything is glamorous, and nothing is sad. And sometimes, it really seems that way to me when I talk about it. That said, I want to tell you about the harsh reality of this life.

As I’m writing this, one of my colleagues approaches me with a freshly-tempered bar—broken into individual pieces—expecting that I take and eat one. This is a twice-daily ritual: before the beginning of every tempering round, each member of the production team tastes a square of chocolate from the batch about to be tempered. The idea is to taste the chocolate, and provide a score on a scale from 1 to 10. The number corresponds to our subjective preference for the chocolate, but we also consider its fidelity to the objective flavor—determined by the roast profile we’ve chosen—of whichever origin it is. If the chocolate is Madagascar, for example, we’re looking for its characteristic tangy citrus and berry flavor, and a sharp acidity balanced by a pleasant creaminess. If I think my square matches these sensations, and otherwise tastes good, I’ll probably give it a 7.5 or 8. If it’s exceptional I’ll give it a 9. If there’s something slightly off about it, I’ll say it’s a 6 or 7. If there’s a score of 5 or below, something about the chocolate has caused enough concern that we need to stop what we’re doing and investigate. Or cry.

Elman gives this one an 8.

When I first started working on the production floor, I would relish the requirement to eat these squares not only because I enjoyed them, but also because I was introducing my uninitiated palate to the nuances of our chocolate that change from day to day, and shift to shift. I felt particularly special, a part of a greater process of judgement and consensus, a member of a group that understood sensory subtlety. I felt like I moved in some fancy echelon of connoisseurs who can discern the difference between a 6, a 7, and an 8. That was a particularly juicy feeling considering I was not, nor am I now, a connoisseur, rather just a person who really likes, and now really knows, good chocolate.

This is how we score chocolate, every day.

And now, as Obed insists that I eat this square of a Madagascar bar so he can record my score, I take it, break it in half, and swallow my reluctance. I just had lunch and I have no desire for Madagascar’s tart jab and mouth-coating tendencies. And I had a whole square this morning, plus I had a few spoonfuls of it yesterday, and right now one more square feels like an overdose. I can easily imagine what it tastes like, I’ve tasted it a million times before, so I could half-heartedly chew and swallow and score it, followed by a quick chase of coffee if I wanted. But, like I said, dear reader, my job does require that I eat a lot of chocolate every day. It’s days like this one that challenge me the most, that oblige me to steel myself against the ennui of another bite of chocolate. And so, in consideration of just about every other job I could be holding in this world, and any other thing I could be eating, I eat the half square. I let it melt and express its full range across my tongue, and remember exactly what it is that makes my friends jealous when I tell them what I do for a living.

Le Grande Experiment: Part 3

October 8, 2015 by Greg

This is the third in a series of posts about Le Grande Experiment (which translates into no language except the one we’ve made up), a somewhat recent adventure wherein we sent teams to Denver and Italy on a vital mission: to hunt down and test the best equipment for scaling up our process. Our current setup works well for our factory space on Valencia Street, but as we grow into our new factory space on Alabama Street, we believe there are better options out there for improving the quality of our chocolate and expanding our capacity to experiment. While we could do the work on the phone, we find the best results come from hitting the road and getting our hands dirty.

The exciting conclusion to our experiment is here! If you haven’t read about Le Grande Experiment, it is worth reading up on Part 1 and Part 2 before reading on as I’ll be making reference to some of groundwork laid in those posts. We now rejoin our intrepid research team in San Francisco.

Now that we had lots of data and tests and samples and, well, chocolate, we needed to figure out what we liked! There were two main considerations (in order of importance to us):

Flavor
Texture (and the closely related viscosity)

Why we care about flavor and texture should be relatively obvious. As we only make two-ingredient chocolate, viscosity is a constant challenge. Without added lecithin or fat (cocoa butter), we can’t control the viscosity to make the chocolate more workable the way many other makers can, so we need to set ourselves up for success! Our overall goal is to make more chocolate with less labor, and to make chocolate which tastes better, has a better mouthfeel, and is easier for us to handle. How hard could it be?

Flavor

Because flavor is our major driver, the first order of business was to understand the impact of the equipment on flavor. Typically, we use blind taste tests to determine these things, but doing a blind taste test of our standard chocolate against chocolate we made with alternate equipment made me nervous. Even though the beans were all roasted the same way, there were a number of variables that were difficult to control and I worried we wouldn’t be able to make a fair comparison. It turns out I sometimes (*cough* often) overthink things, and luckily fate stepped in. It was January, and we had made it back to San Francisco in time for the semi-annual FCIA meeting (which always takes place in San Francisco in January), which gave us a phenomenal but transient opportunity to talk to a number of other chocolate makers about our results as well as get some chocolate folks tasting chocolate! So, we threw caution to the wind and did a blind tasting of the three methods.

The test compared our own standard chocolate against two others: the chocolate we’d made with a ball mill and rotary conche (the “Packint Method”), and another we’d made with a roll mill and longitudinal conche (the “Steve Method”). We had our standard internal set of people taste the chocolate as well as a number of guests and visitors. This was anything but a scientifically sound study: everyone was trained differently, various chocolate makers look for different things in chocolate, and many people tried the sample late at night after much merriment had been had. That being said, what we wanted to understand is what people actually liked, or more to the point, what did they love? Our customer base is wide and varied (our chocolate is often eaten after much merriment) so while I don’t feel this tasting had the level of rigor we usually attempt to achieve, I think it gave us interesting information. In the results below you can see what we look for when trying to understand preference in samples. The samples are scored on a scale of +2 to -2, +2 being the best thing you’ve ever tried and -2 being something that might make you a little angry at the person who gave it to you. We look for samples that have large number of scores above 1 and minimal scores below 0. Our goal is to make chocolate people love, not chocolate that is inoffensive. It near impossible to make an intensely flavored chocolate that everyone will love, as some people just won’t like that particular flavor, so a few negative scores isn’t a bad thing. These are the results from all of the tasting:

	Standard Dandelion	Steve Method	Packint Method
Number of scores greater than 1	4	4	5
Average of positive scores	0.98	0.93	0.81
Number of scores less than 0	7	5	4
Overall average	0.27	0.43	0.45
Median	0.625	0.875	0.75
Standard Deviation	1.11	1.09	0.90
Favorite Count	4	6	7

The first thing you’re likely to see is that there was no clear winner. Standard Dandelion had the highest number of negative scores but also the highest average of positive scores. The Packint Method had the most fans but the Steve Method had the highest median score. On the qualitative side, people felt like the result from the Packint method was more chocolatey and the Steve method retained more fruity and acid flavors. The conclusion we could draw is that in a blind taste test, the method we have spent years perfecting was neither significantly better nor significantly worse than two other methods that we were just trying out for the first time. Both of these methods can be done at a larger scale with less labor, and that was very promising because it meant with time and practice it seems likely we will be able to “make more chocolate that tastes better, with less labor.”

Texture

The next question was one of texture and viscosity. These two attributes are closely related and typically depend on:

Fat content
Fat type(s)
Moisture content
Particle shape
Particle size distribution

Since we used the same beans for each test, we felt confident that the fat content and type(s) was pretty similar between the samples. This meant that any differences in texture and viscosity are likely due to moisture, particle shape, or particle size distribution. Before diving in further, it’s probably worth outlining why these factors can influence what I’ll call “texturosity.” As Cynthia noted in her post on Le Grande Experiment 2, chocolate is technically a solid in liquid colloid (a.k.a. a “sol”). In our case, the liquid is the fat released from the beans during the refining process, and the solids are what’s left of the cocoa once the fat is released (including the sugar we add).

The ratio of particles to fat will influence both the texture of the chocolate as well as the viscosity. In terms of moisture content, adding moisture—a dissimilar liquid—to a combination of fat and particles will break the homogenous mixture and the sol will start to thicken. This makes it harder for us to work with, and so we try to keep moisture to a minimum.

As for how particle shape influences viscosity, imagine a vat full of identical balls, all of which can move over each other easily. Then imagine a vat full of irregular spiked balls. Irregular particle sizes make the chocolate more viscous because, like the spiked balls, they cannot move amongst and around each other easily. Less viscous chocolate is much easier to work with, so we want to optimize for machines that will make the most particles the same, rounded shaped.

The last factor we’re considering is something called “particle size distribution,” by which we mean the quantity of each sized particle in a given sample. To illustrate this, imagine a vat full of identical balls; they move easily! Then imagine a vat of balls of various sizes, wherein the smaller ones can fit in the spaces between the larger ones, creating a relatively static, solid vat. To reduce viscosity, our goal is to have all of the particles as similarly sized as possible.

While the machines we use can’t really impact fat content or type in the beans, they can impact moisture content, particle shape, and size distribution. Once we had samples from our current process as well as samples from a ball mill, from a ball mill / rotary conche, from a roll mill, and from a roll mill / longitudinal conche, we looked at each of them under a microscope and found the results are below.

Cocoatown
Cocoatown – notice the relatively wide particle distribution	Cocoatown – The particles tend to be a bit rough around the edges
Ball Mill (without conching)
Ball Mill – notice the 2 distinct sets of particle sizes	Ball Mill Particle View – very consistently sized particles but quite rough
Ball Mill / Rotary Conche
Ball Mill / Rotary Conche – notice the narrower distribution once the particles have been conched	Ball Mill / Rotary Conche Particle View – wider distribution but rounder particles
Roll Mill (without conching)
Roll Mill: narrower distribution of particles but two distinct sets, one smaller, one larger.	Roll Mill Particle View – bigger and rougher particles
Roll Mill / Longitudinal Conche
Roll Mill / Longitudinal Conche – after conching, the particle distribution is significantly narrower!	Roll Mill / Longitudinal Conche Particle View – smaller and rounder particles (as well as a bit of cross contamination)

The main thing you’ll notice is that there are two clusters of particle size in the post-refining but pre-conching phase. As it turns out, conching the chocolate resulted in a tighter particle distribution. The conche also reduced particle size overall through the shearing and rounding action of the conche. The sample from the Cocoatown (that we use in the factory now) didn’t have the double cluster and had a wider particle size distribution.

Decisions

Overall we learned a lot through these experiments. Our results are admittedly a bit fuzzy, and we could put more rigor into the experiments, but our goal was to understand which equipment we should use and we feel like we accomplished this goal. The decisions we made are as follows:

Pre-refining
- We LOVED the Packint 2 roll pre-refiner. It produced a shelf stable pre-refined material without adding much heat. This means we can control flavor more effectively.
Refining
- Use a Packint Ball Mill for refining the more chocolatey beans
- Use a five roll mill for refining all the other beans. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to purchase a small five roll mill, so we bought a used Carle & Montanari 980MM mill from Base Coop.
Conching
- Use a Packint Rotary Conche for chocolatey products
- Use a longitudinal conche for other products. Sadly longitudinal conches are not easy to come by but it was Steve DeVries to the rescue. We purchased a used longitudinal conche from Steve, and our Magic Man of Machines, Snooky, is working on reconditioning it now.

Okay! We now have beans, we have equipment to roast, crack, winnow, refine, and conch. Next stop… TEMPERING!

Behind the Bitters

August 13, 2015 by Rob Easter

Our friend and collaborator Rob Easter (Workhorse Rye) makes some of the best bitters in the bay. Here, he lets us in on a few of his secrets and how the Salted Cacao bitters came to be.

I never wanted to make chocolate bitters. I have made drinks with molé and other chocolate bitters for years, and didn’t feel like I needed to contribute much to that world so I ignored chocolate (in a bitters context, not an eating context, please) for quite some time. As I started becoming more familiar with Dandelion Chocolate bars, a totally new flavor profile appeared in my mind: cacao bitters. Not chocolate bitters. That sounds silly but it is a totally different beast—a bright, fruity, yet savory beast.

I pitched the idea to Cynthia and Greg after their chocolate class at Four Barrel, and asked them for some cacao husk and nibs, separately. I knew the husk would contribute something bitter and tannic, but wasn’t sure exactly what. I put rye on husk and rye on nibs, agitated them for a month and then tasted. It is ridiculous how fantastically good cacao and quality alcohol taste when married for a month. It tastes like wine. Alcohol is a fantastic solvent of course, and it easily extracts the fats and proteins of the cacao. To compliment those savory and bright tones that our rye took from the cacao, we selected as counterparts cardamom, cinnamon, and super cool Piran salt by Bitterman Salt Co. We added some extra bitterness via dandelion root too.

After that, it was a simply a matter of dialing it in. After a year and a half, the recipe has evolved, and now we put whole beans (with husk, no separation from nib) through our grain mill the same as we would before making mash for rye whiskey. We use an extra dash of husk too—these are bitters after all, and a pleasant but unique bitterness is what we are after.

I like using entire plants as much as possible. Roots, bark, fruit, peel, husk, nib. Not because it sounds wizardlike and “one-with-all” (that’s cool too, I suppose) but because a plant expresses itself in so many ways, and there is core personality in many of those parts. To make a silky chocolate bar, the husk needs to be separated from the nib. It is usually valued as prized compost, aiding in soil aeration, but lately it’s moved to center stage and is more appreciated for what it is: bitter. We rejoice in the name of cacao husk; who would have thought? I don’t yet know what cacao root or leaves tastes like, but I foresee that changing for both us and Cacao Bitters lovers.

You can find Rob’s bitters on the Workhorse Rye website, or in our Valencia Street factory. To start, try a few sleeves with 2 oz mezcal and 1/4 oz Tempus Fugit Crème de Cacao. Or, stir up a dry Manhattan with rye, dry vermouth, and 3 sleeves Salted Cacao Bitters.

What’s a Grindometer?

August 7, 2015 by Molly Gore

Along the south wall of our factory on Valencia Street, there are six, spinning steel melangers. This is where the cocoa nibs turn into cocoa liquor, and where the liquor and sugar are refined and conched until they have reached the perfect consistency and flavor to become a chocolate bar. The melangers themselves are actually modified spice grinders from India, comprised of two spinning granite wheels and a granite base. They spin 24 hours a day, crushing nibs and sugar together and oxidizing the mixture which helps release volatile aromatics. Each batch stays in the melanger for three to five days, until we know the chocolate is ready. But how do we know when it’s ready?

Deciding when to “pull a batch” is a matter of personal judgment, but we have a few benchmarks and tools to help us. First, we taste. Is it well-balanced? Delicious? Smooth? Exactly as it should be? If we taste grit—which indicates the particle size is still too large and needs more time under the granite wheels—we know it’s not ready. If the texture is smooth but there are a few off flavors, it needs more time to conch and mellow out. If the texture and flavor are flat, it means it may have been in the melanger too long and refined to a particle size that’s too small. We prefer a particle size between 20 and 30 microns, which makes for a smooth mouthfeel but isn’t too small to keep the flavor from dancing around* in your mouth.

To help us understand what we’re tasting, we used to use something called a micrometer, which measured particle size by pinching a small sample of chocolate. This was a good tool, but it was limited to measuring only the largest particle in any given sample. Even if we measure three times, that’s only three particles.

Enter the grindometer. We learned about grindometers at last year’s Chocolate Maker Unconference, and later decided to purchase a particular model that we learned about from the guys at Hexx Chocolate in Las Vegas. A grindometer is a beautifully simple instrument used to measure particle size in suspensions, usually printing inks and paints. The instrument itself is a stainless steel brick with two almost imperceptibly shallow channels carved across the length of it. The grooves graduate from a depth of 100 micrometers below the surface to 0 micrometers (where it’s flush with the surface). To use it, we drop two small blobs of chocolate onto the top of either channel, and scrape them to the end with a straight steel scraper.

The particles slip under the scraper as the space between the scraper and the steel brick grows smaller, which means we get to see the entire distribution of particle size throughout a single sample of chocolate. Where the shade of the chocolate’s color changes most abruptly, from dark to lighter, indicates the size of the majority of the particles.

When that drop-off happens between 20 and 30 microns, we know the chocolate is somewhere close to its sweet spot, and could be ready to pull.

To see it in action, stop by the factory!

*real scientific term

Meet the Bean Dervish!

July 14, 2015 by Molly Gore

As a small, bean-to-bar chocolate maker, we’re part of a very small industry. Since the beginning, that means we’ve had to build a lot of the machines that we couldn’t find, as well as engineer creative ways of meeting our small batch needs. When Todd and Cam moved from a small garage into a small factory in the Dogpatch, and when we later expanded into our current factory on Valencia Street, a good deal of that machinery came with us. Our PVC-and-vacuum winnower, the vibrating wooden sorter, our bean cracker, and more. As the months roll by, we’ve slowly upgraded when we’ve found better ways of doing things or when the machines were past their prime. Still, if you’ve been through the factory in the last year, you’ll likely have seen some relics chugging away, paying their dues.

Last week, we bid adieu to our oldest piece of still-working equipment: the Crankenstein. Crankenstein was our devoted bean cracker, a set of three rollers that we installed in a table under a hopper. This is where we cracked beans after roasting and before winnowing. Generally, it did well, but it was slow enough to bottleneck our whole process, and we must have spent weeks of our lives standing over it, scraping jammed beans out of the rollers with the end of a ladle. We needed something better.

Mufu approves of the Bean Dervish.

Last year, Mike Orlando, owner of Twenty-Four Blackbirds out of Santa Barbara and creator of some amazing chocolate, showed us a different approach to breaking beans. Working with Mike’s device as the inspiration, our Magic Man of Machines—Snooky Robins—has been putting together a very different kind of cracker. It’s tall, it’s shiny, and it’s called the Bean Dervish.

The machine works much in the same way as a walnut cracker from the 1880s. It works by flinging beans against the sides of a big steel drum, breaking them on impact. The Crankenstein relied on friction to pull beans in between a fixed sized slot, this had numerous problems including reduced speed through wear on the roller, small beans not breaking, and large beans getting stuck. As the Dervish doesn’t rely on friction or a fixed sized slot to break, it works incredibly well and breaks beans (of any size) consistently.

The point of a cracker is to break the beans into sizable chunks that make it easier to winnow the husk from the nib. Due to its force and speed, the Dervish also breaks nibs away from the husk more effectively, which means our yields are improving too.

Oh, and compared to the Crankenstein, the Bean Dervish moves at the speed of light.

Come by during production hours to see it in action! If you think this sounds like a good way to break your beans, Mike is working on building these sort of Breakers and can be contacted at mike@twentyfourblackbirds.com.

Our Tours are Changing!

July 2, 2015 by Becky Wurwarg

Every Monday morning when I open the door to the chocolate factory to start my work week, that heavy, roasty, and sweet chocolate smell overwhelms my senses. By Friday I will have gotten used to it, but it only takes a weekend before it knocks me off my feet again on Monday.

I love that smell, but what I love more is how it represents the myriad things that go on under our roof at 740 Valencia Street. It’s the aroma of everything that we do. It comes from the production team roasting cocoa beans or grinding nibs to start a new batch in a melanger; from the cafe team, steaming up a hot chocolate; the kitchen crew baking off the next round of nutella cookies; the flavor team starting an experimental test batch to ensure quality in our chocolate; someone upstairs breaking up chocolate bars for our next Chocolate 101 class.
Our wide open factory is built on the basis that we love to share what we do. One of our favorite ways to introduce what we do is by showing you our process through a tour of our factory floor. Every time we give a tour, we get the chance to stop and really think through what we do and why we do it. The tour gives us a platform to engage regularly about the process, the local food community, the chocolate community, our relationships with the farms we work with, and the folks that visit us.

When we first established our tour program two years ago, we meant to build a clear look inside our process and how we do what we do. We wanted to make it easy and free, and the feedback has been more encouraging than we could have imagined.

Lately, we are finding that because the tours are free and easy to sign up for, it is also very easy to not attend. Of course, we totally understand that things come up, and anyone who signs up for a tour truly intends to come. However, lately, we have also been amazed by a recent influx of tour requests! Because we are truly trying to share our process with everyone who is interested, we are really hoping to make sure the opportunity to tour is really available for those who will definitely participate. So what to do? We decided to make some tour changes and improvements to our current system!

Sign up will now be available through our website with a calendar that’s easier to use. We are increasing the size of our tours to be able to accommodate eight people. Tours will be held Wednesdays-Saturdays from 6:10-6:50pm, and we have hopes of adding new days of the week in the coming months. We’re extending our tours so we can start with a guided tasting of our single origin bars before taking you on a tour of our factory floor and explaining our process. We are also going to start charging a $5 fee for the tour to encourage those who do sign up to attend. But at the end of the tour we will be giving all attendees who do come a free hot chocolate gift card to use in our cafe! We are hoping this system ensures that everybody who signs up really does participate and ends their tour on an extra chocolate-y note.

We hope to explore our factory and all of its toasty aromas, noises, sights, and tastes with you soon! To reserve a spot, head to our Tours page.