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Two Chocolate Garages

August 8, 2011 by

On Saturday we spent a really inspiring day in another chocolate garage in Palo Alto. We have our own garage, our lab, in East Palo Alto. But, The Chocolate Garage is just a few blocks away, founded by Sunita de Tourreil. We met Sunita a few months ago, and she’s been a wonderful neighbor. Her mission at The Chocolate Garage is to educate. She supports new makers, connecting them to other experts in the industry and introducing her customers to their bars. Her mission is to bring attention to “Happy Chocolate“- chocolate that tastes delicious, but also has integrity in its cacao sourcing and connection to the farmer. We really appreciate her approach. When our space is open in San Francisco, we also hope to have a large educational component of our factory operation. It’s rewarding and exciting to teach chocolate lovers about all the care and effort involved in making chocolate.

Because she’s our neighbor, it’s been very easy to drop by and visit Sunita. A few weeks ago, she came to our garage to try bars Todd brought back from the FCIA event in D.C. and to see our process for roasting test batches. Then on Saturday, Sunita hosted us during the Palo Alto Farmers’ Market. She holds open hours during the farmers’ market, and has many regulars that stop by after shopping for produce. It’s a nice space with comfortable chairs and couches, and it draws in people eager to taste new chocolate and learn about the process of making bars from the bean. Each Saturday she puts together a tasting, and I encourage you to drop by at some point. During the hours we were there, we met lots of her regulars and shared our bars. We chatted about our factory, but also got to talk about the delicious mulberries at the market and the way the market came about in the early 80’s. The Chocolate Garage has a great community.

After our morning with new customers, Alex Rast of Seventypercent.com dropped by to taste our bars as well. He was in town from England, and graciously offered to give us feedback and a lot of incredibly valuable information about process improvements and formal tastings. Alex works with Martin Christy and others at Seventypercent.com to give comprehensive reviews of chocolate bars. His palette is exceptional, but more impressive is his scientific knowledge of bringing out flavor from the bean. He had all kinds of insights, and we will undoubtedly use his feedback to improve our bars. Though, he did offer one piece of advice that we may ignore. He told us that the best way to cleanse your palette is with watery polenta, which he described as having the consistency of gruel. No doubt he’s right- maybe we should go ahead and give it a try! We look forward to keeping in touch with him. He’s a great resource, and we really appreciate the introduction from Sunita.

Sample Invaders

July 25, 2011 by

Whenever we get new beans in, we do a bunch of different tests to find the flavors we like best. Since those test batches aren’t worth tempering, we use some flexible silicon molds (rather than the polycarbonate molds we use for our bars) because it’s easier to get them out after they’ve cooled. As a bonus, those silicone molds come in fun shapes, so now we’re swimming in fish shapes, staring at Moai, and munching on space invaders.

Beans, beans, beans

June 26, 2011 by

We just got a few new bags of beans in (we’re still trying to get as many different beans as we can). Obviously, the bags don’t come with roasting instructions so each time we get a new bag, it’s fun to try and coax out the best flavor. We have a lot of taste tests to do :)

Knowing your beans

May 24, 2011 by

Last November, while Todd was in Costa Rica on vacation, he went to a Bribri reservation and checked out one of their chocolate houses where he bought some sample beans from the APPTA collective:

He was super excited to try the beans so we roasted them up as soon as he got back. Unfortunately, the batch turned out pretty badly so we had to throw it out. We were busy with other things so we didn’t have a chance to really understand the beans and why they made bad chocolate… until now.

We were doing some cleaning and rediscovered his sample of APPTA beans. Now that we have our own handy Magra, we decided to do a cut test to try and understand what was causing the poor flavor:

As soon as we opened the Magra, it was completely obvious what was wrong. First, there were a lot of unripe beans:

You can spot the unripe beans (in red circles above) by their purple color. They have a pretty neutral flavor to start out but then they get really bitter and nasty, almost like a bad olive. Once this flavor’s in your chocolate, you can’t get rid of it. Our tolerance for unripe beans when making chocolate is near zero and these beans were almost 40% unripe!

Unripe beans were only half of the story, though, as there were a large number of under-fermented beans too:

You can find the under-fermented (again, circled in red above) because they look plump and full (well fermented beans have lots of ridges and look “brainy”). Unlike unripe beans, under-fermented beans don’t add a lot of bad flavor. In fact, they don’t really add flavor at all which means that a few under-fermented beans isn’t going to cause a big issue. However, if you have a lot of under-fermentation, you’re not going to get great flavor. Combine that with a lot of unripe beans and you’ve got a bad recipe.

Unfortunately, because APPTA is a collective, they have a number of challenges, particularly around quality control. With about 1000 producers, it’s really hard to verify that each producer is harvesting at the right time. Worse, because beans are combined across producers, you never know what you’re going to get. Add to that variable genetics across producers and the challenges get even bigger.

So what does all this mean? The take away for us is that there’s no replacement for knowing who’s growing your cacao and how they’re doing it. Without that direct relationship, you’ll never be sure of what you’re going to get: even if you get good stuff once, you may not the next time around. Also, as most cacao farmers have never actually tasted finished chocolate, by going direct we can give them feedback on how their processes affect the end product and how to improve them. Finally, and most importantly, by working directly with the farmers, we can make sure more money goes into their pockets rather than someone in the middle.

New Toy

May 19, 2011 by

We just got our Square in the mail and we’re looking forward to using it at the next market. We also started shipping out orders from yesterday.

Inspection Table Done

May 4, 2011 by

We finished our bean inspection table that we mentioned a little while ago. We’re really happy with how it came out. To make the table, we first talked about the design before sketching some ideas out on paper. Once we had a general design we were happy with, we started the real production process.

 

The first step in that process is modeling the pieces in AutoCAD. It took a few iterations to get something we were happy with. Once we had everything modeled, we used MasterCAM to create the toolpaths for the CNC desktop router we’d be using to cut out the pieces. Getting the toolpaths exactly how we wanted them also took a bit of time, but we ended up with a nice, efficient cut. After getting everything set up in the digital world, we went to the Tech Shop to bring the parts to life. We started with an air cut to make sure our toolpath wouldn’t hit anything (work holding, bottom of table, etc) and then we cut the pieces out of foam. The foam pieces looked good, so we started cutting the pieces out of HDPE. We had to adjust the feed rates slightly, but, after a little less than an hour, the parts were all done. After that, we assembled the parts, added the mesh, and sealed the joints using a food grade silicone sealant and the table was done!

Bean Inspection Table

April 29, 2011 by

It’s important to inspect the beans before throwing them in the roaster as there can be lots of junk tagging along in the bag. We decided to build a bean inspection table (a glorified bin with some mesh to let the small junk fall through) to make that step better. We’ve taken some classes at the Tech Shop in the past and this seemed like the perfect time to apply those skills. We modeled the parts using AutoCAD and created the toolpaths using MasterCAM. The video shows the desktop router cutting the pieces out of HDPE. Now we just need to assemble those pieces, add the mesh, and seal everything and we’ll have a fully FDA compliant inspection table.

The 10 Levels of Chocolate Appreciation

April 20, 2011 by

Recently, my wife, Elaine, started taking a class at Stanford about the history and art of the book. The class spends their nights looking through ancient manuscripts and poring over type in Green Library. In the last class, the professor posed the hypothetical question:  “if you came upon a mountain of books and had 20 minutes to save 20 of them, how would you choose?”

Apparently, there is an answer to this — or at least an approach you can take in evaluating a book from an aesthetic and craft, rather than a content, perspective. The idea is that there are seven levels of book craft connoisseurship — a simple framework consisting of the different questions you can ask and answer when examining a book. These range from as basic as: “is the font bold or italic?”… all the way down to who was the punch maker and at which foundry. These questions provide a common vocabulary provide a way to think about the book making craft.

I found this fascinating and thought it would be interesting to apply this same line of thinking to chocolate. If you started from knowing very little about chocolate and wanted to expand your understanding of a particular bar, what would be your framework for learning and going a level deeper? What details would you look for and what questions would you ask? After discussing with Cam, we jotted down some quick notes. I’d love to hear from other chocolate makers and enthusiasts if this seems about right, fill in some gaps, or present an alternate opinion:

The 10 Levels of Chocolate Appreciation

#1 Type — What type of chocolate is it? Is it dark, milk, or white?… or possibly compound (candy bar chocolate with the cocoa butter swapped out for something else).

#2 Aesthetics — is the bar tempered properly, has it bloomed? Does it have flaws, bubbles, or mold release marks? What about the packaging and unwrap experience?

#3 Chocolatier — Who made this bar? Not necessarily the maker of the chocolate, but who tempered, molded and packaged it? What is their story?

#4 Percentage — What percentage cocoa products does this bar have? Why?

#5 Ingredients — What else did they add? Vanilla to even out flavors? Lecithin or cocoa butter to change the viscosity and mouthfeel? How did each of these affect the experience?

#6 Flavor notes — What do you taste and when? How does the flavor evolve?

#7 Country (or countries) of origin — Where did these beans come from? How does the flavor of this bar differ from similar bars from the same region?

#8 Chocolate maker — Who made the chocolate (if not the same as #2). What’s their story? How was the chocolate changed by the chocolatier in #3?

#9 Plantation / Farmer — More specific than #7, where did these beans come from? What’s their lineage? Who is the farmer and what’s their process for harvesting, fermenting, and drying the beans?

#10 Chocolate Making process — What parts of the maker’s process affected the final flavor or mouthfeel and in what ways?

This last one is interesting and best illustrated by a story that Cam told me.  Steve DeVries, an expert chocolate maker, was judging a chocolate competition. Immediately after trying one chocolate, he spit it out, shocking the other judges and the person that had made the chocolate. Steve explained that he could tell by taste and texture that the chocolate had been over-refined and was giving him that “dirt mouth” sensation that lingers on your tongue and would prevent him from tasting anything else. He said he could tell that the chocolate maker had used a ball mill and had let the chocolate refine for too long. Everyone was amazed, as are we, at his level of understanding.

One of the great things about chocolate is that it’s easy to enjoy. At the same time, we’ve found that the more we learn, the deeper the experience can be. So, if you’re a fellow chocolate lover, tell us how you enjoy your favorite chocolate and what you look (and taste) for.