Archive | product

Bunnies and Baskets and Bows, Oh My.

March 28, 2013 by Alice

As it’s getting sunnier and sunnier in the Mission, we’re getting excited about springtime. We’re starting by celebrating Easter in full-force. We have beautiful Easter baskets for sale in our cafe and our online store, and they’re a true collaborative effort. I found Jen Kindell’s prints at MCM and asked her to come up with something chocolatey and festive. She came up with a beautiful version of our caramel tart. The tarts fly out the door at our cafe, so it’s nice to have a long-lasting version. Her cards are silkscreened, signed, and numbered. And, they’re gorgeous!

Then, Norah’s talents came in handy again with our basket assembly line. She makes it look easy, but her bows are very hard to beat.

Finally, each of our baskets is finished with a stamped bunny card. But, those aren’t the only bunnies we’ll have around our cafe. Today, from 4 – 7 PM, we’ll have a bunny petting zoo! Outside our space at 740 Valencia, you’ll be able to pet adult and baby bunnies, and I can’t imagine anything happier. Our cafe will also stay open an hour later, so that everyone can make it to bunnytime. Hope to see you there!

Wishing you a chocolatey Valentine’s Day

February 12, 2013 by Alice

We know that chocolate and Valentine’s Day go very well together, so we created a box of our favorite treats for you to give to your loved ones this holiday.

Our boxes include some of our favorite items from our new factory and cafe on Valencia Street. We included each of our own single-origin bars, from Ambanja, Madagascar; Elvesia, Dominican Republic; and Rio Caribe, Venezuela. In addition, our box also features treats from two local chocolatiers who use our Rio Caribe chocolate to make delicious confections for our retail space. We have chocolate covered nibs and caramelized almonds from Feve and chocolate covered shortbread cookies from Kika’s Treats. Shawn at Feve and Cristina at Kika’s Treats were two of our favorite neighbors in the Dogpatch. We’re very happy to collaborate with them now that we’ve moved to the Mission. And, they make our box of Valentine’s Day goodies that much more delicious!

This box is available for pick-up only. You can preorder a gift box in our online store until Wednesday evening. If you do place an order, please come pick up your box at 740 Valencia Street on February 14th, from 11 AM – 6 PM.

And! If you’d like to tuck a special note inside your box, Pam from Shotwell Paper Mill will be outside our factory and cafe from 12 PM – 5 PM on Thursday letterpress printing custom valentines on paper made from our cacao sacks! Her notes begin, “I love it when,” and you can finish the sentence with a message to your loved ones. All together, it should be a very special day here at Dandelion.

Maya Monster

November 28, 2012 by Cam

We’ve had a few nice mentions in the press recently which generated a bunch of orders. Fortunately, Maya, our fulfillment lead, is a monster at packing up orders:

We’re still a bit backlogged but with Maya on our side, that shouldn’t last too long!

Pirates, Poems, Sea Salt & Chocolate

November 20, 2012 by Chiann

Back in June, Alice and I led a workshop called “Chock-full O’ Chocolate” at our friendly neighborhood pirate supply store, also known as 826 Valencia. Founded ten years ago in San Francisco, 826 Valencia offers a variety of free programs for primary and secondary school students to support their writing skills, foster creativity and inspire confidence through writing and the literary arts.

We met a group of really great, talented students (all between the ages 12-15) who came to learn about chocolate, the chocolate-making process, and to further hone their creative writing skills. By the end of the four-week session, each student had produced numerous short stories, poems, and drawings inspired by chocolate. They personally selected their best pieces, which were published in a chapbook entitled If I Were A Wizard Chocolatier.

We’re thrilled to announce that this chapbook can now be found at our chocolate factory as well as 826 Valencia! To commemorate this super-special collaboration with our neighbors, If I Were A Wizard Chocolatier comes with its own limited-edition chocolate bar, developed especially for 826. It’s called the High Seas bar, complete with sea salt and an intriguing back-story. In honor of the partnership, we’ve made a total of 826 bars.

You can pick up both as a bundle at our space; alternatively, you can purchase the chapbook at 826 Valencia’s Pirate Supply Store, where you’ll also receive a golden ticket that can be redeemed for the accompanying High Seas bar at our location one block away.

María and Lauren, two of the fantastic designers at 826, are responsible for creating the look of the chapbook, as well as the packaging for the High Seas bar. They did an absolutely amazing job, and we can’t wait for you to dive right in and enjoy both!

A portion of the proceeds from If I Were A Wizard Chocolatier and the High Seas bar will go to 826 Valencia, so they can continue to fund free student programming for elementary-, middle- and high-schoolers. We had a great time working with everyone at 826, and especially with our workshop participants: Nathan, Miriam, Cecily, Janelle, Bryan, Troy, Anja, Zora, Anthony, Alexis and Myles.

Now that our factory and retail space on Valencia is open to the public, please feel free to stop by and thumb through the chapbook: maybe it’ll inspire you to pen a paean to chocolate as well!

Please click on the links to learn more about 826 Valencia and 826 National, which coordinates its sister chapters located around the country.

Introducing Rio Caribe: The Trials and Tribulations of a First Time Batch Maker

September 10, 2012 by Caitlin

It’s official, my first batch is complete and making its way into people’s mouths all over the country!

I could not be more excited as it was a long time coming. This road began several months ago when I was in the process of becoming a full-fledged chocolate maker (I had been an apprentice chocolate maker until that point). The last hurdle, after showing that I could complete all the steps of our process correctly and efficiently and passing a “background” chocolate knowledge exam, was to design a batch of my own.

Now I had been making chocolate for several months at this point, but I had followed prescribed processes that had been developed for each of our three origins at the time (Madagascar, Colombia, and Ocumare, Venezuela). So I was given the option of ordering beans from a broker or using some of the beans that were already in storage. I looked around at the beans on the market (and we already had samples many of them), but the pragmatist in me won out and I chose to use some organic Bolivian beans we already had on hand.

I launched into the first round of taste tests, excited at the prospect of my first batch. I sat by the roaster eagerly awaiting the first crack, a common point of reference we use to start taste tests (when the first bean pops away from its husk). The trick is to wait for the first crack (or two) and then push the button on the roaster to start cooling the beans. I pulled up my chair so my face was directly in front of the roaster, straining to hear over our roaster that elusive first crack. I waited and waited and then I heard it, I got so excited I pressed the button starting the cooling cycle and then realized…I hadn’t looked at the time so the whole exercise of finding a reference point was lost. So once I stopped blushing and feeling silly, I quickly prepped another kilo of beans and was at it again. This time, it was a success. To cover my bases I did a roast two minutes longer and another two minutes shorter.

In no time, all three 1 kilo batches were cracked, sorted, winnowed, ground and into the cocoatown (what we now call…mini) melangers. A day later, they were ready to be cooled and tasted. I excitedly brought them out at lunchtime for a group taste test. We all tasted our pieces, prepared to be delighted by our newest taste test and it was AWFUL. Poor Elaine, who was used to taste tests being fairly palatable, had a rather large chunk and I took one look at her face and told her it would be okay if she spit it out. Really, it was terrible.

I kept at it. Trying different roast profiles…a temperature spike at the beginning, a longer slower roast, and my colleagues were great sports and continued to taste the different test batches in all their glory. Nothing was working.

Then, a giant order came in and my immediate production duties shelved batch development. About a month went by and we were running out of Colombian beans, so all of the sudden, getting a new origin online was an urgent matter to avoid a bean crisis. I was not feeling optimistic about the Bolivian beans filling the Colombian void, and then thankfully we had some newly arrived Venezuelan beans from the Rio Caribe region by way of the Franceschi family. I repeated the taste tests process and got excited when I was first cracking the beans and this amazing aroma was released. The first round of taste tests were ALL delicious. It was glorious compared to my previous attempts, and felt like such a luxury to pick the best from the really good.

We all agreed on a roast profile we liked and I got the go ahead to make a thirty kilo batch. The batch tasted great and I was so excited to temper it. But that wasn’t the end of the story, I put the chocolate in our temperamental temperer and it wouldn’t get anywhere close to the correct temperature to come out tempered before seizing (this is when cooled chocolate builds up in the pipes of the machines and simply stops coming out of the nozzle). I tried for about 4 hours and only had 6 streaky bars to show for it. I couldn’t stop thinking, what are we going to do as our supply of Colombian bars quickly dwindled.

I was bailed out by a new motor for the temperer. It arrived just in the nick of time and was strong enough to pump that thick Rio Caribe through the pipes and into the molds at the correct temperature. Thank goodness!

The Rio Caribe is just lovely–full of deep, dark chocolately richness and it just begs to be squished between graham crackers and a roasted marshmallow or smother a perfectly ripe strawberry. It’s been well received at the Noe and Mission community farmers markets as well as around the factory. One of our newest additions to the production crew, Joey, let it slip that this is his favorite origin yet. Not to mention it got the stamp of approval from my Grammy. So I could not be happier to share it will you all and hope you like it just as much as we do!

Cynthia giving me a chocolate high five!

Wraptacular Machine

July 30, 2012 by Cam

As Todd mentioned earlier, we recently got a wrapping machine. We’ve been really happy with the paper and foil we use and we weren’t willing to compromise on them just to make wrapping easier. Finding a machine that would work in theory was challenging enough; actually getting it to work has been just as challenging. Fortunately, we were introduced to Jim Greenberg of Union Confectionery Machinery and I spent a bunch of time out there with Pablo and Osvaldo to get the machine set up for us. A week or two ago, the machine arrived and I couldn’t have been more excited:

Even after scrambling to find a forklift and forklift operator (Thanks, Juan!) and breaking the crate down, we were left with this:

It’s tough to tell from the picture, but the hallway to our space in the Dogpatch is huge but that doesn’t stop the machine from taking up almost the entire thing. Now that we could see the machine in all its glory, we realized that we had a small problem… the machine is 67 inches wide at its smallest point (with the safety covers off) and our door is only 47 inches wide. After a little bit of scrambling and enlisting the help our friend Snooky and his pal, we realized that we could make the machine small enough by removing one shaft from the machine. Luckily for us, the piece we needed to remove was easy to mark so we didn’t ruin any of the calibration:

Once the machine had the left piece removed and the “super pallet” had been cut to size, it was the moment of truth:

Fortunately, our measurements weren’t off and it just squeaked through the door. Everyone was pretty happy, including Snooky:

After moving a few tables, the machine was maneuvered into its new home:

The machine looks great in pictures but it’s even more fun to see it actually work so I’ll post a video soon.

It’s open!

May 11, 2012 by Alice

After many months, our online store is open! We shut our store down in December in order to keep up with our growing wholesale demand. At the time, we were struggling with our temperer and working hard to grow our production while our demand continues to increase. It feels pretty momentous to open the store again. We’ve made great strides with our production pipeline in the past few months. Cam’s taken on the role of production manager and has been busy whipping us into shape. He makes an epically long to-do list for us every morning and puts it on our chalkboard. After a few long days in February, we threatened to get him a smaller chalkboard with less room to pile on tasks. But, instead, we rose to the challenge of cranking out bars.

We’ve made a few other process improvements as well. Caitlin’s now an expert temperer, meaning there are extra hands to help make bars. Cam created a timer for our roaster. We now hear the Oompa Loompa song from Willy Wonka every time another round of beans is done. Todd and Greg have been working overtime on our cracker. And, the rest of us are pitching in as well. All these things together mean that we have bars on hand and are ready to sell them in our online store.

If you click over to our store, you’ll find our bars from Madagascar, Colombia, and Ocumare along with gift sets and tickets to our Chocolate 101 classes. We’ve also included a note about shipping in the warm summer weather. We have to be careful with our bars in the heat, so we’ll only ship out orders on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. We’ll take every precaution we can, but if you receive bars that have suffered in the heat, please let us know and we’ll happily replace them.

In the past few months, we received a few emails from chocolate lovers eager to buy our bars and we’re happy that you all now have ready access. Thanks for waiting!

Hello, Four Barrel!

February 22, 2012 by Alice

Don’t forget, we’ll be teaching Chocolate 101 next Wednesday night in our space. There are 15 spots and we’d love to see you there. Tickets are available in our store.

The next time you’re walking down Valencia Street craving our chocolate and eagerly awaiting our factory, you can make a stop at Four Barrel. As of last week, all of their chocolate drinks are made with our Madagascar.

We stopped by the cafe late last month to make a few test drinks. Our tasting wasn’t nearly as intense as the last time we made hot chocolate, but we did taste drinks made with our Colombia, Costa Rica, and Madagascar. Initially, we thought the Colombia would be best as a simple, sweet drinking chocolate, but the fruitiness of our Madagascar tasted incredible with Four Barrel’s coffee. The complexity of the chocolate played really well with the rich milk and espresso.

Our working with Four Barrel is an awesome partnership. We admired their space long before we met Jeremy and the rest of the crew. We’d be lucky to have a place as welcoming and good looking. And as two roasters on the same street, there’s a pretty unique opportunity for collaboration. When we open on Valencia, we’ll serve their coffee along with all of our hot chocolates.

Hitting the big time!

February 20, 2012 by Alice

Don’t forget, we’ll be teaching Chocolate 101 next Wednesday night in our space. There are 15 spots and we’d love to see you there. Tickets are available in our store.

Chiann and I wrapped our 10,000th bar last Friday night. We’ve been counting the packs of foil we’ve used from the beginning. When we finished our last pack, we’d wrapped a full 10,000.

We snuck a golden ticket into the bar. Chiann created an awesome origami envelope with a note from us inside. If you’re lucky enough to open this bar, there’s a surprise waiting for you. 10,000 bars has been a lot of work, especially without oompa loompas to help, but it’s also been a lot of fun. We had to do something to celebrate and a nod to one of our favorite chocolate factories seemed just right.

Good Food Awards

November 15, 2011 by Todd

We’re thrilled to hear that we were chosen as a finalist for the 2012 Good Food Awards. Nine bean-to-bar companies were chosen out of countless submissions and we are happy to be considered in such good company. Here’s the full list of chocolate finalists:

Amano Artisan Chocolate, Guayas Utah
Bittersweet, Rich Milk California
Dandelion Chocolate, 70% Costa Rica California
Escazu Artisan Chocolate, 60% Goat’s Milk & 65% Costa Rica North Carolina
Fresco Chocolate, 214 Madagascar 74% & 217 Chuao 70% Washington
Lillie Belle Farms, Perfect Illusion 65 Oregon
Patric Chocolate, LLC, PBJ OMG & Signature 70% Blend Missouri
Rogue Chocolatier, Inc., Hispaniola & Sambirano Massachusetts
Theo Chocolate, Theo and Jane Goodall 70% Dark Chocolate Washington

In other news, Cam and Alice are deep in the jungles of Madagascar visiting Bertil at the cacao farm. I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of internet out there, but I did manage to get a quick update from Cam that he made it there in one piece. Updates to follow.