Archive | recipe

Secret Recipe: Richard’s Chocolate Bao

October 17, 2017 by Richard H.

Richard Huynh came to our production team from a life cooking professionally in kitchens like Mission Chinese, and he’s become known around these parts for his culinary experiments with chocolate. He’s a bit of a kitchen wizard, and we’re really excited every time he brings a new adventure to the table, like this one. And ICYMI, check out his primer on smoking meat with cacao husk, and making charcoal too!

When I was interviewing to be an apprentice chocolate maker here last year, I’m pretty sure I spent more time talking about dim sum, baos, and dumplings than I did talking about the job I was applying for.

That’s because prior to making chocolate here, I spent most of my free time making soup dumplings, or xiaolongbao (小笼包). Soup dumplings are pretty much exactly what they sound like: starchy balloons filled with hot soup. It sounds like a bit of an impossible trick, but the principle behind them is actually pretty simple; when you make the stock for these dumplings by boiling bones with aromatics, all the yummy collagen seeps out of the bones you’re simmering (or pig’s ears and chicken feet in my case) and turns into a firm jelly that you can mash up and integrate into your dumpling filling. Once you steam the dumplings, all that jelly melts back down into stock. Magic!

At some point, I got the idea to try this out with things other than stock, including, of course, chocolate. Soup dumplings are nearly always savory, and I really wanted to try making a sweeter equivalent. Eventually, this idea mutated into something else because when I tried to make soup dumplings filled with ganache, they were very leaky. And so, I resorted to another more durable dough: bao.

Bao dough is that fluffy, soft, shiny dough that you’ll sometimes find taco’d or totally wrapped around pork belly. It’s a kind of Chinese dumpling, sort of, and it seemed like a much more durable skin for a ganache-filled masterpiece than thin, traditional dumpling dough. And, it worked! There are a few ways you could do this, but you’ll find my favorite method below.

You can also riff on this method using any filling that’s somewhat solid when cool, and liquid when hot. The principle is always the same: make the filling, cool it down to solidify it, wrap the dough around it, and when ready to serve, heat it back up. (You can make loads of them and keep them in the freezer, too.)

Typically, these buns are steamed, but I don’t have a steamer so borrowed a trick from making gyoza (or potstickers) and pan-fried the buns in oil for a nice crispy, caramelized edge. Then, I spooned a little water into the hot pan with the dumplings and capped it real quick to seal in all that steam. This steams and cooks the buns and the filling, and after all the water boils off, the leftover oil crisps up the bottom of the bun.

Panfried Chocolate Ganache Baos (巧克力生煎包)

Bao dough

240 grams // 2 cups all purpose flour

50 grams // ¼ cup warm water

80 gram // ⅓ cup milk

2g // 1 tsp yeast

5 grams // ½ teaspoon salt

50 grams ¼ cup sugar

Chocolate ganache

150 grams // 1 cup chopped chocolate,

150 grams // ⅔ cup heavy cream (or coconut cream if you’re lactose intolerant like myself)

First, make the dough:

Combine yeast and warm milk, let sit for about ten minutes until it is bloomed. When it becomes bubbly and frothy, it’s ready to use
Then combine the flour with the milk, and knead until the dough is smooth, springs back when you poke it, and no longer sticks to your hands. Afterwards leave the dough to “proof” in a warm area, covered, for 60 to 90 minutes.The dough should have doubled in volume in this time. Meanwhile, make the ganache.

To make the ganache:

Heat the cream slowly until just steaming, but not simmering. Add chopped chocolate and stir until fully melted and incorporated.
Place ganache in fridge, and let cool until solid enough to scoop, at least one hour. Use an ice cream scooper to scoop out balls onto a sheetpan lined with parchment paper. Cover the sheet pan and store in fridge for at least 20-30 minutes or until ready to use.

To assemble:

Divide the dough into twelve portions, roughly 35 grams each.
Flatten out each dough into disk with your hand, and use a small rolling pin to flatten the sides. Turn the disk as you roll to make it even.
Place ganache ball in the center of the dough disk and wrap it or pleat it shut by making small folds and creasing them together with your fingers.
Once all baos are wrapped, grab a skillet and put it over medium high heat. Once hot, add oil.
Once the oil is hot, add buns to skillet. They should sizzle when they hit the pan.
Add a few tablespoons of water to the bottom of the skillet and cover. Once water has all boiled off, turn heat to low and let buns fry in the bottom.Turn off the heat and let buns sit in pan covered for at least five minutes, if you take the buns off too early, they will collapse due to the drastic change in air pressure
After five minutes take the buns off the skillet and let cool.

Education Station: What’s Up with Whole Roasted Beans?

July 28, 2017 by Robert

You’re curious, so we find answers. Our education team fields lots of questions from our guests during classes, so we’ve decided to launch a series of monthly installments in which we tackle some of those questions and share the answers with the world. We call it The Education Station. This week, Robert addresses some questions about a product we sell in our cafes, and what to do with them.

At Dandelion Chocolate, most people know us for our chocolate bars, drinks, and pastries, but the one item our customers seem to be most curious about lately are whole roasted beans. We sell bags of them in our cafés, and after spending most of my time working at the Ferry Building as a cafe associate, I’ve heard a lot of questions about them: “Are those coffee beans?” or “Is that where chocolate comes from?” and of course, “What do I do with them?” Well, now is the time to grab a bag and come along to dehusk that question.

To start, Whole Roasted Beans (or as we often abbreviate, WRB) are cocoa beans. Yes, these are what we use to make chocolate. So nope, they are not coffee beans. After we finish hand sorting all of our beans—picking out the cracked, flat, and broken ones that might not taste good—we roast them, and then we crack, winnow and grind them down with sugar into chocolate. Roasting is a very important step in our flavor development process for two reasons: One, it helps bring out the flavors that we love in our chocolate and two, it’s the ‘kill step’ that ultimately kills any possible pathogens and assures that our chocolate is safe to eat. For our WRB, we use Madagascan beans from Bertil Akesson’s Bejofo Estate, and roast them a bit longer than we do if we were making them into chocolate. Why? The answer is simple. When roasted lightly, our Madagascar beans have the bright flavors we think taste amazing as a chocolate bar (after they’ve been conched and sugar has been added) but we don’t necessarily love those flavors as much as a stand-alone experience. So, by increasing our roast time, we’ve been able to skim off some of the sharper acidic flavors, leaving us with a nutty, citrusy flavor profile that we think is more snackable. If you want to learn more about the roasting process for our beans, we have factory tours and classes available to answer any questions you may have.

So, how do I eat them?

Snacking
One way people eat them is as a snack! You can squeeze one lightly and roll it between your fingers, just like cracking a peanut, to snap the skin and make it easier to peel off. You’ll end up with two parts; a peel, which we call husk, and the solids inside or the “meat of the bean,” which we call the nib. The nibs are what we refine down to make chocolate. This is the closest thing to eating 100% chocolate without the commitment. I often taste nutty notes in pure nibs, similar to a peanut or almond.

Topping
Using the nibs as a topping is always my favorite way to enjoy them. I like to have the crunchy texture and nibby flavor that it adds to things I already love. You can sprinkle the full nibs on top of yogurt, oatmeal, a salad or even ice cream! If you feel like getting creative, many people candy their nibs and use them as a delicious topping for desserts. Not only can you eat them as broken chunks of nib, but you can grind them up in a blender or food processor to make a nutty powder to boost your recipes. I suggest trying matcha soft serve, covered in ground nibs – yum!

Baking
Baking with chocolate is always fun, but with nibs, it’s even better! My favorite is making chocolate cherry bread using nibs instead of chocolate chips. Roasted cacao beans also make a great substitute for nuts. You can easily make banana nut bread by replacing nuts for nibs. We use nibs in many of our recipes here at Dandelion, stop by either of our cafes to try how our kitchen team incorporates them into our pastries and drinks.

Chocolate making
Although it’s possible, I wouldn’t recommend using these bean for home chocolate making. As I mentioned before, we developed a very specific roast profile that is intentionally different from the one we use for our bars, so we would hate for you to not get the result you wanted. If you’re interested in making chocolate at home we have a book coming out in November where we go more in depth, but if you can’t wait, sign up for our Chocolate 201 classes and let’s make a batch of chocolate!

Are there any other experiments I can do with them?

Absolutely! The great thing about working at Dandelion Chocolate is all of the tasting and experiments we do here—from our chocolate makers developing new bar profiles to our pastry team regularly adding new things to the menu. Everyone works hard in learning and creating something they’re excited about, so I wanted to share a couple of things that I made at home using my roasted beans.

Cracking and winnowing (removing husks)
If you want a quick, but slightly messy way to remove the husk off the beans, this has worked since the beginning of our chocolate journey. This is the same technique our founder, Todd, used when he was starting in his kitchen at home.

Put your desired amount of beans into a ziplock bag and make sure it’s closed all the way.
Using a rolling pin to go over the bag and break all of the beans. What you will have in the bag is a bunch of broken husk and nibs, all mixed together.
Place all of the broken nibs and husk into a bowl. I found that using a strainer helped me filter out some of the bigger pieces of husk before putting in the bowl.
Then use a blow dryer to “winnow” the husk off the nibs. Since husk pieces are light, they should blow away and the nibs should remain in the bowl. This takes a little practice of angling the blow dryer just right to allow only the husk to fly over the edge of the bowl, while the heavier nibs remain inside. As a warning, make sure you do not do this in a place where pets could eat them. Theobromine is very, very dangerous for dogs!
If you’re like me, and like things done at 110%, you can remove any remaining husk by hand. In our factory, we use the ten-minute rule: once you start picking nibs clean, cap yourself at ten minutes. Otherwise, you’ll be doing it for eternity.

I also tried seeing how long it would take me to remove the husk by hand, bean by bean, and got through half of the bag before my hands were covered in cocoa butter and smelled like chocolate. It’s not impossible, but requires more patience, a lot of podcasts, and may take longer than cracking and winnowing.

Cold Brew infused with nibs
After spending some time working at the Ferry Building one of my favorite things to do was to make our Ecuador Cold Brew. So I went home and made some for myself in a French press.

Start off by grinding your coffee at a coarse grind.
Optional: Use a spice grinder. I tried to match the same coarseness as the coffee.
Pour the coffee into the French press first and then fill it about halfway full with boiling water.
Next, add the nibs and stir everything together before topping it off with more water.
Remember to put the lid on, but don’t plunge it.
Leave it to brew at room temperature for 24 hours.
Plunge the coffee, and do it slowly so none of the grounds make it to your coffee.
Transfer to a jar and put it in the fridge to enjoy later.

Waffles with nibs

This was probably the most exciting thing I got to do. I bought a cast iron waffle maker and was finally able to put it to use. If you were wondering, this is where I used those nibs I winnowed by hand!

Here is a recipe I adapted from Flour Arrangements:

INGREDIENTS

1¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
⅓ cup cocoa nibs
2 large eggs
1¾ cups buttermilk
1 stick butter, melted
2 teaspoons vanilla
maple syrup, for serving

INSTRUCTIONS

Combine all of the dry ingredients into a bowl.
In another bowl, mix the eggs, buttermilk, melted butter and vanilla.
Combine wet and dry ingredients.
Brush each side of the waffle maker with sunflower oil, or another neutral oil.
Pour 1/2 cup of batter into the pan for each waffle.
Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until golden and crispy at the edges.
You can use maple syrup if you like, but I used strawberries as toppings since I wanted to really taste the nibs.

I love incorporating roasted beans into my overall diet, especially if I want to cut out sugar for a bit. The possibilities are endless, and if you ever see me at an event or class I would love to hear how you used your beans. Or comment your favorite ways below! Remember there’s no right or wrong way to taste chocolate, so I hoped this helped answer some of your questions. There are lots more experiments that I wanted to try, like smoothies and candied nibs, so keep an eye out for another post soon.

Blazin Husks

July 2, 2017 by Richard H.

Richard is a chocolate maker at our Valencia St. factory, and as a former line cook, he’s been eagerly experimenting with ways to bring cacao husk into his culinary endeavors. Here, he gives us a primer on his most recent adventures: smoking meat and making charcoal with husk! A quick disclaimer: because cocoa beans come straight from farms, there is always the risk of pathogen contamination or heavy metals. Check out our blog post that dives into some of those risks here. The husk that Richard used was from Mantuano, Venezuela, and tested negative for heavy metals and aflotoxins. We very, very strongly encourage you (we’d require it if we were standing in your kitchen) that you know the source of your husk, and check in with your supplier to make sure that it has been tested for contamination. Ok, now that that’s over, let’s smoke!

I’ve always been fascinated with finding uses for things that people typically throw away. I guess this attitude came from growing up with family that spent a few years in a refugee camp, so I grew up with a strong emphasis on not wasting anything. A lot of delicious things have been invented from what was previously considered “scraps” including meatloaf, Vietnamese Pho, and most stews. In our factory, we’ve got no use for cocoa husk (the outer shell of the cocoa bean), other than donating it to local farms to use as mulch. I’ve done a few weird projects with chocolate at home—chocolate milk dumplings (like soup dumplings but with chocolate milk, peanut butter, and banana), and tangyuan, which is like a mochi in a ginger syrup but I made it with chocolate ganache in a cacao nib and ginger syrup. But smoking meat with cacao husks was especially enticing to me because I get to use something we normally throw away. That, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying wood chips. And by cheaper, I mean free (for me).

So, on one of my days off, I drove up to the Valencia St. Factory and came home with a 7-kilogram bag of husk from a batch of beans from Mantuano, Venezuela that was winnowed that day. My mission: to find out if I can, in fact, smoke meat with cacao husk.

So, can you?

You bet! Turns out that it works. Though it doesn’t impart any special chocolatey notes to the meat, it definitely makes for a faint smokey flavor, almost like oak or maple. Now, I am very far from a barbecue master, so I am not familiar with the nuances of different types smoke and how they impart different flavors. I just know that it is possible to smoke with the husk and that the end result tastes pretty good. If anything, it is a convenient alternative to wood chips.

The technique I used to smoke with cacao husk was inspired by Chinese tea-smoking (think tea smoked duck). The typical method for tea-smoking involves wrapping your tea with rice and spices in foil. In this method, you bunch up all your smoking fuel so that it burns a little slower. The low oxygen environment keeps it from igniting and turning to ash. Here, I’ll outline the process that I used with my grill because I don’t have a smoker (yet). If you don’t you have a smoker like me, you can just use a little Weber grill ($30-$40 from Home Depot). If you have a smoker, I imagine you can replace your wood chips with packets of wet cacao husk.

How to smoke with cacao husk:

This is my method for smoking anything using cacao husk, and I recommend using it on brisket or white fish to start, or pork belly—which you’ll find a recipe for below.

Smoking Packet:

Fill foil with a few handfuls of cacao husk and wrap it up.

Poke holes in the foil to allow room for smoke to escape.

Do this to make two larger to three smaller foil packets.

Set Up Your Grill:

Set a metal pan full of water under where the meat will go, this will simultaneously add moisture, catch drippings, and act as a heat sink to keep the temperature consistent as you are smoking your meat.

Light your coals using a charcoal chimney, or any other method you know. Add a bed of unlit coals opposite of where you will grill your meat. Add your lit coals on top of these. Cover and preheat your grill until it reaches roughly 250°F (you’ll want a thermometer here).

Directions:

Place smoking packet over coals, and place grill rack on. Place meat on grill above the water pan

Stick a lid on the grill with vents above the meat, half open. This creates airflow that will guide the smoke towards the meat you are cooking.

Replace coals every hour or so to maintain temperature and fuel for your grill. If the packet stops smoking replace it with a new one.

After about four hours, begin checking the temperature of your meat with an internal thermometer. Once the meat reaches 145°F, the meat is done. Now take the meat off and let rest.

So far, I’ve only done this the husk from Venezuelan beans, and I’m curious to see if different husks might impart different flavors.

RECIPE: Crispy Smoked Pork Belly with Cacao Husk

Ingredients:
1- 1.5 lbs of pork belly, skin on
2-3 foil packets of cacao husk (instructions above)
Kosher salt
a few tablespoons of Chinese five spice

Score the skin in cross hatches on the skin side of the pork belly to allow fat to drain out when cooking.
Rub a thin layer of salt and Chinese five spice all over the pork belly.

Heat up coals for the grill in a chimney starter, and prepare smoking packets. Place water pan in the grill, once coals are ready place them on one side next to water pan. Place smoke packet over coals and allow the charcoal grill to preheat until the thermometer reads roughly 225°F.

Place pork belly, skin-side up on the grill above the water pan, and layer more kosher salt on top of the skin. Cover grill let smoke for at least 4-6 hours until the salt has formed a crust and the internal temperature has reached 145°.

Take pork off the grill and remove the salt crust. Preheat oven to 475°F, and bake for another 30 minutes, or until skin is crackly and crispy (alternatively you can place the pork belly under the broiler for 5-10 minutes). That’s it! Enjoy your crispy smoked pork belly.

Bonus! Making Charcoal out of Cacao Husk

Husk Charcoal Flakes

One of the byproducts of smoking with cacao is that you get charcoal flakes at the end that you can use later to make charcoal briquettes.

For those who don’t know, charcoal is made by heating high carbon material (typically wood, discarded coconut shells, and other plant materials) in a low oxygen environment so that “impurities,” or anything that isn’t carbon, burn out, and the carbon itself (the charcoal) doesn’t combust and turns to ash.

Normally when people make charcoal, they are looking to make lump charcoal, from whole chunks of wood, especially in more rural areas. I first ran into homemade charcoal when I was staying in Kenya, where the folks I was staying with would essentially light a pile of wood on the fire, then cover it with dirt, so the wood didn’t burn into ash.

Inevitably, you will also end up with little bits of charcoal that break off that are too small to use on their own. Charcoal briquettes are made by grinding up all these extra bits and pieces into a powder and mixing them with a binder (I used cornstarch because that was what I had on-hand), then shaping them into briquettes. They’re basically the hotdogs of the charcoal world.

Cocoa charcoal!

If you try this, please let me know how it went in the comments below!

A Month of Macaron Madness

February 14, 2017 by Mary Bradford

One of the three bazillion trays of macaron shells we made.

I started preparing for Valentine’s Day a month ago. No, not plotting any grand romantic gesture for a significant other – this is a different sort of relationship. I’m talking about my love/hate affair with macarons.

What is it about macarons that seems to have enchanted everyone with Instagram? Here in the states, these French almond cookies that sandwich a soft, flavored filling have become quite a phenomenon. Is it the bright colors? Is it the shatteringly crisp exterior that gives way to a delightfully chewy center? I suspect the fact that they’re French has a lot to do with it; Je ne sais quoi and all that.

When we decided we wanted to offer a special something for Valentine’s Day, everyone in the kitchen agreed that there could be no more perfect way to express our love of chocolate than a box of macarons that showcased five of our single origin chocolates.

The reason macarons are usually only found in bakeries and restaurants, rather than the home kitchen, is probably that they are a rather intimidating project to take on. Admittedly, if you don’t have a great deal of experience making them, even if you’re a professional baker like I am, the prospect of making macarons can be a little…frightening. My team and I had made macarons for our café’s Chef’s Tasting Menu with success before we took on this challenge, but we had never had the pleasure of making them on a monstrous scale in such a tiny timeframe. For Valentine’s Day, we planned to make at least one hundred boxes, with ten macarons in each. My calculator watch tells me that that amounts to 2,000 shells. No big deal, right? We had a month.

The utter relief of pulling the last tray from the oven.

The thing about macarons is that something can go wrong at nearly every single step of the process, and they are delicate: the almond flour must be ground and sifted finely enough, the egg whites must be at room temperature, the meringue must be folded into the almond-sugar mixture enough (but not too much!) This process is known as macaronage, and when done correctly produces a thick batter that flows like lava but still holds its shape when piped. This is the hardest part and can only be perfected through practice. Throw our chocolate into the mix, which doesn’t always like to behave like normal chocolate in the pastry kitchen, and you’ve got your work cut out for you. Then of course you have the temperature and humidity of your kitchen to deal with because it just wouldn’t be fun unless the very elements of nature were against you, too.

When we started this project, I immediately began working the macaron shift, churning them out and stowing them away in the freezer to be filled with ganache right before the big day. They all came out perfectly, and I was queen of the macarons.

And then I wasn’t.

I may never know why, but suddenly they were coming out wrong. There were batches that would come out looking like I was making a different cookie altogether. I had not changed anything about my process, and yet the results were, shall we say, less than ideal. There were batches that came out wrinkled on top, ones that spread out too much and stuck to each other, some that looked grainy, and some horrific ones that cracked and deflated into sad brown puddles. And we weren’t even halfway to our 2,000 macaron goal.

That was a bad week. In the depths of my macaron despair, I questioned everything I thought I knew about making them, I tried tweaking my method in various ways, with no success. Finally, I decided to try making them with Italian meringue – pouring cooked sugar syrup into whipped egg whites, instead of a French meringue, where the uncooked sugar is added alone to the whites. French meringue had worked so well for me in the past, and I didn’t think it would make a difference, but I was desperate for a solution. When I made this new batch using the Italian method, I could feel it – this was going to work. And it did.

I don’t know the exact science behind why I could suddenly make macarons again, but this is what I have learned about them: they take practice. You can feel when you’re doing it right: the texture of the batter will be smooth and flowing, and just beginning to get shiny. Once you know that feeling, your macarons will always come out perfectly (well, almost always). And so, with the help of my rockstar pastry team, we made 2,010 macaron shells, plus one extra batch for good measure. We figured out how to assemble the boxes and tie the bows on 100 sets of macarons for Valentine’s Day, a few of which are still left for those of you procrastinators who waited until tonight to grab something for your darling (or yourself, which I advocate). Consider it our way of saying Happy Valentine’s Day, with love, from the Dandelion Chocolate kitchen to you.

Canelé. Passionfruit. Pancetta.

January 15, 2016 by Lisa Vega

For the past few weeks, Executive Pastry Chef Lisa Vega and our pastry team have been busy developing three new recipes to coincide with the opening of our Ferry Building brick-and-mortar space. Below, she recounts just how it all came together.

A canelé is a beautiful thing, but as any home cook or pastry chef knows, they’re so hard to make well. I’ve always thought that if everyone in my kitchen can bake a perfect canelé, that means we have the skills to do just about anything. To kick us off on recipe development, I sent Meredyth, Lucy, Lia, and Mary this essay by Paula Wolfert about the history and closely-guarded secrets of the canelé; the recipe is filled with places to trip up: seasoning the copper molds with a perfectly even, paper-thin coat of butter and beeswax in a way that doesn’t leave puddles or holes in the crust of the pastry, flipping them out of the molds while still hot, baking them them to the perfect threshold that crisps the crust but doesn’t over-bake the custard inside.

The cakes themselves are fluted and small enough to hold in your palm, and the hallmark of a good one is the shining, crackling, nearly blackened crust of caramelized sugar around a pillowy soft baked custard inside. A classic canelé is vanilla, but we’re not traditionalists in this kitchen. Ours, of course, is chocolate. Deep, dark chocolate. It took two weeks of constant recipe testing, but we’ve finally nailed it, and though the bakers in Bordeaux 300 years ago would slap my wrist for saying it, I think chocolate is a canelé’s best friend.

crust

Next, we decided to work on something more seasonal: a chocolate passionfruit tart. Meredyth calls these “Drake tarts” because we usually blast Drake over the Jambox when we make them—a good soundtrack to dozens of recipe iterations and shortbread dough that won’t stop cracking when you tuck it into the mold. In the end, we ended up with a rum -and-coconut caramel, a ganache with passionfruit purée and Camino Verde chocolate topped with toasted meringue and coconut, all inside a buttery, chocolate shortbread crust.

And for our final, salty finale, we tried something we’ve never tried before: a savory pastry. I’ve always wanted to include something savory, so we got to work on what I think is a wonderful new counterpart to our most chocolatey chocolate: pancetta. We use pancetta from The Fatted Calf—not too salty—which works quite nicely with the nibs and buttery richness of our nibby scone. We also peppered in a few Deglet Noor dates (Medjools were too sweet and mushy) for a little more earthy sweetness, and behold: the Pancetta Scone. Enjoy!

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.

Baking with Nibs: Cynthia’s Sticky Buns

April 6, 2015 by Cynthia Jonasson

Sticky buns before going in the oven.

I don’t always find the time to make sticky buns, but when I do, they never last long. These are not for those avoiding gluten or dairy or sugar, and each time I make them I love the way the ooey, gooey caramel glaze on top counteracts the bitterness of the nibs I use in place of nuts. This recipe was adapted from Peter Reinhart’s excellent book, The Breadbaker’s Apprentice. I often use nibs in place of nuts when I’m baking, and I recommend anyone try it. Depending on where the cacao is from, they can add a ruddy earthiness, tart fruit notes, or smokiness, as well as a different kind of texture.

I’ve shared this recipe with others who haven’t been able to replicate the results, and I believe these three tips are what make these sticky buns extra delicious. Follow them for best results.

Weigh, don’t measure! After making these in a rental cabin where I didn’t have a scale, I can personally attest to this. Using a measuring cup, particularly for flour, can cause very different weights of flour to be used. For this recipe, you want to use as little as possible, or the dough will become dry and it’s very easy to use too much if you don’t weigh your flour. (The sticky buns will still be tasty, but results are always better when I weigh the ingredients).
The Window Pane Test. This is a technique I learned from the Breadbaker’s Apprentice. To test if the gluten in the dough is relaxed enough, grab a piece of it and stretch it apart by four corners into a rectangle. If you can stretch it to a thinness that you can almost see through it like a window, its ready. If it tears or is too sticky to do so, the glutens are not relaxed enough and it’s not ready.
Delicious ingredients = delicious bread. I am a firm believer of the instructions my Great Gramma gave my dad when he wanted to learn her bread recipe: “If you use ‘good ingredients,’ the bread could not fail.” I’m lucky to live in San Francisco, where its easy to find fancy organic, local, pasture-raised, biodynamic ingredients. (Although it’s also a bit depressing that the chickens whose eggs I use have significantly more space to call their own than I could dream of here).

Cinnamon. The one ingredient I never compromise on is Vietnamese cinnamon. It has a higher oil content than the average cinnamon bottle purchased at your typical grocery store, which means the cinnamon flavor is stronger and lingers longer than regular cinnamon.

Eggs. Even some friends who are used to San Francisco prices think I’m crazy for buying eggs that cost $1/egg. However, these eggs are not only more tasty, but also more nutritious. (And what else am I going to buy for $1?)

Milk and butter. Organic is okay, but at the risk of sounding like a Portlandia episode, the diet of the cows is more important since it determines the taste of their milk. I use whole milk and unsalted organic butter.

Sugar, brown sugar, and corn syrup. The more stripped of colors these ingredients are, the less delicious flavors they have. I use Wholesome Sweetener’s Organic Fair Trade Sugar and their Corn Syrup (with vanilla) for the topping.

Flour. Flour quality is important. In the US, mass-produced flour is made by pulling apart wheat into its separate components, and then reassembling them. While this creates a uniform flavor, gluten content, and product, I prefer flour that is closer to its natural state, not processed and reorganized in order to make it all taste the same. It’s the same reason I appreciate single-origin chocolate, because terroir and genetics furnish food with particular tastes, and the fact that those are different is what makes it interesting to me. Good quality bread flour is available, but make sure to do some background checking. I use King Arthur unbleached bread flour for this recipe, but for the rest of my baking I like to use Community Grains hard red winter wheat.

Now, if you can’t find all of the best ingredients, just use as many as you can. This recipe is not the simplest of sticky bun recipes, but it’s worth it, I promise.

Nibby Sticky Buns

Ingredients:

91 g sugar

7 g salt

77 g butter

3 g lemon zest

46 g egg

448 g flour (bread flour)

6 g yeast (rapid rise NOT dry active)

252 g milk (whole or half and half)

FOR CINNAMON SUGAR:

80 g sugar

13 g ground Vietnamese cinnamon

FOR CARAMEL GLAZE:

½ cup sugar

½ cup packed brown sugar

½ tsp salt

½ lb. unsalted butter (room temp)

½ cup corn syrup

¼ cup roasted nibs

1. Combine salt, sugar and butter in a mixing bowl. Cream with paddle attachment on high speed until smooth and pale.

2. Add egg and lemon zest. Beat until everything is mixed well, for another minute. Add in flour, yeast, and milk. Mix over low speed until all ingredients are combined together.

3. Switch to dough hook and beat over medium speed for 15 minutes, until the dough crawls up the hook.

4. The dough should be shiny and tacky, not sticky. If the dough is too sticky, add a spoonful of flour at a time and scrape the sides of the bowl during middle of beating process.** Continue until it passes the window pane test.

5. Form the dough into a shape of ball. Place in a bowl, spraying both bowl and dough with some oil.

6. Cover dough with plastic wrap. Let ferment at room temperature for 2 hours, until dough doubles in size.

7. Prepare the caramel glaze and prep your baking pan for later.

8. Dust working surface with flour. Transfer dough to the counter and use a well-floured rolling pin to roll the dough into a long rectangle with .25 inch thickness.

9. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar generously on the dough. Use your hands to roll the dough away from you to form a long log of dough with a cinnamon swirl, not pressing it too hard. The roll should be quite loose.

10. Slice the rolls into 1-inch thickness buns and gently place on top of the glazed pan, about ½ inch apart. Proof at room temp for 90 minutes.

11. Preheat oven to 350° F and bake on lowest shelf for about 30 minutes. (Caramel should be melted, and buns should just be turning golden on top.) Pull out of oven and cool before flipping over onto serving plate.

12. Eat all the sticky buns.

To make the caramel glaze

1. Cream sugar, packed brown sugar, salt, and butter (room temp). Add corn syrup (I use a brand that has vanilla, but you might want to add a teaspoon of vanilla extract) and continue to cream until light and fluffy.

2. Spread a ¼ inch thick layer of glaze on the bottom of a glass casserole pan. Lightly sprinkle nibs on top to taste, not too many or it will be bitter.

Pour-Over Coffee and Chocolate

May 20, 2014 by Maverick Watson

I love coffee. A lot. (It’s even how I met my fiance, but that’s another story). I also love chocolate and the two make a great pair. My experience in coffee is how I got started at Dandelion Chocolate. I got involved with Dandelion through our mutual friends at Four Barrel in January of 2013 and I’ve had a great time helping to develop our drink menu. I’ve experimented with different ingredients, origins and methods of preparation for hot chocolates, mochas and coffees alike and it’s tons of fun to be able to adapt our menu seasonally… or whenever we feel like it.

We already have a variety of drinkable chocolate options and a few Café Mochas made with Four Barrel Friendo Blendo Espresso, combined in ways that we think blend our single origin chocolate with their seasonally varied ‘spro. Four Barrel has been a great partner to us in the past year as we’ve learned and grown into a full fledged chocolate cafe and we think that their coffee and our chocolate go great together. They roast their coffee only a few blocks down from us on Valencia Street here in San Francisco, and their dedication to ethical coffee and education is super rad and pretty similar to our approach to chocolate; light roasts, small batches, single origin, and personal relationships with farmers.

The Marocchino

Since opening, we have offered a seasonal rotation of coffees brewed in the french press method. We are now offering single origin coffees brewed in the pour-over method. I think that french press tends to make a cloudy and relatively weak brew in contrast to my personal preference of a strong and clean cup of coffee. French Press produces very pleasant earthiness and silky mouthfeel, but in brewing tends to lose some of the brightness and unique flavors that make our coffee selections really stand out… and that is why we are now offering Four Barrel Coffee brewed via the pour over method.

Why Pour-Over?

When making a single cup of coffee, the pour-over method makes a really delicious cup of bright, flavorful brew with a crystal finish and I think makes a great pairing with chocolate. Similar to the way some people pair wines with chocolate or Lisa Vega uses different origins to help certain pastries shine (see: Papua New Guinea S’mores), the unique flavor notes in coffee can pull out flavors in chocolate that one may not have noticed before and vice versa. For this reason we are introducing a seasonally rotating pour over coffee option with a pairing suggestion depending both on the coffee that we are currently serving and the chocolates we are currently making. Instead of combining the Espresso and Hot Chocolate, we want to also show how the can complement each other.

The coffee that we are currently serving is from a co-op farm in Robot Mata, Ethiopia. On its own, this coffee has flavor notes of kiwi, lemon, ginger, green tea, and honey with a very pleasant sweetness that lingers at the back of the palate and followed by a clean finish.

While the flavors of the coffee can stand on its own, when paired with chocolate we get new interesting notes. Our newest bar from Ecuador (Camino Verde), has the quintessential flavor of fudge brownies that many people look for in chocolate and is definitely the mellowest of our bars. Having a couple pieces with the Robot Mata is like putting cream in your coffee. The smooth chocolate melts over your tongue and slightly mutes the brightness in the coffee in a pleasantly sweet texture and mouthfeel that makes me forget that I’m drinking black coffee and eating a 70% dark chocolate.

When paired with our chocolate from Mantuano, Venezuela, the slight fruitiness of the chocolate and the coffee play off of each other resulting in a roasty, dried cherry flavor with cinnamon notes at the end and a buttery mouthfeel. This pairing is definitely spicier and more interesting than the Camino Verde, but it really depends on your preferences or mood as to what you want. I like a square of the mellower chocolate with my coffee in the morning, but enjoy a more fruity pairing in the afternoon or evening, which is especially nice if you’re sharing it with someone. Everyone’s palate is different, so not everyone will get the same tasting notes out of every chocolate or coffee, so these foster great conversation for the coffee or chocolate connoisseur!

If you come in and order a coffee, you can feel free to taste our varieties of chocolate samples on the shelf and think about flavor profiles for yourself and if you find something that you like in particular, you can take home a bar and a bag of the coffee (yes, we sell Four Barrel Coffee Beans!) that we are brewing so you can have the pair that you like at home! Our coffee offerings and pairing suggestions will change seasonally, but each new variety will be chosen thoughtfully with specific pairings in mind. And as always, everyone at Dandelion is more than happy to answer any questions that you might have regarding any of our products or practices.

Dandelion Chocolate at Caledonia Alley

May 15, 2014 by Maverick Watson

If you like our Marocchino, this weekend you should stop by Caledonia Alley behind Four Barrel! This little treat is our version of a traditional Northern Italian drink (Drinking Chocolate + Espresso + Nib Whipped Cream), and for this weekend only Four Barrel is serving their interpretation (think bourbon whipped cream)!

Caledonia Alley is a small kiosk that harkens back to 4B’s earlier (build-out) days, and is located directly behind the building in the alley. They’ll only be open from 9am-3pm for a few weekends coming up, during which they are hosting signature drinks from a number of their favorite wholesale accounts (we’re one of ’em!)! This definitely aught to be a fun way to start a weekend morning, so check ’em out!

Bakemaster Flex

April 2, 2013 by Tod Chubrich

I LOVE Amanda Hesser’s Essential New York Times cookbook.

My best friend from high school helped with the recipe testing for the book, so I eagerly awaited its release and snapped up a copy as soon as it appeared at Bi-Rite. The genius of this cookbook is that it’s crowdsourced–Amanda had Times readers write in with their favorite recipes from the Times over the years, tallied up the results, and painstakingly tested and refined each recipe. It’s become my go-to for classic American dishes like brownies — I made some for a friend’s Super Bowl party with our Madagascar chocolate, Alter Eco’s spectacular mascobado sugar, and Marin Sun Farms duck eggs that were so well received that I made them again the next day for the Dandelion crew, the general consensus being ZOMG BEST BROWNIES EVERRRR.

This time I made a buttermilk chocolate cake, a recipe from San Francisco’s very own Campton Place that was published in the Times in 1986.

Step 1: a contrived glamor shot for the ingredients, the stars of the show

Step 2: melt some chocolate and sift some flour and mix stuff and whatnot
Step 3: !?!?where’s my phone how could I forget to photograph this IT WAS THE WHOLE POINT
Step 4: whip up some egg whites in a copper bowl, because choosy chefs choose copper

Step 5: are these peaks stiff yet?
Step 6: SRSLY, my arm is falling off
Step 7: how stiff do they need to be anyway?
Step 8: gently fold the egg whites into the melted chocolate, butter, buttermilk, sugar, and egg yolks