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A Halloween Debut of a New Web Series Featuring Witches and Chocolate

October 29, 2018 by

Megan Giller is a longtime friend of ours and one of the most prolific journalists and authors in the field of chocolate. She’s also a feminist, a food historian, and our guest blogger for this post. Note that the video mentioned below is not suitable for children.

graphic of woman and birdsWhen I was working on my book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, one of my favorite sections to write was “Chocolate Is for Everybody,” about craft chocolate being made by all sorts of minorities, including women. (After all, my business card says, “food writer, feminist, chocolate eater.”)

I’ve always wanted to write more about women and food, and when I asked Professor Kathryn Sampeck if she knew of some good stories, boy, did she deliver. She sent me two scholarly articles, “Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala,” by Martha Few, and “Potions and Perils: Love-Magic in Seventeenth-Century Afro-Mexico and Afro-Yucatan,” by Joan Bristol and Matthew Restall.

These dense, academic papers contain a treasure trove of illicit activity. Long story short: In the 1600s and 1700s in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, thousands of women were accused of bewitching their lovers, enemies, and frenemies with magic hot chocolate. At that time, chocolate was a pretty gritty drink, and you could hide all sorts of ingredients in it. Fears of women spiking hot chocolate stemmed from anxiety about their changing roles in society, and women who challenged the status quo were persecuted — just as they were in every age, and all around the world.

One of the stories is so powerful that it inspired me to start a new project, a digital TV show called What Women Ate. The first episode is about one of the so-called witches, named Cecilia, who was accused of bewitching her husband with hot chocolate and making him impotent (sure, sounds likely). Before I write any more spoilers, here is the full episode for you to watch, just in time for Halloween. If you like what you see, subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow @whatwomenate on Instagram!

Sorting things out in Texas

June 12, 2014 by

Cam and I took off for Texas last week to visit AMVT, a company that sells optical sorter machines. People’s eyes start to glaze over when I start talking about optical sorters until I mention that it could greatly improve the quality of our chocolate and decrease the amount of time it takes to prep beans before we roast them (maybe about half snap back to attention—and 100% of the Dandelion production team!).

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The optical sorting machine in all its glory

Imagine a world where a machine with six eyes and a thousand lights is scanning the beans, rejecting anything cracked, moldy, flat, or foreign material. Then a chocolate maker can make sure nothing slips through rather than spending 20-30min per 5 kilos of beans like we do now (keep in mind batches are 30 kilos each and we are prepping roughly 65 kilos of beans per day).  As a person hand sorts beans in the chilly bean room, attention can wander, and we miss things that a machine will be able to catch.  This can help us make better chocolate by selecting only the best beans!

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Things we want to get rid of

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Assessing the sort done by the machine

We flew into Austin and stopped by La Barbecue to fuel up for the drive to Houston. We made it just in the nick of time to be their last late, late lunch customers of the day and got to sample some mighty fine brisket and pulled pork. It came with the most amazing sweet and tangy sauce and was just the ticket to kick off our Texas adventure. The AMVT lab had several machines and we were warmly welcomed by David and his colleague, Gary. There were several tests to try and we had brought an overweight checked bag (shh!) full of raw beans from a two different origins to play with.

David and Gary had calibrated the machine with a previous sample we had sent. We worked with them to understand the priorities around rejecting beans based on color, size, and shape. The machine has a set of cameras facing each other (so it can “see” both sides of the beans) and is fed from the top using gravity and slight vibration to move the beans down. The beans fall past the camera and then, if rejected, are blown into a different chute with compressed air. All simple in concept, complicated to achieve, and amazing to see in action.

David and Gary were incredibly knowledgeable and helpful and we both learned a lot during our visit. On our way out of town, we decided we needed one last barbecue fix before heading back to SF. We hit up Micklethwait Meat Company where we tried their pulled pork, pork shoulder, and brisket. These were accompanied by outstanding homemade pickles, jalepeño cheesy grits, and crisp coleslaw. The meat was delicious and the grits were amazing!

IMG_6614To top it all off, we stopped by Hay Elotes, a permanent structure version of a Mexican street cart selling all things corn and delicious ice cream/icees. Ivan helped us out and let us sample a few things and explained how they seek out the best corn in Mexico to import. He told us, “in Mexico, corn is life.” We were too full to sample the corn or the chicharones, but we both enjoyed mango, lime, and tamarind icees (kind of like sorbet). Ivan promised to come visit the factory next time he’s in SF.

hay-elotesAll in all, a productive and illuminating trip to learn about some pretty amazing technology. Though we are still in the research phase, we are excited about the possibility of integrating this machine into our process.

Meet our production team

February 7, 2013 by

I’m very excited to share a video that Hannah Radcliff put together for us earlier this fall. Hannah lives in St. Louis, but stopped at Four Barrel on a recent trip to San Francisco and discovered our chocolate. She wrote to us asking if she could make a video about our “rich and delicious” chocolate on her next trip, and of course we said “yes!”

She recently posted the video as part of a travelogue by FEAST magazine. Her video turned out beautifully. It does a fantastic job of introducing each step of our process and each member of our production team. Thank you, Hannah!

Bar-to-Bean

January 16, 2013 by

By now you’ve heard of bean-to-bar chocolate, but have you heard of bar-to-bean? Our friend Ryan at Cat Trick Films made us an awesome and quirky video for our opening. Check out how chocolate bars are (un-)made:

Our first video!

March 16, 2012 by

We all felt a little self-conscious watching this, but we have our first video!

Todd did an excellent job telling our story, but my favorite part should be obvious. Our videographer,  Liza, included Cam’s chocolate air toss antics, and they’re pretty good.

Todd and Caitlin are headed to New York at the end of the month for The Next Big Small Brand contest. It’s Caitlin’s first trip to the city, so it should be a great time all around.

Back to Madagascar

January 19, 2012 by

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

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

Cam was not a pro.

Truthfully, neither of us was really that good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New first stage grinder

August 15, 2011 by

Rather than putting the nibs straight into a melanger (the machine we use to combine the nibs and sugar into chocolate), we use a peanut grinder to turn the nibs into a paste first. We recently upgraded this first stage grinder to a new one. The old one would occasionally seize on nibs with less fat (like our Costa Rican) so we had to feed it a scoop at a time. With the new one, though, we can fill the hopper and it’ll crank through everything. It came configured with an 24 second auto-shutoff but after opening it up and changing a few dip switches, we were all set.

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.

Sorting Machine Prototype

March 4, 2011 by

After doing a bunch of tests, we realized that winnowing was easier and our yield was better when we sorted the beans into different sizes (i.e. small, medium, large). We started out doing this by hand but it was really tedious and time consuming so we decided to build a sorting machine. It took a little while to build, but we’re pretty happy with how it turned out. It sorts a lot of cracked beans quickly and it kind of sounds like rain (chocolate rain?). Now we just need to have a better loading system and rebuild it out of stainless steel…