Chocolate News

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about chocolate, and a lot has happened.

The main thing is that we have been eating (ahem, I mean tasting) a lot of chocolate bars.

Our Meadow Salted Chocolates were back in stock for a short while!  But no, they are gone again, darn it.  If anyone knows a great, secret local chocolatier who can mold and package our salted chocolate, please do tell.

Also made locally, we now carry Sahagun Handmade Chocolates‘ legendary fleur de sel liquid caramels, and an expanded collection of her lovely “barks.”  There is the Palomitapapa, the Pepitapapa, the Oregon Bark.

Michael Recchiuti fleur de sel caramels have also landed on the shelves, along with boxes of his wild and delicious chocolates.  I confess that part of the reason does not have to do with the fact that his caramels are ridiculously, annoyingly good.  Part has to do with the fact that we just love Michael and his wife Jackie so much, we want to be feel their presence in the shop.  (I’ll post something on a Japanese fusion salt-festooned dinner we all shared at the Heathman not long ago on Saltnews.org sometime soon!).   Local chocolatiers include Sahagun, Xocolatl de David, DePaula Confections, and Lulu’s Chocolate!

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Mark Bitterman :: Dec.04.2008 :: Chocolate Happenings, Dark Chocolate, News, Single Origin Chocolates :: 3 Comments »

Taza Chocolate is a new American bean-to-bar chocolate company that has brought an unusual approach to chocolate-making. Their new, limited edition Chiapas 75% chocolate bar is made from beans from Chiapas, in southern Mexico. It has great earthy-nutty-nutshelly notes and some fruit and spice to boot. The bar is made with Taza’s characteristically coarse grain sugar, which gives the impression of added sweetness for a bar of this cacao content.

This is an intellectually welcome and culinarily exciting addition to the small but fundamentally key (a gourmand of no less magnitude than Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin  repeatedly refers to the unsurpassed drinking chocolates originating in the “sokonusco” region of Mexico.  Askinosie Chocolate not long ago introduced its own Soconusco chocolate bar from a small band of growers in Mexico. 

According to Larry Slotnick, co-founder of Taza with Alex Whitmore, the beans in the Chiapas bar are from the farm community of San Felipe in Southern Chiapas. Only 1,392 bars were made, and each is hand numbered. Larry and Alex don’t give cellaring recommendations, but I think the bar is eating pretty nicely right now. (I’m kidding around…)

The Taza guys say this about the bar: “We carefully blended the chocolate as a 75% dark that is a perfect balance of sweetness allowing the very unique flavor characteristics of this bean to shine. The beans exhibit a very nutty flavor profile and a dry, tannic finish not found in most chocolate bars.”

Some background on Taza: Pulling some very old technology from the shadowy recesses of history, they have resurrected ye olde grinding stone (molino) to create a more rustic, less processed chocolate.

Taza’s mission is stated: “Taza is a true bean-to-bar chocolate maker located in Somerville, Massachusetts, and is the only maker of 100% stone ground chocolate in the United States. Taza sources organically grown cacao beans directly from small farmer cooperatives ensuring those farmers receive more than fair trade prices for their high quality cacao. Taza is uniquely positioned as one of the only independently owned, socially and environmentally responsible chocolate makers in the country.”

In addition to the rougher grind and lack of conching of the chocolate, Taza roasts their cacao beans lighter than many, leaving more intense fruity acidity.

Mark Bitterman :: Aug.13.2008 :: Single Origin Chocolates :: 2 Comments »

Butter, margarine, confectioners sugar, heavy cream, evaporated milk, condensed milk, brandy, vanilla extract. What do all these things have to do with chocolate? Why not add Eye of Newt to the mixture?

Fondue recipes proliferate. Many are unduly fancy. Some are simply mired in preconceived notions about food inherited from the roly-poly days when butter and flavorings were the esteemed foundations upon which we constructed our culinary fantasies. Sometimes it’s nice to dispense with the curlycues, or more savagely, just take those crusty habits out to pasture and put them out of their misery.

The other day at our Himalayan Salt Block Cooking Class we made an original sort of chocolate fondue. More viscous, richer, more complex, and, (of all things) crunchier than your typical fondue, we ate fondue was at once more sophisticated and yummier. The only ingredient in the fondue is chocolate.

No good pictures of our Himalayan Salt Block Very Dark & Nibby Chocolate Fondue have survived for posterity, but a shot taken that evening (right) gives an idea of the basic setup. The Himalayan salt block works like a double boiler, protecting the chocolate from excessive heat while contributing the temperature stability necessary to work the melting chocolate without allowing it to separate into oil and solids. The salt block also makes a beautiful serving platter. Because there is virtually no moisture in chocolate, the Himalayan salt block does not add any perceptible amount of saltiness to the chocolate.  To prepare this dish, you will need the following:

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Mark Bitterman :: May.11.2008 :: Dark Chocolate, Single Origin Chocolates :: 1 Comment »

Der Spiegel, the popular German magazine and website, has published a great story based on a visit to Claudio Corallo at his plantation on Sao Tome and Principe. The story communicates pretty nicely the general impression one gets that Corallo harbors little love for the chocolate industry in general, and, perhaps, the gourmet chocolate industry in particular. I definitely recommend reading it if you are interested in learning about Claudio Corallos quest for the intense and true flavors in chocolate.

Striving for the World’s Best Chocolate

In a remote corner of the global village, an Italian believes he’s developed the best of all chocolate recipes. Claudio Corallo lives on an island off Nigeria and ships his small-batch chocolate around the world.

Most people, says Claudio Corallo, don’t have the slightest idea what chocolate is — or what it can be. The article continues>>

Mark Bitterman :: Feb.28.2008 :: Dark Chocolate, News, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »

After an examination by a committee of experts of the London Academy of Chocolate, Amedei (Tuscany, Italy) has won the Golden Bean award for “the best bean to bar chocolate in the world.” That has a nice ring to it. Once someone told me my Cassoulet de Castelnaudary was “the best cassoulet in the world,” my chest still gets puffy when I think of it (it is puffy now).

I imagine Alessio and Cecilia Tessieri, the brother and sister founders of Amedei, were drowning in Champagne on the night of the announcement. Nonetheless, they managed to comment: “We are very proud of this award. Our objective shall always remain that of producing the best chocolate in the world, dedicating it to all our supporters. We thank the Academy of Chocolate for this award, and for the seriousness and passion it puts in its worldwide work in search of good quality chocolate.”

Here is their announcement, edited slightly, because while I respect their palates, “harbouring” all those “colourful” extra ‘u’s hogs up RAM on my “computour.”

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Mark Bitterman :: Feb.22.2008 :: Dark Chocolate, Flavored Chocolate Bars, Milk Chocolate, News, Single Origin Chocolates :: 1 Comment »

There is so much to say about the combination of salt and chocolate that I will just stare, paralyzed, at the computer screen for three hours of insect brain-deadness… Salt and dark chocolate, salt and milk chocolate, salted chocolate, chocolated salt (I actually do have both).

But as with everything in life, the devil is in the detail. Salted 80% dark Italian blended chocolate (Salinae bar by Antica Dolceria Bonajuto) has nothing to do with 80% dark Italian Ecuadorian chocolate a chocolate (Blacksal by Domori), which in turn has virtually nothing in common with a 74% dark Italian blended chocolate served up side by side with Trapani and Cervia sea salts (Cioccolato Fondente al Sale di Cervia by Cioccolato di BruCo).

The power of salt to coax out, elucidate, and expand on the flavor of food does not stop with the savory. Actually, the idea that sweet and savory are somehow opposite is strange, and actually at odds with our natural affinity for diversity and complexity in food. Eat Ethiopian and you will find your fingers plunged in sugar on lamb with tamarind; eat dim sum and half the time you are eating donuts and pork. My grandpa was in love with apple pie with cheddar cheese. At any rate, chocolate is not even a sweet until after it is sweetened, and that can be done with much more deftness than is common.

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Mark Bitterman :: Dec.16.2007 :: Dark Chocolate, Flavored Chocolate Bars, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »

If there is one go-to chocolate bar in our entire store, it is the Valrhona 2002 Chuao dark chocolate bar.

Looking for something delicate? Try Valrhona’s Chuao Bar from 2002. Looking for something with perfect, silky body? Try Valrhona’s 2002 cru bar from the Chuao valley in Venezuela. In the mood for understated yet superb balance of flavors? Why not the I suggest the 2002 Chuao Chocolate Bar by Valrhona? Looking for the perfect, brilliant mirror, crisp snap, lovely fragrance? Try Valrhona 2002 Chuao Chocolate Bar. Does eating one of the best freaking chocolate bars on the face of the earth strike your fancy? Valrhona 2002 Chuao cru chocolate bar.

Just want a dark chocolate bar that is super freaking yummy? Valrhona 2002 Chuao chocolate bar.

So, imagine my reaction to reading Bill Buford’s encomium to Frederick Schilling, founder of Dagoba Organic Chocolate, printed in this week’s New Yorker.

Buford writes: “Some bars have a harvest year. I got one from an Internet supplier, a 2002, made from ChuaoValley beans in Venezuela, three years past its sell-by date. Suspecting a gimmick, I ate it to confirm its staleness. I was surprised. It seemed fresher than the other bars I’d bought.”

“Seemed fresher?” That’s it? Buford bites into a piece of chocolate making history, and his comment is, “seemed fresher?” What the hell…

I love Buford as much as the next guy, but his economy of words here comes at the expense of his readers. One wonders if Buford, eating a seven course meal at Le Bernardin, summarizes the experience with, “Seemed Eric Ripert used fish.”

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Mark Bitterman :: Oct.30.2007 :: Dark Chocolate, Single Origin Chocolates :: 1 Comment »

It isn’t every day that a new, serious, bad boy chocolate maker comes on the scene. But one hath arrived: Askinosie chocolate.

“Bad boy?” you say. “What kind of street creds does this Askinosie Chocolate company have, that you confer the rebel-serious badboy status? Askinosie… Any name that is so obscure that it can, in this day and age, still procure its own, unadulterated internet URL is surely just some couch-potato hobbyist toying with co-op cacao beans in a toaster oven.”

Well, quite simply, such is not the case. Shawn Askinosie had it all: Money (criminal defense lawyer), Religion (Christian). Enabled by money from the former and obeisance to the latter, he has ventured into that most dark, sensual, and alien land: chocolate. For a man who “loved the law since I can remember,” Shawn Askinosie is also manifestly attentive to the call of nature at its most unfathomable, at its most flagrantly indifferent to the constraints of human convention. Askinosie chocolate sings like the savagely furred bellow monkey. Askinosie chocolate also sings like a schoolgirl, like a castrati, like the uber-rare Kirtland’s warbler, and like the family cicada.

Askonosie Chocolate’s Soconusco 75% dark chocolate bar is, as far as I know, the first single origin dark chocolate bar to treat Mexican chocolate seriously. This is an excellent dark chocolate in the French tradition. The flavors are a crazy rich combination of earthiness and dried fruits. In fact, why parse the tastes for you, when the bar is freely available. (We sell it online at The Meadow (atthemeadow.com), though Askinosie has also taken the annoying step (why must we square off against The Maker?) of selling it online themselves).

I will share the unfettered critiques of two of my most esteemed critics.

On Askinosie Chocolate the seven year old inveighs. “Dark, a little bit bitter. I think it tastes a little bit like seaweed. Except that it is a little bit stronger. Of the texture, he says, “it kind of has a crunch like ripe coconut.”The four year old, mouth contorted by outlandish phonics: “Askinosie tastes like every kind of treat in the whole wide word.” Later, after a second tablet, he adds, “I was sucking on it for a really, really long time, and it tasted kind of like an ice cream cone.”

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Mark Bitterman :: Oct.21.2007 :: Dark Chocolate, Single Origin Chocolates :: 3 Comments »

Yes, Mike and I just hung out for the evening, exchanging witty observations about the trade. Tucked in a mellowly lit booth at the Heathman Hotel’s Tea Court, we sipped a vodka martini made with Okhotnichya — an old Soviet-era “hunter’s vodka” — that Mike had crafted himself from the mucilage of cacao pods and various findings at the Portland Farmer Market earlier that day ,and gifted to the bar keep in a beaker hand cut from a thrift store vase. Philippe Boulot, Executive Chef of the Heathman, plopped down in the booth beside us from time to time, soliciting our opinions of various amuses gueules involving foie gras, chocolate, fleur de sel de l’Ile de Noirmoutier, and grape must. We were later graced by the presence of Boulot’s lovely and talented pastry chef wife Susan Boulot, bearing miniature plates of her legendary Chocolate Gourmandise produced from the aquatic criollo beans she harvested on a scuba expedition to the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan beneath the azure waves of lake Texcoco. The bouquet of flowers plucked by Florist/Sommelier/Wife Jennifer Turner Bitterman from our own, private, greenhouse-coddled cacao tree filled the room with its intoxicating aroma, attracting various non-native lepidopterous insects that glowed and chattered about our heads.

Actually, none of this happened.

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Mark Bitterman :: Oct.14.2007 :: Chocolate Happenings, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »

Strolling the isles of the supermarket, what you do NOT find is unadorned nuance. One finds adornment meant to give the impression of nuance, but not nuance itself. Wine, and some of the more heavy duty cheese counters, are notable exceptions. But for sake of making grand, sweeping statements because they sound important and dramatic:

Nuance is not really on speaking terms with consumer culture.

It is the thing, THAT thing, whatever that thing is, that we want. The name of it suffices to give us the pleasure we experience: Champagne, BMW, Free Range–all terms we are fond of, but which we can lose, a sort of not seeing the forest for the trees in inverse.

So why get all philosophical when I really just want to write a note about a great chocolate bar?

Because I am BLOWN AWAY.

At a staff meeting yesterday we opened up a bar of one of the newest entries to the high end single origin dark chocolate bar makers: the Los Ríos 75% cacoa dark chocolate bar by República del Cacao. This proved to be quite a distraction from the rest of the things we were hoping to cover in the meeting, and launched us on five discussions at once, many of them critical of our own inclination toward summarizing things in grand sweeping gestures.

The Los Ríos chocolate bar is packed with a rambunctious family of baking spices, from cinnamon to nutmeg to allspice to ginger. Sliding the wax-paper wrapped bar from its box, you are accosted with all the thankful aroma of a pumpkin pie bake-off. Behind that, there is some fruit–maybe pear–though that flavor might be the result of associations drawn from the chocolate bar’s distinctly pear-like texture.

We talk about the flavor of an Ecuador chocolate all the time, about the nature of the Nacional Arriba cacao as manifest in such illustrious chocolate bars as the lovely Guittard Quevedo 65% Cacao bittersweet chocolate bar, the bright and well-executed Guaranda 71% single origin dark chocolate bar by Chocovic, and the super good Domori Arriba 70%. Doubtless, each of these bars is different (now is not the time to get into it, but maybe soon?), but how much of this difference derives from the cocoa maker and how much from the actual beans themselves? Is there a difference in the beans themselves? We can only speculate and opine.

But get this:

Republica del Cacao makes THREE (3) Ecuadorian Arriba Nacional dark chocolate bars, count them, three, tres, trois, chocolate bars from three different provinces in Ecuador’s vast and bountiful chocolate producing regions:

1. The Republica del Cacao Los Ríos Province 75% bar;
2. The Republica del Cacao El Oro Province 67% Dar Chocolate bar (very earthy, lightly spiced, silky, tannic, woodsy), and;
3. The Republica del Cacao Manabi Province 75% Dark Chocolate bar (fruit! almonds, more spice, milder and less complex than the others),

The bold differences and glimmering similarities between the three chocolate bars by Republica del Cacao makes for an extraordinary journey through the beautiful, and beautifully varied climes of Ecuador. On its own, the Los Ríos is a complex and potent (if slightly crazy) chocolate bar suitable for snacking on the go, for use in a nice calming cup of drinking chocolate, or for heavy partying.

Mark Bitterman :: Oct.11.2007 :: Dark Chocolate, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »