If you live in the Boston area, you saw how much water dropped suddenly from the sky last Saturday afternoon. Traffic ground to a halt as streets flooded out just minutes after the rain began.

Windsor Street River

Around 3pm, Taza’s Director of Manufacturing (i.e. Head Chocolate Making Guy), Mike Schechter, thought maybe he’d pop by our newly renovated, first floor chocolate factory for a quick look, just to be safe. He arrived to find Windsor St. more river than roadway. And once inside, he found water pouring unchecked into the factory via a breach in our building’s front exterior wall, and bubbling up from the drains in the floor. The new chocolate production facility, where we’d turned out our first batch of Mexicanos just last week, was already sitting in an unwelcome lake several inches deep, and the water was still coming. He grabbed his phone and started dialing, letting any Taza employee he could reach know that it might be a good idea for them to come by the factory, pronto.

Now, 72 hours later, we’re taking stock. A dedicated, non-stop weekend bail-out, mop-up, and salvage effort by many of our amazing Taza staffers, on their own time, has cleared the way for recovery and rebuilding to start. We’ve hacked out the bottom 16 inches of drywall on every wall in our entire facility, carted ruined office cubicles to the dumpsters, and relocated our laptops to apartments and cafes until we have a functional workspace. Our chocolate production capacity will be shut down for at least a week, and cash flow will be a big challenge as we find a way to finance the repair of the facility we just made a major investment in upgrading. The silver lining? Our stockpile of bars, Mexicanos, and other Taza goodies is still stored on the second floor of our building, and remains safe, dry, and delicious.

Retail Store

Taza has always been a scrappy crew of chocolate fanatics, and we’re determined to get back to the important business of making excellent chocolate as soon as possible. You have all shown us terrific support and love over our first 3 ½ years in business, and we ask for your support now – if you can, buy some Taza Chocolate (we also think you’d look great in a Taza t-shirt). Shop our online store, come out and see us at the farmers’ markets, or find us at your local retailer. With great customers like you, we’re going to keep on making the Taza Chocolate you love, come hell or high water.

Watch video from Channel 5 about Taza and the Somerville flash floods here>>

Buy their chocolate from The Meadow here>>

Press release: Following their recent entry into administration, certain assets and intellectual property of Kshocolât Ltd and Brand 1602 Chocolate Ltd have now been acquired by Bon Bon Buddies Ltd, Europe’s leading character licensed novelty confectionery and biscuit company.

The Kshocolât and Hot Choc brands encompass a range of premium boxed chocolates and confectionery, chocolate bars and drinking chocolate, with award-winning contemporary designs. These luxury products sell in a variety of UK premium retailers and enjoy a strong international presence in over 20 export markets.

Bon Bon Buddies will now invest in the brands to further develop the existing product range, build the brand profile and increase distribution. By maximising the marketing and market opportunities for Kshocolât and Hot Choc, Bon Bon Buddies plans to further enhance and complement its successful confectionery portfolio.

Chris Howarth, Managing Director of Bon Bon Buddies, said: “We are delighted to have completed this excellent acquisition against strong competition. The Kshocolât and Hot Choc brands will allow us to extend our market presence into the premium chocolate market in the UK and Europe with this exciting premium confectionery range”.

Bon Bon Buddies are currently holding in-depth discussions with Kshocolât’s existing supplier base and hope to re-launch the range at the earliest opportunity. However all future orders will only be made to customers within the Retail trade. For further information please view our Terms & Conditions

In readiness for the re-launch of the Kshocolât range, we are strongly encouraging existing Trade/Retail customers to contact Paul Stanton at Bon Bon Buddies, in order to obtain both the Account Application Form and Terms & Conditions.

Once these forms are returned to us, our Finance Department will then take up all relevant credit applications and references and process the applications accordingly. Once established, notifications will be sent indicating your Account Information and, if applicable, credit limit.

Bon Bon Buddies are enthusiastic to grow both the Kshocolât and Hot Choc brands within all markets and are excited to expand its already successful client base with Kshocolât’s previous customers.

In the first instance of for further information please contact Paul Stanton at paul.stanton@bonbonbuddies.com

We look forward to receiving your applications in the very near future and establishing successful trading relationships with you.

About Bon Bon Buddies

Bon Bon Buddies is a privately owned market leading business specializing in design, sourcing, manufacturing and marketing character and branded confectionery and biscuits.  Bon Bon Buddies head office is in South Wales, UK with additional sales, marketing and logistics offices in France, Benelux, Denmark and Poland.

Bon Bon Buddies license the intellectual rights for kids entertainment properties from the major global brand owners, working with their most popular character properties, including: Disney – Princess, Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Cars and Toy Story; Nickelodeon – Spongebob; Marvel – Spiderman and Ironman; Sanrio – Hello Kitty; Lucas Film – Star Wars; and, BBC – In the Night Garden and Dr Who.

Bon Bon Buddies were winners of the Licensing Industry Awards for ‘The best food or drink range’ in both 2008 and 2009.

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For the last month or so we have offered a class on the making of salted caramels at The Meadow.  Our friend and master confectioner David Briggs of at Xocolatl de David led us through the various stages of caramelization and saltiness.

Below is the Ultimate Salted Caramel Recipe as perfected by David Briggs of Xocolatl de David.

The format of the salted caramel class was the usual: Attendees (we had over 32 last night!) were given a glass of wine to help keep their palates lively as we moved through a somewhat rigorous tasting format.

• Mark Bitterman gave the selmelier’s mini-lecture on the four types of sea salt currently used in the assorted salted caramels offered in the shop.
• Halen Mon Gold oak smoked sea salt from Wales – oaky and warm and mellow with hefty filo dough like flakes
• Iburi Jio Cherry cherrywood smoked deep sea salt form Japan – heady and bacony and silky at the same time
• Amabito no Moshio seaweed salt from Japan – a round and mild mineral-rich salt with lots of savory brothy (umami) flavors.
• Pangasinan Star fleur de sel from the Philippines – brambly and warm and delicately sweet with outsized yet delicate white crystals.
• The David Briggs talked about how he formulates the salt-levels of his caramels as people tasted:
• Unsalted burnt caramel cubes
• Lightly salted caramel cubes (the light is Briggs’s term, as the man loves salt)
• Fully salted caramel cubes (whoa Bessy!)
• Then Dave demonstrated how to make a salted caramel sauce (note: Dave declines to go by the title of caramelier either because he thinks a caramelier fellow in France will be offended or because he worries it might constrain future projects involving bacon or ice cream—or maybe both).
• We took a vote and let the guests choose which salts to put in the caramels based on their tasting.  Every class has been different.  This time the choices were Halen Mon Gold and Pangasinan Star.
• Last, Dave served up home-made chocolate ice cream and guests were allowed to ladle out the salted caramel sauce (or sauces) of choice onto the ice cream.

Jittery, maybe a little buzzed, the crowd at the end of the evening was slow to drift off, doubtless uncertain as to whether dinner, bed, sea kayaking, or something else would be the best outlet for their energy.

Recipe for the Best Salted Caramel Sauce
The first step is to make invert sugar to prevent the sugar in the caramel from spontaneously crystallizing.

Salted Caramel Invert Sugar
3 C          Sugar
1.5 C       Water
1/4 t        Citic acid OR juice of 1/2 lemon
Put ingredients in a non reactive pot and bring to a boil.  Lower heat and simmer for 30 minutes.

Caramel Sauce
2 C  Sugar
1 oz  Invert Sugar
1.25 C   Cream, warm
1 oz   Butter
Fleur de sel

Put invert sugar and sugar in a wide high sided non reactive pot on high heat.  Every minute or so slowly mix in granulated sugar with some that is liquefied.  Eventually you will have a paste.  Warm Cream separately.
Continue to cook sugar until it begins to caramelize.  Using a candy thermometer monitor the temperature of the cooking sugar.  The classic caramel stage is around 330-350 degrees F.  You can cook it longer for a less sweet more bitter sauce.  Do not go above 390 F.

When your desired temperature is reached turn off the heat and slowly and very carefully add the warmed cream in small increments.  When the cream is fully incorporated, turn the heat on high and heat the caramel to 230 F.  This will go quite quickly.  Turn off heat and add the butter.  Stir until the butter has completely melted.  Add your desired amount of Fleur de sel or other sea salt.  Let cool.

It will store in the refrigerator for up to 4 months.

Sadly, some people don’t listen to their little voices, so setting up camp at the chocolate fondue area of the party makes for only the most fleeting of intercourse with others.  While that may have its advantages, I can’t shake the feeling that there is something failed in a chocolate fountain that doesn’t break down every semblance of the social façades that propel us through parties on unending undulations of stiflingly pedestrian conversation and gushy niceness.

What makes fruit taste better?  Salt.  What makes chocolate taste better?  Salt.  What makes fruit and chocolate taste better another?  What makes chocolate fondue something you might actually eat on a regular basis?  Stumped?  A Himalayan Salt Block.

First: My favorite salts for chocolate these days, or at least some of the artisan sea salts I’ve found myself returning to again and again when dabbling in salted chocolate are:
Grigio di Cervia Italian sel gris
Iburi Jio cherrywood smoked
Pangasinan Star fleur de sel
Halen Mon Gold oak smoked flake salt

Many, many salts work well with chocolate. Far fewer chocolates work well with salt.  I’ve tasted hundreds, and most leave me with a freaked-out feeling, which in itself isn’t so bad, but could be improved.  The beautiful, super-silky Cru Sauvage wild harvested salt from Bolivia, is just awful with salt.  Most of the more well-known all around crowd pleasers are good, but not perfect, perhaps because they are all about delicacy.  Michel Cluizel, for example… Not good.   The bigger chocolates take the salt much better.  Venchi is superb.  Claudio Corallo, magnificent.

Here’s bewilderingly delicious way to bring salt together with fruit and chocolate with ease, grace, and visual pizzazz.  First, warm a plate or brick of either tableware grade or cookware grade Pink Himalayan salt on the stove at low heat for about 3 minutes (go for 110, which is basically just a touch warm to the touch.  This is warm enough to melt the chocolate and also gentle enough on the salt block to permit use of less expensive Tableware Grade salt blocks).  Set the salt block on a trivet or plate.  Arrange chocolate bars on a slab of Pink Himalayan Salt.  Slice some fruit (any of the ones mentioned above will work) and arrange on the salt block alongside.  (You can also serve a platter of fruit alongside, and then just transfer a few piece at a time to the salt block.)  Serve with a dish of excellent finishing salt. Dip fruit in chocolate, or scoop chocolate onto fruit.  Eat some straight up.  Sprinkle some with salt and then eat.

The thrill of serving fruit and chocolate on a block of salt and then sprinkling with some salt at your discretion is that the salt come into the field of play from two different directions and in two vastly different forms.  On the salt block, the luscious liquid heart of the fruit picks up a touch of salt, bringing out the sweetness, accentuating fugitive fruit notes, but interacting only in briny simplicity with your tongue because all the salt on the fruit is dissolved.  Because the chocolate is mainly fat, and salt is not fat soluble, the salt block bring zero salt to the chocolate.So, take a bite.  The salted fruit liquid is doing the salting for the chocolate.  Then drop a flake of salt on top of the chocolate and munch with a bite of the fruit.  Now you get brilliant sparkle of salt dancing off the chocolate, commingling with its dark richness, penetrating through all the way to the fruit.  The variations of salt and fruit and chocolate are geometric, crystal salt, liquid salt, salted fruit, salted chocolate, chocolated fruit and salt, fruited chocolate and salt, etc.  Summed up as: yum.

To clean up, rinse the pink Himalayan salt block under warm water, pat dry with a paper towel, and you’re done.

I was there to talk salt for a chocolate and salt class for 30 people at Recchiuti’s factory in San Francisco.  While there, I took it upon myself to assume the role of in-house naturalist.  Below are a handful of examples of my attempt to capture, with a cell phone camera, Michael Recchiuti in action.  For my own purposes, I also tried to soak up as much information, technique, and ideas as possible.  I’m still processing the experience, but this is sort of how it went:

Me just off the plane from Portland, he just out from a marathon morning at the chocolate factory, we meet at Piccino, share a bitter salad and a pizza with mildly junipery speck, chat and share a bite of burnt caramel ice cream (made by Recchiuti) with two beautiful women at the table next to us (who introduce themselves the moment the ice cream arrive), then race off to buy glasses for the salt and chocolate class, scheduled for the following day.

Returning to the factory, located in a huge industrial building in the uber hip Dogpatch district of San Francisco, I park my luggage at the door and am introduced to everyone in the “kitchen,” then everyone in the office.  The “kitchen” has mixers, temperers, coaters, conveyor belts, warm rooms, cool rooms, and giant kettles reminiscent of jet engine parts.

We survey the presentation area, chat over ideas about how to seat people, how to present salted caramels (there will be a flight of eight with six salts), where lights should go, where the tent went that was supposed to be here already, where homemade graham crackers can be set out alongside palettes of chocolate melting atop a Himalayan salt block, the general drift of how people will arrive, how they will dredge said graham crackers in said chocolate atop said Himalayan salt block and then find a seat.  How all their knees are going to be touching because the event is fully booked.

Then Michael starts disappearing.  He’s in the humidity controlled walk-in.  He’s rummaging for tubs under a worktable.  He’s grabbing something from a file.  He’s tossing a heavy cast iron pans on a counter top and pouring sugar over butter.  He is up on top of the giant walk in fridge fumbling with octopus plugs.  I intersect with him from time to time, busy either wondering what to do, brainstorming about something that will or will not happen, helping with some random task, photographing something.  We do this for two days together. Michael and his team had been working on it for a least a few days prior to my arrival as well.

I realize that somewhere along the line I’d started eating things.  Michael throws me a cherry bomb, I pluck a caramel-encrusted pecan from a tray, snack on a few real-mint-junior mints, dip my finger in some apricot, gouge a glop of sorbet from the spout of the ice cream machine, gouge a glop of sorbet from the spout of the ice cream machine after some egg white has been added, sprinkle some bamboo salt or sel gris or fleur de sel or smoked salt on each of the above and try them that way. (I’m also not 100% sure that it’s okay for me to be tasting things; this is, after all, a real factory, with spoken and unspoken codes of behavior, defined economies, ongoing production streams, etc.)  But I realize that I’ve already learned something from Michael: eat what you preach, and eat it often.  Which may be simplified as: eat.

(This is not to say that we relied exclusively on chocolate as a fuel source for the long days leading up to the salt and chocolate event.  Recchiuti has just bought a new espresso machine, and he is eager to try it out at every opportunity.)

But by now everything was coming together, which has a soothing effect on me and an intensifying effect on Michael.  Now he is almost impossible to see.  Suddenly spun sugar appears on a tray.  Tarte tatin appears in neat squares.  Marshmallows of flash frozen lime foam glow mysteriously on the counter.  The dish washing station is piling higher and higher with bowls, spatulas, knives, molds, beakers, trays.

I am taking pictures, still, and helping where I can.  I rim glasses for malted milk in powderized cocoa nibs and smoked salt.  I roll chocolate swizzle sticks in flaky salt.  I eat.

The guests arrive, we serve cocktails, and soon, the event is under way.

Menu:

Welcome Cocktail
Champagne Apricot Freeze made with Schramsberg Blanc de Noirs, celery and radish juices, and a salted chocolate swizzle stick.

Dip-It-Yourself Breadsticks
Recchiuti’s housemade graham crackers and single origin chocolate on a Himalayan salt block.

A Classic Opening
Tarte Tatin baked with Sel Gris de L’ile de Noirmoutier and finished with a suspended animation sprinkle of Okinawa Snow salt.

“Palette” Cleanser
Single Origin “Ocumare” by Amano Chocolate. Topped with pistachios, rosemary foraged from Michael’s street and 3x Roasted Korean Bamboo salt.

Frosty Beverage
Chilled Chocolate Malt drink made with El Rey 41% Milk Chocolate and organic roasted barley malt from Oaktown. Finished with a rim of Iburi Jio Cherry salt.

Intermission
Recchiuti factory tour.

Salt Flight
A comparison of six artisan salt caramels: Pangasinan Star, Kona Deep Sea, Shinkai Deep Sea, Halen Mon Gold, Amabito no Moshio, Cyprus Silver.

One Last Dance
House-churned Burnt Caramel Ice Cream (the same one that elicited the attention of the two women at the restaurant the previous day). Garnished with a drizzle of Stonehouse Olive Oil and Haleakala Ruby Salt.

And to take home…
A box of salt caramels to share (or not) with friends.

Two articles I’ve found on (or relating to) the Recchiuti Bitterman Chocolate Salt event so far:

http://www.foodporn.com/pescygourmet/2009/05/recchiuti-salt-and-chocolate-tasting.html
http://www.thedinnerfiles.com/?p=1089

Profits are a nice thing for a company.  What is not nice is when they come at the expense of brand integrity.  Hershey is winding down its “Global Supply Chain Transformation program,” which aims to increase shareholder value rationalizing and restructuring various operations.  To date the company has spent over half a billion dollars on the program.  Buried in all this financial information lurks an inconvenient truth:

“During the fourth quarter of 2008, the scope of the Global Supply Chain Transformation program increased modestly to include the closure of two subscale manufacturing facilities of Artisan Confections Company, a wholly owned subsidiary, and consolidation of the associated production into existing U.S. facilities, along with rationalization of other select items.”

Hershey, the nation’s second-biggest candy maker, owns Artisan Confections Company, which in turns owns Dagoba, Joseph Schmidt, and Scharffen Berger chocolate companies.  Those two “subscale manufacturing facilities” are bay area chocolate companies Joseph Schmidt and Scharffen Berger. 150 people in the area will lose their jobs.

Hershey acquired both the Schmidt and Scharffen Berger companies in 2005, and the chocolate world was abuzz with speculation first about whether, than about how much, the Hershey acquisition would impact the quality of the chocolate.

As the chocolate slid slowly downhill (in many people’s estimations), Hershey’s continued to pursue its “Global Supply Chain Transformation program,” (despite the program sounding a lot like something that the Spice Merchants of Planet Arrakis http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Arrakis would not have appreciated) Hersheys was also reportedly behind a plan to radically improve the profitability of all its chocolate lines.

From what I hear, it was Hershey’s that proposed and pushed a petition to the FDA to allow for the re-formulation of chocolate to allow for using any vegetable oil rather than the cocoa butter naturally found in chocolate.  “By specific language in this Petition document, it would allow for the unlimited use of vegetable fats from any source and at any level to replace the cocoa butter in chocolate and still allow the product to be called chocolate,” said Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate, an organization founded by Guittard Chocolate to combat the petition.

Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate alleged that “the petition would allow liquor to be made by combining purchased cocoa butter and cocoa powder instead of solely being ground from nibs.  In addition, the 50% minimum requirement can be voided if you want slightly reduced fat liquor—say 40%, which does “not rise to the level of a defined nutrient claim” (FDA language). In effect, we would now have a new form of ingredient that would also be called “chocolate liquor” which could then be used to make chocolate and would allow the use of even more vegetable fat in the final product that would be called chocolate.

“The key issue we would face with approval of the Petition in current form is that the marketplace will have two fundamentally different versions of products, yet both would be legally permitted to be called chocolate, resulting in great consumer confusion. While the ingredient label would identify vegetable fat as a component, the front panel would not be required to alert consumers that it is really what the Industry today calls a compound (not 100% cocoa butter) chocolate.”

But then, a miracle: “Cocoa butter is one of the key defining ingredients in chocolate, providing the signature melt-in-your-mouth creaminess and texture.”  Miraculously (or perhaps I should have more faith in industry) Mars jumped into the fray.  “In sharp contrast to recent industry efforts to change the Standards of Identity for chocolate, Mars Snackfood US today announced its support for the current definition of chocolate and pledged to continue to make pure, authentic chocolate with 100% cocoa butter for all of its U.S. chocolate products.”

Todd R. Lachman, President, of Mars Snackfoods US, said: “Even though we could save millions of dollars, we simply won’t compromise the purity and authenticity of our chocolate by diluting it with a cocoa butter substitute. This company was built on quality – it’s one of our core principles – and we will not lower the bar on chocolate quality.  At Mars, the consumer is our boss, and American consumers are passionate about chocolate.”  Word from the FDA was that challenges to such petitions were rarely met with success.

And lo! the heavens trembled and the skies opened and an Almighty Hand reached from the light above to the earth below and smote a terrible blow to the forces of vegetable oil proliferation.  Guittard leading, with Mars stepping up to the plate to defend them, plus the voices of however many squeaky voices like mine and yours, were heard.  The effort to redefine chocolate failed.

No public announcements of this coup were made, to the best of my knowledge.  I only found this out by calling Guittard myself (are they not the most humble chocolate company in the world?) to get an update.  In honor of Guittard’s agitating on behalf of humanity, I suggest you buy a Quevedo 65% Ecuador Bittersweet Chocolate bar (which I just ate for other reasons and which really is just a great chocolate bar).

Picking its hulking frame up and dusting off its hulking shoulders, Hershey’s “Global Supply Chain Transformation program” continued unabated.  The “program” will be completed in 2009, meaning Sharffen Berger and Joseph Schmidt have only a short while to live.  Hershey expects total cost of closing the plants to be about $25 million.  In return they will economize to the tune of $5 million annually.  Operations will be consolidated in a plant in Robinson, Ill.

To a normal Joe like me, it might seem crazy for a $5 billion company to trade all the risks (like further degradation of quality and negative public perception) for $5 million in savings—that’s a .1% savings.   However, the cumulative savings for the “Global Supply Chain Transformation program” are expected to be about $81 million, with total ongoing annual savings by 2010 of $175 million to $195 million.  Not small potatoes.

Hershey’s announced: “The financial market and credit crisis has not had a material effect on our business operations or liquidity, to date.  However, the increase in our cost structure and uncertainties in the financial markets and in the broader economy present challenges as we head into 2009.”  Apparently there is no room for the artisan in meeting those challenges.

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!We have two of the best and brightest new boutique true bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers, Rogue Chocolatier and Patric Chocolate, joining the tide (mmm, tidal chocolate) of new American chocolate makers like Askinosie, Amano, and Taza.  We will share more on them later, but for now… Suffice it to say that both are pursuing things never before achieved in chocolate. Rogue is almost bewilderingly flavorful, with the citrusy licoricey Hispaniola from the Dominican Republic and the Plumy woodsy Sambirano from Madagascar. Patric is sophisticated as can be, playing with varying cocoa butter levels (one of only two artisans who press their own cocoa butter).  Like a wolf and a duck raised in the same crib, the 67% and 70% chocolate bars are more different than they are alike, with interesting qualities.

And we have a bunch of great new chocolates, including about 9 new single origin chocolate bars from Coppeneur.  Not only are they incredibly fun to say aloud (Plantation Hacienda lara, Plantation Menavava, Plantation Uba Budo, Plantation Menavava, etc), they are truly wonderful chocolate bars. And for those of you who look down your nose at milk or flavored chocolate, try the Plantation Tabuna milk chocolate or the Trinidad chocolate with habanero and lavender.

That’s not all.  We have a bunch of new snacky chocolates from Kshocolat, new beautiful chocolate bars from Richard H. Donnelly fine chocolates.  Askinosie Milk chocolates and white chocolates are now available, and they really unusual—definitely worth a try.  We now carry Caoni Chocolate from Ecuador, and to wrap things up.  We have new drinking chocolate from Café Tasse joining the shelves with our existing collection of Marie-Belle drinking chocolate, Weisse, Kshocolat, Guittard, and others.

All will be up on the www.atthemeadow.com soon for online ordering.  All have been eaten and eaten some more, again and again, as we try to educate ourselves on the the positively sensational wave of great new chocolate bars entering the marketplace!  The Golden Age of Chocolate is upon us!

But chocolate as a theme, as a concept, as a pattern, a fashion, a mode — no.  Nay.  I do not like it.  My initial, invertebrate response when my personal friend and professional chocolate supplier David Briggs said he was making a chocolate dinner was to recoil into a dark crevice somewhere, staring through the briny depths of my eyes with octopus horror.  Sucking cold brine through my gills, my brain is reduced to its bivalve origins.  Chocolate, my dear friend, is a food.

But immediately after that my knowledge of Dave, who owns and operates Xocolatl de David and is also Sous Chef at Park Kitchen, returned to assure me.  Mr. Briggs’s unassuming manner cloaks a sophisticated palate, unflinching creativity, and an ever-expanding set of skills .  So why not?  A seven course chocolate-based meal paired with seven beverages, served at Park Kitchen, one of Jennifer and my favorite restaurants in town, and a place we freely recommend to out of town visitors and locals alike who visit The Meadow.

If Jennifer had qualms she didn’t express them; she just grabbed my hand and dragged me to Park Kitchen where 14 people (two cowardly louts failed to honor their reservation) were seated with the preliminary awkwardness that inevitably attends such public-private group encounters.

“Aren’t we all suppose to be friends now?” I probably wondered, aloud, trying to hide my own agoraphobia.  “Can’t we all just sort of snuggle?”

Eventually (at my request) the empty chairs of the two no-shows were removed and I managed to coax two of the several attendees at the far end of the table (Western Culinary Institute students whom I soon came to adore after one of them plunked down $100 bucks cash to go Dutch on a chicken-infused mescal) to move in closer.  We soon had more of a hive of hushed buzzing buzz of expectation going.

My only complaint of the entire evening had nothing to do with Dave, and happened right at the start.  Strangely, the cocktail waitress asked Jen and I if we wanted a drink (which prompted the involuntary response of “YES”) from both of us.  Then, strangely, she brought the cocktails, and then, within 15 seconds (because I do drink fast enough that any later and I wouldn’t have noticed) she served champagne intended as a pairing for the amuse bouche that was about to come out.  There I am, listening to the sommelier’s explanation of a Jose Michele Pinot Meunier Champagne, fist still gripped around a very pickly and aromatic martini, and wondering how I am supposed to taste either.

Out of deference to the flow of the evening, my beautiful martini was left to grow gradually warmer, eventually exiting the table at the end of the evening as an undistinguished swill of grain alcohol and oil and brine and herbs.  Poor thing.  Jennifer was in the same predicament of cocktail-interruptus as I, the experience for which we paid something on the order of 24 dollars!

The Champagne was a distinctly forgettable Jose Michele Pinot Meunier Champagne, but on the heals of it service came Dave’s first creation–ingeniously conceived and masterfully executed: a smoked cocoa butter and olive oil emulsion on toast.  What the hell?

That, topped with a few flecks of Iburi Jio Cherry cherrywood roasted deep sea salt from Japan.  What the hell?

It looked like a slightly scary pat of butter; sort of a redolent beige reminiscent of some of the truly evil cheeses of southern England or the Alpine regions of France.  Upon touching the lips, the thing melted into nothingness, bypassed the mouth’s organs of taste altogether and rocketed straight to the olfactory nether regions where it did unfamiliar and delightful things to the brain.

Next up was a HUB lager chelada, a sophisticated version of what I always knew as a Michelada — effectively a bloody mary with beer substituting in for vodka, and maybe some habenero peppers tossed in for good measure.

Dave then served corn milk ganache fritter with piperade.  The corn was sweet, so he used 100% dark chocolate, for a crunchy beignet-like thing with the rich, corny, sweet pleasantly gooey inside.  Very un-chocolately and yet very chocolately at the same time: an achievement in it’s own right.

Next up came a “chocolate panzanella” that was just that.  But this was possibly the most beautiful panzanella imaginable, chocolate or otherwise.  Crusty chocolate brioche, multicolored cherry tomato halves, string beans (haricot verts?), and certainly among the finest fresh-marinated anchovies I’ve eaten outside of Italy; all of which was drizzled with a harisa-like dressing of tomato reduction and cocoa.  Citrusy (from the anchovies and tomatoes), teetering toward hearty, and at the same time garden fresh-tasting, served with an acceptable La Bota de Manzanilla Sherry.

Then came the pork belly confited in non-deodorized cocoa butter, which retains its characteristic earthy, musty, woodsy smells.   It was served with chanterelles and white beans and was just totally over the top in the way of classical French magic acts, suspending richness, subtlety, and body in midair and gliding hoops over it: see, no strings attached.  (Granted Dave says he was inspired by a recent trip to Spain.)  The dish was served with a 2006 Chateau de Segries Lirac, which had all the friskiness of a late-model Oldsmobile sedan with no gasoline.  The pork belly was so compelling that I hardly noticed.

Next up came what, if I must name a star of the show (and why not), fit the bill.  Chilled chocolate consommé and a dollop of crème fraîche-like goat cheese, sprinkled with crunchy green nutty pepitas.  Again, so delicate, so nice, so jam packed with je ne sais quoi I really don’t think I’ll even bother.  It was bliss.  Everybody freaked out.  And then to top it off, the sommelier hit one out of the park, pairing the dish with a Del Maguey Chichicapa Mezcal that just…  destroyed.

“Chichicapa is 2 hours south of Oaxaca, and 2 hours to the west on a dirt road. The pueblo elevation is about 7,000 feet. Chichicapa is separated from the valley of Oaxaca by a mountain range. The valley is broad, about thirty miles deep and ten miles wide. The climate is desert and tropical, with banana trees, guava, mangoes and other exotic fruits. Faustino Garcia Vasquez is the maker of Chichicapa. He is a humble and talented craftsmen with great respect for the ancient processes.”

Faustino is a god, or perhaps, rather, a fallen angel.  Faustino probably parades around Chichicapa in a kilt, speaks Spanish with a thick brogue, lullabies his bambinos to bed with the bagpipes, and eats haggis, neeps, and tatties for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I am a passionate lover of mezcal and tequila, but my passions are alloyed with an irrepressible manly need for dalliance with single malt scotch whiskey — particularly of the highland variety.  If Faustino bartered his soul to the devil in exchange for the powers to concoct mezcal, he most assuredly came away with the bargain.

The mezcal, for all its fulminations and flourishes, just purred like a kittycat on the lap of the ineffably yummy chocolate consommé, chilly-aromatic goat cheese, and pepita bits.  Women squirmed in their seats, dissolved into the ether.  Men fashioned spears from chair legs and went out spearfishing for barracuda.

Next to last was a trio of mostly single origin chocolate ice creams: a Claudio Corallo 75%, something or another from Madagascar (Valrhona?), and a milk chocolate that I cannot recollect.  Each was served with a few crystals of a different sort of finishing salt.  The ice cream was served with a “chocolate soda” that was crisp and refreshing and “more or less” non-alcoholic.

Last came chocolate milk and a nougaty-nutty cookie, which was starting to be more food than I needed, but which I obligingly wolfed down.

And I forgot to mention that maybe every dish was sparked to its fullest expression with a few grains of strategically selected finishing salt.  Be still my heart — there was the regal Pangasinan Star, there was glowering Halen Mon Gold, there was the trusty Fleur de sel de l’Ile de Noirmoutier.

Dave, enough already.  Open your own restaurant.

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.

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:

Ingredients (serves 4-6):

• 16 ounces of the dark chocolate of your choice (the darker the chocolate, the better it will compete against the flavors of the foods you dip into it).
• 1 tablespoon cacao nibs (optional).
• 1 large Himalayan salt plate (8 inch by 8 inch by 1.5 inches is recommended. The larger size plates give you room to work the chocolate without making a mess).
• Banana, strawberry, croissant, corn on the cob, or other fun dipping foods.

Place the Himalayan salt block on the gas range at very low heat. If using an electric range, be sure to use a metal ring as a spacer to keep the salt 1/4 to 1/2 inch above the surface of the electric coil. Slice the dipping foods into finger sized bits and set aside. After fifteen minutes at low heat, the salt block should be quite warm to the touch, but not hot. When at the desired temperature, place a square of the chocolate. It should begin to melt slowly. If it sizzles or smokes, reduce heat and wait another fifteen minutes for the brick to cool. If the chocolate does not begin to melt slowly after a minute or two, increase heat slightly and wait fifteen minutes for the salt block to warm.

When you have a nicely melting square of chocolate, add half of the remaining chocolate. When chocolate is mostly melted, fold it over on itself with a metal spatula. Add the remaining chocolate. Continue to work gently with the spatula. When all the chocolate is melted, slowly fold in the cacao nibs. When all is a gooey consistency, remove the Himalayan salt block from heat and set on a trivet at the table with the dipping foods arranged along side. Provide each diner a cheese knife or butter knife with which to dig into, and spread, the fondue, and set to!

Why fondue now?

Fondue is one of those transcendent foods; it is a dessert, it is an experience, it is a social activity, it is a symbol of fun, and there is something so obviously erotic about dipping slices of turgid pineapple into molten chocolate with our fingers that nobody even bothers to offer suggestive metaphors about it. Mi-cuit foie gras may be the tastiest thing on the face of the earth, but the fact that you have to eat it on a thin slice of fresh melba toast to get the most out of eating it says a lot for its failure to find much of a following outside the more worldly circles.

Today we have extremely cool new chocolates out there, opening the door to making fondues that are every bit as nuanced and profound as crafted by fanatics who are working hand in hand with local growers ( or growing cacao trees themselves) on increasingly specialized plantations where quality is prized over quantity. Like so many forgotten daffodils, chocolates are now cropping up across a wide open landscape of flavor. In a good chocolate shop you can dive into any experience you care for, with profiles that sync up with, and groove to, even the most obscure domains of your food preferences. Looking at a wall of dark chocolate bars, you can dive into virtually any experience you care for.In the move Total Recall, the character of Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves through a catalog of dream-realities—Explorer, Playboy, Thoracic Surgeon, Jedi—hoping to escape, if only for a moment, his work a day life. (Inexplicably Schwarzenegger chooses Secret Agent.) Open your mind and your mouth to there right dark chocolate bar, made from the right cacao by the right person in just the right way, and you are likely to find some pretty interesting thing happening to your taste buds: Leather, dates and figs, dried bananas and fresh persimmon, cinnamon and allspice, cherry and vanilla, tobacco and diesel, marshmallows, lime zest and strawberry, coffee and tree nuts, not to mention a host of harder to describe flavors that voice themselves from great dark chocolate like voices whispered in a the shadows of a cathedral.

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

Fondue today is mired in preconceived notions about food we have inherited from decades ago, when flavorings were the esteemed foundations upon which we constructed our culinary fantasies. Today we have extremely cool new chocolates out there, crafted by fanatics who are working hand in hand with local growers (or growing cacao trees themselves) on increasingly specialized, quality-oriented plantations. Chocolates are now emerging across an wide open landscape of flavor profiles, and in a good chocolate shop you can dive into any experience you care for. In the movie Total Recall, the character of Arnold Schwarzenegger leafs through a catalog of dream-realities (explorer, playboy, thoracic surgeon) hoping to escape, if only for a moment, from his work-a-day life. (Inexplicably, he chose secret agent). Open your mind and your mouth to the right a dark chocolate bar made from the right cacao by the right person in just the right way and you may find some pretty interesting things happening to your taste buds: leather, dates and figs, dried bananas and persimmon, cinnamon and allspice, cherry and vanilla, to tobacco caliber, the flavor, the

Chocolate fondue is one of those transcendent foods; it is a dessert, it is an experience, it is a social activity. It is also a byword for decadence alongside mi-cuit foie gras, pheasant under glass or bellinis and caviar. So why do we muck with the possibly the single thing that makes every living person on the planet feel like a bouncing bambino

Most chocolate fondues have you go through a lot of concocting to get to the point where you feel you have earned your Brownie Points. Properly subjugated, quivering with humiliation, is properly enslaved to your ego. Happy now?

Maybe that’s a little extreme, but I’m pretty sure that the proper amount of academic research in the field would conclude that fondue recipes are by and large the result of a genuine terror of chocolate. Or at the very least, it would conclude that elaborate fondue recipes are a hold-over from the days when chocolate was not quite safe to eat on its own.

Those days are gone. There are 100% pure (zero added sugar) chocolate bars out there now that can be eaten with a straight, smiling face–though some of us might admit to finding the large-scale consumption of such chocolate a bit of a challenge. There are dozens of super elegant chocolates that need no more than 30% or even just 20% sugar to make them palatable to most people.

At an event at The Meadow the other day we whipped up a novel form of Fondue. Created for the serious chocolate lover, it also proved delicious to every stripe of eater, from the brooding dark chocolate lover to the bubbly sweet-tooth.

The only possible drawback to this recipe is that not one single ingredient used in it is commonly available at most stores. Shameless, I know, but it truly was born out of what we had at hand in our shop… That said, all these ingredients are out there, and findable with a little research.