how to create chocolate no one else has ever created
in three easy-ish steps, plus a recipe for lemon white chocolate
If you are wondering how I teach or what you might get here from the Next Batch, why (or if) what is offered here is different from the norm, consider this required reading. It’s best paired with that really amazing bar you’ve had stashed for the right day~~yes, it can be one you made, go ahead and own it sisters and brothers, we deserve to be proud of our craft :)~~or someone else’s brilliant work. Either way, I hope what you have is one of those bars that don’t come along just every day. The kind that makes you stop, jump up and shout Yes! loudly enough to scare your cat. And on that note, I hope today’s read will equally forever linger in your slow batch chocolate experience as something you don’t come along every day.
I read something really good from Rob Hoos, a specialty coffee roasting pro I admire. If you’ve ever attended one of the Next Batch’s livestream classes then you may have spied his book Modulating the Flavor Profile of Coffee, One Roaster’s Manifesto on a shelf above my DIY sous vide melter (yes, that tiny kitchen is not just the NB studio but the working craft kitchen of Map Chocolate).
If you’re aiming to improve your cacao roasts or understand “what is roasting,” (I will say this until my last-ever batch of chocolate, roasting is NOT baking in an oven), get his book. Although it’s about roasting coffee, it provided my foundation as a cacao roaster, when the only other info I had was what I could glean from the quagmire (Rob’s word).
He has a new booklet out about avoiding tipping (it’s a coffee roasting issue), but this pre-intro struck me as so applicable to craft chocolate it made me spill my mocha: a declaration of not having all the answers, of aiming to offer experience-driven insights. Every time he says coffee change it to chocolate. And change it from Rob speaking, to me. Bonus points if you wave your hands.
In chocolate, pseduo-science and bro-science is just as much a thing as it is in coffee, or beer, the similiar-ish specialty industries we’re often compared to. Sadly, when it comes to actual research and education solely on behalf of craft chocolate, the comparison/likeness fades. The coffee and beer folk have us beat hands down on that.
What I present here in the Next batch is, to paraphrase Rob, What is helping me make chocolate better now.
My personal approach has been since day one to create chocolate no one else has ever created, which is not to say I set out to create a “better” Belize Toledo District 70% bar than all the others out there. I never dreamed of coming up with a way to make a “better” Peru Maranon. I set out to make my chocolate better, and on the way, I ended up creating chocolate no one else makes.
Every time I create a new bar (Lucky Day, below) or a whole new chocolate (oat milk/oat milk white, and the plant-based white gianduia for Projet Chocolat) or new product I go through these steps.
I decide it’s time to create a bar, and what it will be
I think about the flavor I want, and how I want to create that
I create the test formulation, and try it out
Still with me? then you’ve noticed each step is a two-step: each dependent on the other, but not necessarily consecutive order. For example:
I could decide what I want a bar to be and then decide it’s time to create it
I could want to create a certain flavor and then think about it
I could try out an idea (with a batch I have on hand) then create a new test batch formulation.
Here’s another tip: the steps are fluid. They can be in any order because there are no rules, this is just how I’ve done it. This is not comforting to those makers who are engineers, sorry. I know you will be thinking You can’t build a bridge without the plans and specs and materials.
But I am saying, you CAN make a chocolate no one has ever made, and on a whim. On the fly, on a spur of the moment fling, on a very simple tiny inner voice squeaking at you, Here is your a-ha! moment.
You can also learn to make chocolate no one has ever made, and it can be the best you’ve ever made, simply by accepting you don’t have a choice.
I was hired to consult for a maker and though we’d been talking about their goals and business needs (grow their small batch biz slowly but also make enough profit to justify spending the time + money to keep it moving forward; sound familiar?) it wasn’t until we got to the nitty-gritty details of their product line that they told me they’d never veered from the basic batch formulation they’d been using, since day one.
What they wanted, they said, was for me to create new bars for them.
So I asked, trying to imagine how this would work, Would I do this every season? Every year? What about if you order a new origin? What if someone reaches out about a custom bar? What if you discover some fabulously wonderful ingredient and want to use it?
What if, I asked them, you were on the bank of a river and there was no bridge to the other side. How would you get there? What if you had no choice but to get there? What if you didn’t know how to swim, or if swimming was out of the question?
It’s not the bridge we should focus on, it’s the need to get to the other side of the river.
A bridge isn’t the only way.
Here’s some insight into a bar I made for Map’s 2022 holiday collection. I am currently a-whirl with narrowing down ideas for the 2023 collection, and imagine many of you are too. If you’ve already dreamed your products up, crafted them and wrapped them, you deserve a smack to take a break.
Are there other lemon bars out there? sure. Most use lemon oil, or lemon juice powder, one popular one uses lemon oil and lemon salt. I made a lemon poppyseed crispy rice bar years back and used lemon oil, before I realized I could do it differently. That approach—grab an ingredient that any other maker can just as easily grab—isn’t my goal now (like Rob, I’m still learning my craft). And it isn’t what I teach.
Let those makers take the bridge, I want to row my own boat, even if that means more work. Yes, this means I want you to row your own boat too. It’s why, when makers ask me “which oat is best?” or which cocoa butter etc etc, I try to explain, to paraphrase Shawn Asknosie of Askinosie Chocolate when he said, It’s not about the chocolate, it’s all about the chocolate,
It’s not about the ingredients, it’s ALL about the ingredients. Your choices (availability, budget, familiarity) are very likely not the same as mine.
My 3 steps in action. I’d call it a breakdown but plz. No more of those.
Lucky Day: lemon cheesecake with graham crust
I wanted to make a bar that “said” holiday, but would be plant-based + gf. It needed to be “special” because my holiday collection was small this year (4 bars, drinking chocolate, a spread, and bark, and I had requests for old favs; so two new bars/two old favs). Pro-tip here: It also needed to be January forward-thinking, for a “hurray we survived the holidays” collection, in case folks loved the bar and wanted to buy it again. This ticks a couple of key boxes: follow-up orders from folks who were gifted the bar, knowing that the holiday peppermint snowstorm that feels so fresh in November can feel wearily outdated in the New Year. A treat, but seasonal. My answer: citrus.
I had a boatload (ok, a 5-gallon bucket) of organic Meyer lemons I’d picked over Thanksgiving. Candied peel was obvious, because I’ve made it and used it in several bars. But it would only best serve as an accent, the way it does in a cheesecake; how to get the bright, fragrant Meyer lemon juice flavor into it? Side note n1: my family begs for cheesecake every birthday and holiday. Side note n2: Years ago I had a (wait for it) cheesecake business in Idaho. I baked cheesecakes for a restaurant in a yurt which required I ski the cheesecakes on a sled in order to deliver them. My Starry Night bar was inspired by my night-time skiing alone through the woods from the yurt back home.
I knew I needed to “get” the lemon into the bar + it needed to be creamy (lemon cheesecake is the idea, the bar is a riff—improvisation—on a known/beloved dessert) and also, since it’s cheesecake it needed crust. I could make my own candied peel, I could add lemon juice at tempering, but only minimally (yes: liquid in small amounts works with seed tempering); not enough flavor. I could take the Meyer lemon juice and freeze-dry it, if I had a freeze dryer. I could say to heck with all this work and grab a bottle of lemon oil and replicate what everyone else is already making :( I found a local business with a freeze dryer (my first idea was to reach out to a Next Batch student in Arizona who has one :), so I squeezed and zested a kazillion lemons, delivered the juice, they dried it, then took my go-to oat milk white chocolate recipe (deodorized cocoa butter, cane sugar, gf oat flour) and added the lemon until it had the taste I desired. It required 3 days of refining, which is longer than with commercial lemon powder; I have no idea why, I just assessed and refined until I liked the texture. The crust was a gf pie crust recipe; if I made it again I wouldn’t bother with the tapioca since I was blitzing it all up anyway. I had planned to make the crust in a melanger, but (no surprise) I had 2 serious refiner malfunctions (tis the season) and was up against a deadline. Just before tempering + moulding I melted cocoa butter, added panela, blitzed the crust and stirred it in, then tempered the crust: yes, the bar required a dual-temper moulding session. Tempering: stirred in a copious amount of minced candied lemon peel, ladled in the lemon cheesecake and dropped the crust onto it in happy lil blobs. Just like the way you get those remnants of yummy crispy crust on the cheesecake plate. On the topside (below) you can see lemon peel poking through.
Now, was that so hard?
I can’t help but believe if I asked every single student who has crossed the Next Batch virtual threshold If you had a choice to make chocolate no one else has ever made or make chocolate like everyone else, which would you choose? most would want to make chocolate no one has ever made.
I see so many of you doing just that, and it thrills me to no end.
Need a recipe for a lemon white bar? no squeezing required.
Happy making, and thank you for being here!
Mackenzie