A few years back I was interviewed for a podcast, and early in the discussion was asked the very simple question, What is your goal as a chocolate maker? I am sure the interviewer was expecting me to say sell more bars or teach more students, so my answer was not what they expected.
Here’s what I said.
What I have dreamed of doing, still dream of doing, is to work in the kitchen of a fabulously forward-thinking acclaimed restaurant as the staff chocolate maker.
Yeah, think Ever, the restaurant owned by Chef Terry in The Bear.
Not as the pastry chef! but to make chocolate in-house, for the pastry chef and other chefs to use. Like the thinking behind a restaurant making in-house toasted mesquite vinegar or growing greens in their own rooftop garden for kimchi. I’d create the chocolate the chefs couldn’t get anywhere else.
Yes, such a luxury, and yes I do know how cozy cramped the pastry corner of even the best restaurant usually is. Still, even if just for a season, or heck, a two-week stint.
Forward-thinking is why the world’s best, most provocative, award-winning restaurants wear that badge, even the ones cleaving to traditional cuisine. And what I mean by that here, is that the chef has realized that chocolate, like any other painstakingly and thoughtfully produced and sourced ingredient—whether it be goat cheese or rubbiette apples, or what have you—can (okay, should) be an ingredient as intentionally important as everything else used in their kitchen. If the truffle forager commands attention when they knock on the back door, the grassfed lamb rancher, the just-picked-this-morning peach farmer, why not the chocolate maker?
It doesn’t help when well-known and/or respected food writers, culinary creatives, TV personalties, chefs and so on, gush over the standbys like Valrhona and Guittard, worse still when cookbooks continue to use the word chocolate as an anything-goes ingredient. But I get it why they do: those industrial strength companies work hard (translate: spend a lot of money) to attract pastry chefs. They make it easy, and convenient.
What I’m imagining is a keen interest in cacao as the food it is, not chocolate as a predictable flavor.
My cacao revelation, the singular glaring lightbulb moment that lead me to becoming a bean to bar maker the very next day, was that, despite the boxes of chocolate wheeled off the Sysco truck and bags of chips and callets in the bakery and restaurant storerooms where I’d worked, the truth blinking back at me from twenty-four barrels of cocoa beans, each filled with a unique origin, was a heaping dollop of clarity: what purpose would all those different, from-around-the-world origins, serve if there was such a thing as just chocolate flavor.
And why did we all think of chocolate as just…chocolate?
Maybe now is a good time, after ten years of making it, to admit that I’m not in this for the chocolate; I’m in it for baking and cooking and stirring with it. If you look in my house you won’t find a stash of chocolate bars, but you will find a cupboard dedicated to chocolate baking and drinking supplies.
Even at the wee beginning days of Map I offered chocolate for baking and chef’s chocolate as products. My chocolate was used on the set of the documentary Her Name is Chef. Cookbook author and pastry chef Caroline Schiff (recently of Gage & Tollner) has baked with my chocolate in her creations. I’ve had the fortune of playing the role of bean to bar teacher in several renowned pastry chefs’ chocolate making journeys. I even launched a side arm of Map Chocolate called spoon & POD thinking it might bring the idea of craft baking supplies outside the grocery aisle chocolate box of same old/same old, and into more bakers’ awareness.
I recently hauled home a swath of recently-published cookbooks (two solely focused on desserts), and in all three chocolate wasn’t anything other than chop chocolate, or use bittersweet chocolate, or use semisweet chips.
I do know of one chef who’s slicing the cake differently: you can read about Mac Daniel Dimla, pastry chef making his own chocolate at Michelin-starred LA restaurant Providence here. I asked a former Four Seasons executive pastry chef and America’s Best Baker winner (who took my in-person bean to bar class and quit his job to become a chocolate maker: let that be a warning for you chocolate-making contemplating folks) why even a kitchen like the Four Seasons would use the standard commodity bulk options, and his answer was budget.
Not flavor or consistency or easy to source. Budget is a reality, and as business owner I understand. But if you’ve read Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, if you are swept away by the way food tastes as Waters put it, there’s more to it than just what things cost.
I mean, isn’t that the rationale behind a $400 lunch for two?
I suppose, like the $11,000 Orwellian butter Carmy swears by in The Bear (butter from a place called Old Major Farm, possibly a nod (or swipe?) at Animal Farm Creamery in Orwell, VT whose butter is evidently coveted by chefs), the budget has to go for more exclusive, hard-to-source ingredients.
Wait, what was that about hard-to-source? You mean, like not just the regular old stuff everyone else is using? Here’s the rub: commodity industrial ubiquitous flavor factory-of-sameness chocolate is easy to source, so maybe convenience is the problem.
As a farmer in a whole other life I remember the unbearable lightness called joy I felt as I tended the acre I’d planted with heirloom potatoes, and having that lightness switch-hitting with a nauseaus dread knowing that in a month or so I’d be begging people to pay a higher price for my potatoes than they’d ever pay at Costco or Kroger or anywhere else. Those tidy rows of German Butterballs and Red Finns, Purple Peruvian fingerlings, tiny orb-ish Osettes were my dream. It wasn’t a big, going to the moon someday wild kind of dream, just a basic right where I was standing dream, of wanting to grow all the damn potatoes and tomatoes and pumpkins I’d never even seen or tasted, but saw in the heirloom seed catalogs.
Sound familiar? It was the same me and my lighting bolt moment when I realized those chocolate chips I stuffed into cookies were basically the red delicious apple in a world of fabulously diverse apples—Cox’s Orange Pippins, Newtons, Arkansas Blacks—the iceberg lettuce when that was the only choice, the carrot when in fact, there is no such thing as just carrot flavor or even, just orange carrots.
The farm I helped create from the sagebrush field of dirt up served one purpose: to create a job training platform for a burgeoning influx of Burmese and Lhotshampa (ethnic Nepalis removed from Bhutan) relocated to Idaho by the International Refugee Committee. The farm founder’s original idea was simple. Idaho is an agricultural state = the refugees could be trained for ag work = they’d be able to find jobs. Only, a three-acre farm has little in common with a thirty-thousand-acre agri-business farm, though she didn’t quite get that yet.
The founder, bless her kind heart, couldn’t grow mold in her refrigerator if her life depended on it, which is how I ended up being asked to be head farmer. She secured a donated hundred-year land lease on a windswept dust patch, and it was up to me to and a handfull of volunteers to figure out how to transform it into a working farm with everything—tools, water rights, irrigation materials and installation (even now the scale of what we needed and accomplished is daunting)—100% donated.
The day I flipped the dream of farm growing organic produce as a way to train newly-relocated folks who really needed jobs on its head was the day I surveyed the potato rows that needed hilling, stepping over the irrigation lines that needed to be turned on (row by row), the eighteen-wheeler load worth of steaming compost waiting to be wheelbarrowed and spread across the remaining unplanted two acres, while listening to a voicemail telling me we were out of money. Two months in. Seedlings waiting to be planted, a hella lot of work yet to do, an acre’s worth of my dream tucked into the soil waiting.
The founder was worn out from begging for funding and paperwork, I was up to my knees in beautiful (donated) composted horse manure from an organic riding arena. I looked at that steaming pile of poop and started thinking.
Like any batch of chocolate I’ve ever made I peeled apart the idea, layer by layer. My dream to be a farmer got whittled down to the seeds and core and skin, until all that was left was the gist of it, something so obvious I laughed. If people would pay a lot more for riding horses fed on organic alfalfa (I called the arena owner and asked her: because it’s better for the horses she told me) I believed they would gladly pay more for, not just our organic vegetables, but the why the farm was being built on: it’s better for all of us to create a way for a community to thrive.
We pre-sold the potatoes to a local chef who paid us up front in exchange for no other restaurant having the same potatoes; that’s as exclusive as it gets. I turned the remaining acre into 4 x 6 pre-planted garden subscriptions; we’d do the work, the plot subscribers could garden if they chose or not, stop by and grab fresh basil and a squash to take home, bring the kids, watch their plot thrive and grow. Or, for an extra $100, and all the good feelings, they could donate the produce from their plot.
Common Ground Farm was on its way. If you follow the link you’ll see just how much the founder’s original idea has grown.
This last bit is the part I hope you’ll focus on, because about now is where you may be thinking (besides, what the heck) is how I’m going to wrap up this happy ending farm story with an idea for getting chefs to use craft chocolate or make their own chocolate in-house, and somehow tie in my dream of a melanger tucked into the corner of a restaurant kitchen. It’s actually more simple than all that.
Here’s what got my attention about Providence’s in-house chocolate making:
…a new no-waste chocolate program that sources directly from cacao farmers who practice sustainable growing, then processes and utilizes every morsel of the beans: Beans are processed to nibs, which become desserts and confections; powdered byproduct is used in baking and sauces; and even the empty husks, often discarded, are transformed into an elegant end-of-meal tea service.
One of the great parts about being able to source our own cacao is once it comes here, 100% of it is not wasted.
This is not just a descriptive truth of what they’re doing. And it’s not a sales pitch, because they could have easily (expectedly) called it sustainable or ethical, organic, fair trade, any of the terms chocolate companies (and everybody else) already use to try to stand out; you know, the jargon-speak that is so common it’s meaningless. They could also easily have said, We don’t use the same stuff everybody else uses, or, We have a Michelin star, and left it at that.
To flip a dream on its head is to see the underbelly, in defiance of convenience’s sugar coating. We see the stuff we kinda knew was there, but hoped or pretended we didn’t have to look at or could ignore, and then that brings up the questions we might not want to answer; like, what are the principles (are there principles?) underlying our work? What do we believe in, what do we give a F about? What are we willing to give up and what will we hold onto for dear life? Am I giving this thing a shoutout because I believe in it, or because it’s easy money?
If a chef, and by this I mean, the kind who is as in love with the wet snap of a Nantes carrot as they are with the soft mauve of a shiso leaf, through an abiding love for walking their dream of food across a bridge to hand someone else their dream of food, one day holds a cocoa bean in their hands, how could they not choose to take the next step?
I can take lavado cacao, roast it as hot as the oven would go (my roast log notes), hand-peel a handful, smash them in a towel with a mallet, toss the nibby bits and pieces with a pinch of panela into my tiniest melanger, grind them less than a minute into a sandy paste that I then smear onto a piece of parchment to set.
It is some of the most wondrous chocolate ever. And one of the things I like to imagine in that restaurant kitchen dream, when I’m thinking of the mom and daughter and grandmother who grew the cacao, washed it in the creek, dried it in the yard, before I’d hand it over, saying, Chef, you’ve got to taste this.