Next to Squirrel Stash (salted caramel white chocolate with hazelnut(kin)ela), one of my most requested bars has been Meteor Shower, a 65% dark milk made with black sesame, then spritzed with black sesame and a mix of black lava salt + Icelandic sea salt on the back. When I created it in 20I6 the craft world was still deep in the it’s gotta be two-ingredient dark ages, so I had no idea what anyone would think. Ok, I knew what the experts would think but I made it anyway.
The flavor idea came from the food blogger Bojon Gourmet, who had a recipe on their website for a chocolate ice cream with black sesame. In the notes they described black sesame’s nuttiness vs white sesame’s greener grassiness (something along those lines), and it made me think: if it worked well for a chocolate ice cream, maybe a bar. I was working with the origin Honduras Wampusirpi at the time, which can veer toward loamy funky, with root vegetable-ishness (parsnips) that reminded me of the steamy kitchen of an older auntie’s lunch stew. Not entirely what I’d want in an origin, but a deep enough roast cures the funk into something more miso-savory, and the parsnip adds a buttery background that softens it all.
This is not one of those I taste the steely edge of a Roman sword buried for twelve centuries with a hint of that time a herd of goats tromped overhead tasting notes bs, though it may seem that way. So let’s look at what I mean and yes, I promise there will be ice cream.
Loamy and funky is earthy. Truffle-earthy, not grassy, which some folks think of when we say earth. Dirt, soil, clay, bits of sand, all the critters that make up the stuff that earthworms love: beautiful richly pungent compost, the pit your four year-old dug in the rose bed when you weren’t looking, the stuff on the truffle pig’s snout! That’s what I mean. It’s common in chocolate making circles to read earthy (Ecuador Camino Verde in its youth, for example, or Dominican Republic Oko Caribe) as “cocoa forward” because if you close your eyes and taste with color it reads brown, and since we’re talking chocolate, it’s easy to interpret brown = our favorite food.
It’s a case of the wanna-be’s I think.
So how did I know it needed a heftier roast? Only because I let a 25-pound roast go deeper than intended and it smelled so much better than the mushrooms forgotten in the back of the fridge gone bad usual result, that I made a note. At this stage of my chocolate making career I was only two years in, and roasting was terrifying, despite being a cocoa roaster for my day job. I made a lot of mistakes. I mostly aimed with my eyes closed and tried to smell whatever was happening, which meant a sliding scale of When will it smell like brownies baking —> is that what brownies baking is supposed to smell like —> did I just burn the brownies baking —> it smells like brownies baking! and many times —> why didn’t I smell brownies baking? Also, once the batch was made, why the heck if it smelled like brownies baking the batch doesn’t taste like a brownie?
I also wondered, if some origins = fruit bombs and others = earthy, a few others were descriibed as tobacco or spicy or black tea, why we were supposed to experience every roast as “it smells like brownies baking.”
Before I knew that what I was asking wasn’t “why didn’t it smell like brownies baking” but what makes a brownie baking smell the way it does? I just paid attention. I didn’t know yet about volatiles, and even now, I can’t tell you which exact ones I’m experiencing. But I can relate my observations—what I experience, not what I think I’m supposed to experience.
This is how I often turn to ice cream when I think about creating a new bar
I imagine what I would do to turn the ice cream flavor into a bar: how it would work, what tweaks I’d make. With the Meteor Shower I thought the addition of milk would round out the earthy/buttery flavors, but because the butteriness had already softened the savoriness I liked, I bumped the percentage up to 65% for more cacao flavor. I wanted to bring out the savoriness, so black sesame seemed like it might do that, especially the nuttiness of it. But just scattered on the back wouldn’t really achieve this, so I decided to grind the sesame into the batch.
Roasting black sesame is tricky, because it’s hard to tell if the seeds are burning. Also, black sesame (like other seeds) can go rancid, and they don’t necessarily have a glaringly obvious gone bad aroma. They should be stored in a fridge/freezer. Also, adding nuts or seeds into the grind means adding additional fat, so I factored that in when I created the batch recipe
My current flavor ideas board
Ice cream is very similar to the blank slate we have with chocolate: fat, creaminess, we might want to add flavor and/or texture, not limited to one extra ingredient, the base (vanilla, chocolate, coffee, strawberry, etc etc) is an ever-expanding universe of options, including plant-based. It also has some similar irksome issues: the coldness in ice cream dampens flavor assertiveness in the way that cacao’s boldness weighs against an extra ingredient’s flavor goals. There’s also the uber-sweetness factor, which can dominate the experience. There’s the potential inclusion lost in the void problem.
The idea churn
Creamy cashew ginger latte: this one’s easy. Cashew coffee white chocolate with candied ginger.
Strawberry thai basil sorbet means, nothing creamy and intense flavor: three-ingredient strawberry base, thai basil infusion used for a coconut white swirl.
Matcha coconut: matcha coconut white with a coconut sugar + shredded coconut nib brittle.
Raspberry coconut mango: a triple batch moulded in stripes, raspberry cashew white + coconut white + mango white. So pretty!
Fudge brownie coffee: Coffee white chocolate with brownie brittle stirred in.
Salted honey butter (I nixed the peanut butter though it would be fine too): sourdough toast crumblets caramelized with honey (it’s like baking croutons then blitzing into small bits) stirred into (can’t go on back due to sticky factor and/or potential staleness) oat milk honey white chocolate. I’d use panela for the chocolate and reduce the amount as this bar sounds disturbingly sweet, and toast the oats. Fat salt flakes stirred in just before tempering (salt is water soluble so the crystals will remain intact in the chocolate.
Plant-based almond “mascarpone” white chocolate needs lemon in the batch to give it a cheese-tang, brown butter almond crunch stirred in would use a Christina Tosi-esque crunch recipe. This one really appeals to me, also as a spread.
Blood orange sounds so adult and sprinkles sound like off the high horse, so yee-haw to a dark chocolate with candied blood orange on one side of the bar and a blood orange white on the other, yes with chocolate sprinkles.
Salted cantaloupe with ginger could work with freeze-dried cantaloupe bits in a ginger bar, pink sea salt on the back. The issue with “light” freezedried fruits is they require a huge amount to impart flavor, so stuffing a bar with the bits is a workaround.
Toasted almond cherry really needs to be a dark forest bar: plant-based almond milk chocolate with slivered toasted almonds? dried cherries inside. Maybe soaked in a dark beer then dried.
Finally, where to find ice cream ideas for inspiration
Visit the website of an ice cream maker. Here in Oregon we have Salt & Straw, in Seattle there’s Frankie & Jo’s.
And of course, eat some crazy wild or new to you flavor, something you’ve never tried or shied away from (not talking oyster ice cream!) and imagine it as a bar.
Happy making,
Mackenzie
I’ve been paying attention at the icecream shop for flavour combos but haven’t actually taken the step of batchcrafting them. Might be a good excuse to visit our new icecream shop in town!
I have used ice cream flavors for inspiration as well, and classic desserts. As always, thank you for your words 🤗