time to wake up and smell the brownies burning

warning: how-to's not included.

“When you chew, molecules in the food make their way back retro-nasally to your nasal epithelium. All of what you consider flavor is smell. When you are eating all the beautiful, complicated flavors … they are all smell.”

~~Venkatesh Murthy, Raymond Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor and chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University

Increasingly I’m asked “can’t you just give me the recipe?” Also, “do you just have the recipes that’s all I need.” And yesterday there was “Am I really supposed to read this?”

These questions are not the same as What temperature should I roast at? or How do I know when the roast is done? or, Why did my temper fail? These questions are fine. To be expected, heck, to be hoped for! I implore you to ask these I’m-trying-to-figure-it-out questions.

The ones I’m writing about today are what I call the I Want to Skip Ahead questions. In fact, I’ve made it easy, and listed some Not the Next Batch options at the end—feel free to, you know, skip ahead if you have an inkling I may be on a “chocolate is hard you need to do the work” path (hint: yes I am). Your time is valuable, no hard feelings.

However, if you’re sticking around you may know that I am a deep-dive kind of person. There’s no doubt there are different types of learners and approaches to learning, as well as teaching; my innate approach is to go beneath the surface whether I’m the learner or the teacher (which is, in fact, two sides of one coin). Do I love cookbooks? yes, mainly for the inspiration, plus it’s nice to have a direction to aim. But do I follow the recipes to a T? No. As in, never have I ever.

This may very well be a conundrum for anyone accustomed to being handed—and whose preference is for—a blueprint/rule book/cookbook of recipes/very specific operating instructions. Those who’ve attended my livestreams will attest I often see the multiple angles of even the simplest question; how to temper begins with What, exactly, is cocoa butter? Inclusioncraft begins with digging into your Why and the idea/inspiration behind the bar before choosing the direction(s) that will make your idea morph into a bar. Roasting benefits from insights on volatile compounds that create what we sense as flavor, and so forth.

This leads to discussions and sometimes, directions not even I could see coming. I revel in this thinking, the sparking of new insight. It all meanders back around to the same starting point, though: how deeply can we deconstruct this aspect or that ingredient or technique so we can truly KNOW it.

That quote perched at the top? It has to do with everything I’m writing about here.

Everything I believe about craft/specialty chocolate, and it’s reason for being.

Everything of myself I’ve brought to it.

Do you recognize the theme? the mantra I implore in every single class and instagram post and interview: follow that tiny beating chocolate making cacao loving heart that only belongs to you.

Everything: meaning, everything I have labored over, dedicated myself to as a maker, lost sleep over, sweated and cried and busted my ass for, since a very humble one tiny grinder beginning in 2014, to this precipice I stand on now.

Everything leads to why the idea of just handing over recipes (why yes, I do have them, compiled in 10 years of formulation notebooks, scribbled margins, post-its, test batch results, experiments, and a multitude of beautiful messes) goes against everything I stand for, and why I started sharing what I know on Instagram, began opening my doors to students, and then created the Next Batch School. It’s almost impossible to describe how sad this trend makes me. How even now after having read multiple times and thought about the latest email with it’s I don’t want to do the work/hand me the answers message and holding my head in my hands at this desk—that has seen nearly every moment of me holding my head in my hands wondering wtf or why, or how will I—it makes me cry my eyes out.

I keep asking myself, why the tears? why now, after so much chocolate under the bridge and so many students, and honestly, so much support for my approach? And you might be wondering, and I get it, if it might be easier to just hand over recipes?

Lauren Heinick of Well-Tempered once asked me, How do you do it all? I think what she meant was how did I divvy up myself. I did Map, the Next Batch, everything (!) because of hope. I forged new methods and ideas because of hope. Craft chocolate gave me hope, I felt hope every batch I started and then every bar I sent out, despite the ever-present terrifying reality that folks were tasting my work (to this very day). I felt hope seeing other makers throng to the craft, hope from chocolate educators, hope from efforts like the Cross Atlantic Chocolate Collective (meeting Solomon Winky of Winky Chocolate through that initiative has given me incredible hope), hope from all those insta-live stories and the silly reels, hope seeing Next Batch students crafting far outside the chocolate lines, hope every time I’d see someone perusing the craft bar selection at my local market. Hope whenever I click the Start Livestream button.

Not a single one of us can be here without hope. It’s just too damn hard. There’s a lot of work in making chocolate as many of you so well know, and not always the payout we need or the response we yearn for.

My way of teaching is exactly my way of making chocolate, and my whole-hearted hope-filled do it my way approach is how I’m able to still be here: there’d be no Map, none of my pioneering of ideas if I couldn’t find hope in the possibility of not doing it like everyone else: hope + ideas + insights = the chocolate I’ve made. Sure, there was that one time (the very first time) I was told Pick out beans, I watched somebody else push the buttons “how to roast” and then watched them flip a switch “how to winnow” then was given a very straightforward set of directives: melt cocoa butter, add to melanger, turn on, add nibs, add sugar, make chocolate.

If you’ve ever made even a single batch you know. The whirring of the machines is not the part where we make chocolate. But the result: shining and delicious, I made this with my two hands ray of hope.

Here’s what happened. Why did the melanger stop? I wondered, and also, Now what do I do? Why did I add cocoa butter? There’s cocoa butter in chocolate? Why did they tell me to add that amount? What are those weird smells? Is the machine supposed to act like this? Why is chocolate slinging everywhere? Why did the chocolate taste the way it ended up tasting? The answers came later, when I dug around to figure them out, or read, or asked, or stood at the table slowly adding nibs and realizing It stops when the cocoa butter gets too cold which makes it solidify.

Every batch leads each of us toward understanding. There’s no end-goal The Place of Understanding Has Been Reached. Every batch, new insights.

In the 80’s when I worked for a once-famous pastry chef he looked at a tray of croissants I’d painstakingly made at 3 am when any self-respecting 26 year-old would have been in bed, and without tasting a single one, tipped the entire sheet pan’s worth into the trash. He did not tell me why or what, he did not hand me a recipe, just pointed me back to the bench. Start again, pay attention, screw up, learn, repeat.

I know things change. Craft chocolate in 2022 2024 isn’t what it was in 2010 when I didn’t even know it existed. For one thing, in 2014 when I started there were very few solo women chocolate makers: Kristin Hard of Cacao Atlanta, Nicole Trutanich of Bar au Chocolat, Denise Castronovo of Castronovo Chocolate, Christine Blais of Palette de Bine, and a small continegency of others. In 2014 the dude hipster vibe was gaining attention (Mast Brothers, Raaka, Dick Taylor, Woodblock, etc) emerging to the forefront, pushing the idea of craft chocolate toward the realm of craft beer and third wave coffee.

All those makers who paved the way had no recipes. No, 1-2-3’s (as one email requested). Craft meant dedication to a core idea that we were doing chocolate differently (insert hope emoji here). Industrial chocolate, the ubiquitous trick or treat bag full kind, the slap it out and send it down a conveyor belt to the wrapping machine, is what craft intentionally sought not to be, to stand apart from.

Commodification doesn’t want to know who’s holding the machete and lopping the pod from the trunk, who’s coddling and praying over the ferment heaps, who’s running out in the night to make sure the monsoon didn’t blow away the drying bed tunnels. It doesn’t stop one day, after licking it’s finger to ask What if I roasted 2 minutes not 3 in the development window? It doesn’t spend an entire day covered in dust sorting the beans and every third one, holding it up and marveling how a cacao bean came to be in this hand on this day, as if it had fallen out of the sky and something I never saw coming, not in my wildest dreams. It does not, for one second, give a fuck if the person opening the bar, peeling back the wrapper and taking the first whiff, will also stop to think, How? how did this miracle we call chocolate come to be?

That’s what I believe in. The hope kindled between you and me and these damn beans, the thought that leads to deciding I’ll make chocolate, the hopefulness of this culture of cacaolove.

If that’s you, I’m your gal and I’ll wipe away the tears and wave my hands around as I marvel over something I hope you’ll find relevant, useful, maybe even meaningful. If not, the truth is there is no recipe I can hand you for the only way I know how to make chocolate, which is to say, diving in deeply while following your heart.

See below for the other options.

xxoo,

Mackenzie

—>Now about that quote way back at the start: I found it on a search to make sense of aroma and roasting, namely, how I might understand better and convey to students how to use their sense of smell during a roast—where and when, and how to learn from what we smell; not just the “I smell brownies baking” thing, delightful as it is, because what does that tell us? What if, as one student in Singapore wrote me, you’ve never smelled brownies baking? On the river when we baked brownies in a very large cast iron dutch oven, coals on the lid, just a few underneath, when someone yelled “I smell brownies!” we guides would leap in terror for the kitchen mitts because that meant one thing: way beyond done. In cacao, if origins = different flavors, can they all smell like brownies when heat is applied? Why then don’t they all taste like brownies? what about when that brownie smell appears midway? Or early? or not at all? Which is to say, there’s no such thing as set a dial + a timer, and voila, here’s the one and only way to roast

—>Bean to Bar Class Options that aren’t the Next Batch (pre-2024 pricing)

1. Penn State 4-day $2000 + $200 manual, Industrial Chocolate Manufacturing class; taught by “entrepreneurs, equipment manufacturers and Penn State faculty instructing participants in the theory and practice of chocolate production.” If a factory is your dream, this class

2. ICE (Institute of Culinary Education): A Bean-to-Bar Intensive, in-person, two 6-hours days $595

3. Melissa Coppel, Bean to Bar (taught by a Cacao Barry Ambassador), online, three 5-hour days $800