Chocolate Think Tank: Fancy Food Show Interviews

Chocolate maker Steve DeVries (left) operates according to the slogan "100 years behind the times." In the context of DeVries Chocolate, that means, returning to preindustrial artisan methods. But in a larger context, the phrase is perfectly suited to my own life because it suggests mindful work, patience, and sometimes just simply running behind schedule. So a full three weeks after the event, here are excerpts from my conversations with Steve and some of his colleagues at the annual Fancy Food Show in New York:


DeVries Chocolate
Tell me about the chocolate meeting yesterday?

Steve DeVries, founder: It was a meeting of the FCIA, Fine Chocolate Industry Association. Art [Pollard, from Amano] was there, and Shawn [Askinosie, from Askinosie Chocolate] was there, and Alan [McClure, from Patric Chocolate] was there, and Larry [Slotnick, from Taza] was there, and I was there, and Gary Guittard [from Guittard ] was there. Frederick [Schilling, of Dagoba] was there. So that was seven or eight small chocolate makers. And Gary is not a small chocolate maker, but he’s like fourth generation! I mean, I don’t even know what my grandfather did for a living! You know, and he’s probably working with some of the same equipment as his grandfather.

So here’s a question, do you want to get bigger and distribute more, or do you want to maintain this equilibrium between small production and high quality that you have? Because it’s kind of cool.

Steve: Well, I can only speak for myself, but I really am trying to work with being able to do as good a chocolate as... I’m still in the process of learning what good chocolate means. The chocolate that we’re dealing with today is really the result of 100 years of industrialization that I don’t necessarily think was good for chocolate itself. In the plantations, there was 100 years of unlimited competition between cocoa growers, and they were just beat to death. Cocoa prices in the 1950 were like forty cents a pound. We saw those same prices in the late 1990s! People said "Don’t worry about quality, give us quantity." So, I mean, everybody’s going to be different. We cannot compete with the big companies on quantity. So it’s obvious that you’re going to have to stay with better quality. For me, it kind of all started with the heavy anomaly of bringing cocoa beans back from Costa Rica, roasting them in my oven, and grinding them. It was a rustic chocolate but there was a complexity of flavor that I’d never tasted in chocolate before. So the starting thing was "how could this possibly be? There’s companies with a couple hundred years' experience, multi-million dollars, and they’re flat compared to what I’m tasting here."

--

Grenada Chocolate Company

Can you tell me, why did you start the chocolate company, why chocolate, and what’s the distribution chain?

Mott Green, founder: Okay, well, I lived in Grenada for many years, just tinkering around, growing food on this mountainside, living in a bamboo house. I fell in love with cocoa trees and processing cocoa, at the time in a very simple way, which I learned in Grenada, actually--just to make a beverage, what they call "cocoa tea" in Grenada. And I fell in love with Grenada too. And I saw the whole cocoa crop in decline, and all of my cocoa-farmer friends were hardly getting anything for their cocoa, despite the fact that it was getting exported at some of the highest prices in the world. Because they were exploited and because the economy of scale of growing cocoa in Grenada is difficult. And for one reason or another, it went further into decline and the government kind of let go of agriculture. So over the years I developed this dream of making a small-scale, homemade chocolate factory right in Grenada, as a radical way to revolutionize the connection between growing the bean and the finished, highest-value product. And I had that dream for a long time, and then in '99 started researching and picked up a tinkering partner named Doug. And we went to his place in Oregon, and we started building machines and learning to make chocolate on a small scale. And over the years ended up a combination of antiques and machines that were sort of designed for other things and homemade machines, and then after years of work with kind of a shoestring startup, the budget took us to September of 2001, when we started the company. And we’ve been growing slowly. We went organic in 2003, thanks to the connection of a big cocoa farm down the street from the chocolate company, called Belmont Estate. And we helped them certify organic, to create the first organic-certified cocoa in Grenada. And we more recently started a cooperative, and now we have five organic farms, and every year we're trying to get more organic farms so we can grow. Our growth is very slow because we have to literally go through all the work of certifying one farm at a time, and we want to stay organic. As far as the distribution chain, it’s been really limited, we’ve only until now exported a small percent of what we’ve made. And we’ve made until recently about ten tons a year. And now all of a sudden we’re making thirty tons a year. And we’re going to export probably about two thirds of that. So things are changing. So far, we’ve just sent small air cargo shipments to people like Steve, our distributor here in Manhattan, and to a guy in California, a guy in Oregon who does some web sales, a couple of specialty shops in London. Very isolated little distribution. The reason we’re here [at the Fancy Food Show] is that we’re just getting to the next step where we’re, in a month, going to send out our first container, with probably about seventy-thousand bars, and stockpile that with an importer, and actual connections will start hopefully with regional distributors, and then we might start to get into a little bit bigger markets like Whole Foods and more places around the country. So we’re really in transition.

--

Taza Chocolate

Tell me about the chocolate event yesterday that everyone's talking about.

Alex Whitmore, co-founder: A bunch of us new bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers, more artisan chocolate makers, in the United States, we all tried to get together and gather. And it’s kind of the first time that it’s happened that we’ve all been in one place and we all wanted to talk about maybe forming some sort of an organization or trying to work together to really make people aware that this whole movement of new chocolate-making exists, that we’re really different from all the other chocolate that’s out there. So that’s the big reason that we all got together. And then there’s all sorts of other reasons, like dealing with various issues of cocoa-bean sourcing, and all the stuff that we all have to do on the farm level or otherwise. And this is something that happened 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, with the craft brewing industry for the beer guys. I mean, when they first started out, there were all the big breweries. And then there were like a few little guys making amazing beer. But they weren’t being recognized. So they all banded together and really generated awareness of what craft brewing was. And that’s sort of what we’re trying to achieve ourselves.

Alright, so what’s happening next?

Alex: Well, we don’t quite know what’s happening next. We had a very productive meeting. We took a lot of notes. And we’re all going to stay in communication over the coming months. And hopefully we’re going to regather again out in San Francisco at the end of the summer.

--

Claudio Corallo Chocolate

James Clark, US Distributor: People are discovering that chocolate has distinct flavors depending on where it’s from, and how it’s processed, and who grows it, and everything else. Claudio’s chocolate is one of two, maybe three, companies in the world that actually do a plantation-to-bar operation.

Who are the other ones that you know of?

James: There’s one in Madagascar, and then El Rey in Venezuela.

I’ve read about Claudio Corallo in Mort Rosenblum’s chocolate book, but I’ve never seen the chocolate anywhere. So that’s changing, I take it?

James: Yep, Yep.

Where is it available and how are you facilitating that?

James: Well, because we’re physically located on the West Coast that’s where we started distributing. We have several shops in Seattle, wine shops, specialty cheese shops, obviously specialty chocolate shops. Also in San Francisco, Portland, you know, those areas. We have one in DC now. The New York market we’re finding difficult to break into.

I think it’s a funny market.

James: Yeah, yeah, it is. Fickle market. So we’re not quite established here in New York, but we’re working on it.

And you can buy the stuff online?

James: Yeah, there’s a couple of websites actually. There’s claudiocorallo.com, which is done by Claudio, that’s more informative about the whole process. And then there’s claudiocorallochocolate.com, which is the e-commerce site, and you can buy it online.

Boston Chocolate: The Best and the Most Generous

"I have to find Lee Napoli," I said as I walked out the door of my old roommate Paige's apartment in Boston last Saturday. I'm not sure how I expected to find her, since I all I knew was that her less-than-one-year-old chocolate shop was in the South End, as was the apartment I was walking out of. But I guess the fates were smiling on me that morning because as we walked down Tremont Street we came right up to an easel sign advertising the ChocoLee shop around the corner on Pembroke.

Paige and I walked in and found Lee hard at work, wearing her James Beard Award chef's jacket. I told her that someone at Boston University's gastronomy program had insisted I come to sample her confections. I decided not to mention that I was the keeper of a chocolate blog--it seemed a bit superfluous on a Saturday morning.

"What are you making?" I asked. They were Earl Grey bon bons, and Lee (a self-taught pastry chef and founder of the Professional Pastry Guild of New England) graciously began to explain the concept of infused ganache, but I already knew that the bergamot perfume that Earl Grey brings to dark chocolate makes that kind of bon bon one of my favorites. "Ohh, can I have one?" I asked with just a streak of teenage girl. Lee dipped two squares of ganache into a pot of tempered chocolate, waited a few seconds for them to set, and drizzled white chocolate over the top. She waited a few more seconds and offered them to us.

I asked Lee whom she thought the best chocolatiers in the area were. "The best chocolate in Boston is right here," she said, "there's no one else." I laughed. "I say that jokingly," she said, "but I do believe it." And a week later, after trying what was on offer at competitors like the new Aroa on Washington Street, I believe it too.


I asked Lee how much we owed her, and she said not to worry about paying for two little pieces of chocolate and sent us on our way. Paige and I were headed to the chocolate buffet at the Langham hotel. To get there, we had to follow the route of the annual Boston Gay Pride Parade, which was delightful--I'd forgotten that Massachusetts, with civil rights advocacy and health insurance for everyone, is such a wonderful place to live. The Langham buffet(with its frilly yet average desserts) is really better suited to teenage girls than chocolate bloggers--the best part of it was Paige being such a good sport in taking me there.


As usual, I ran out of time before I could do everything, but I did find my way to the Taza factory across the street from a commercial laundry facility in Somerville (near Cambridge). I'd tried their signature "stone ground" chocolate bars before but I'd always thought the unconched chocolate was just a gimmick, an attempt to do something different that sacrificed one of chocolate's greatest European innovations (conching is what transforms gritty chocolate into the smooth stuff that you can roll around your mouth). But co-founder Alex Whitmore (in between answering my questions about cocoa butter, pesticides, and antique machinery) explained that Taza's goal is interact more fully with cacao's places of origin than their competitors, not only by developing strong relationships with growers (they pay above the Fair Trade price for beans) but by creating a product that stays close to traditional recipes for preparing cacao. That's why Taza uses small molinos (grinders) from Oaxaca and turns out an unconched product. "I think we make the best Mexican chocolate in the world," Alex told me, "but I'm sure many people in Mexico would disagree." I'm not so sure--I tried the discs of vanilla- and cinnamon-flavored drinking chocolate intended to be blended with milk or water, and not only did I prefer them to Taza's chocolate bars but I preferred them to any drinking chocolate I've tried in Mexico or Central America.

By the time Alex and I had finished talking, it was about one in the afternoon. I had a flight to catch at three. I think Alex's partner Larry Slotnick asked if I was crazy and I think I said yes. So I helped Larry pack up some samples he was about the mail to Minnesota, I got into his car, breezed by one of the farmer's markets where Taza staff sell chocolate and meet customers one-on-one, and then rode back to the South End with Larry, who generously dropped me off at Paige's front door.

Some Day We'll Find It, the Praline Connection: Candy and Other Indulgences in New Orleans

Five days is not enough time to spend in New Orleans. Five days is especially not enough time when you've curated a comprehensive collection of Cajun and Creole food suggestions from chefs, critics, and chocolatiers, and when you're visiting the city with every other hungry participant in the Association for the Study of Food and Society conference. I arrived, put down my bags, met a few of my colleagues, and announced my plans to head straight to the Praline Connection. I received a chorus of "that's just a candy store" replies. I believed otherwise, but it didn't seem polite to argue, so I followed a buoyant group of young sociologists and agronomists to Coop's, a cheap eats hub known for its rabbit jambalaya. Over the next several days, I also made it to Petunias in the frenzied French Quarter for spicy pain perdu (with so much sausage that I turned the leftovers into lunch while I was locked up in the hotel editing my conference paper), Iris in the neighborhoody Carrollton area (for sublime foie gras, beautiful snapper, and some kind of cocktail that included New Orleans rum, Campari, and prosecco), holes in the wall like Cafe Maspero (for muffulettas) and Johnny's (for Po Boys), and a privately catered crawfish boil amidst the mountable dinosaurs and Marilyn Monroe statues at Mardi Gras World. New Orleans foodie insiders recommended that I meet resilient B&B owner Patty Marino (of Bijou) and Slow Food organizer Poppy Tooker, but there just wasn't time.

Still, I did meet Mischa Byruck from the sustainable food organization Market Umbrella, who, after asking what I was interested in, got on the phone to an exgirlfriend and announced "I'm hosting this group of culinary tourists and they want chocolate!" She sent me to Magazine Street, toward Bittersweet Confections and Blue Frog--unfortunately, holding to the Big Easy's Catholic roots, both shops (along with many others) close on Sunday, the day I decided to visit. But down the block at Sucre, I got a hearty Southern welcome from food blogger Blake Killian of Blake Makes, owner Joel Dondis, and Joel's lovely wife Gretchen. Joel brewed me a cup of tea, pushed a plate of ethereal macaroons in front of me, and then invited me into the kitchen to sample chef Tariq Hanna's latest experiment at combining chocolate with the untranslatable bayou flavor known as "nectar."

And before the five days were out, I'd walked from the French Quarter towards the Bywater, passing the NOLA Rising free public art event, and finally settling in for lunch at the Praline Connection--not just a candy store. They had catfish, they had ribs, they had collard greens and mac and cheese, they had red beans and rice, they had gumbo--and, with the help of Howard, my uncle from Lafayette, Louisiana, I ate all of it.

The Praline Connection is also a candy store. And I've heard murmurs that they take so much pride in their sticky pecan patties that they've sometimes contracted out to other factories (including at least one in America's chocolate capital of San Francisco) to ensure the best quality craftsmanship for their classic New Orleans confections. Howard bought a box of chocolate pralines for his daughters, but after that lunch, I was done eating for a while.

I might have left New Orleans--and this story--without ever tasting a praline. I came up with the title for my adventures in New Orleans before I'd lived them out. Don, the Omni Royal Orleans' concierge brought everything together for me. As I sat in the lobby of the hotel, ready to head to the airport with a handful of other well-fed gastronomers, Don brought out a plate of pralines from the kitchen--the chef's secret recipe.

(Photo of Mardi Gras World courtesy of Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World and NewOrleansOnline.com. Photo of Joel Dondis, Emily Stone, Blake Killian, and Joel's wife Gretchen courtesy of Blake Killian.)

Back to Pittsburgh Chocolate: Greenhouses and Pink Flamingos

In the course of a week, about half a dozen people emailed me about the Phipps Conservatory's chocolate exhibit here in Pittsburgh. So just as summer weather was setting in, I walked through Schenley Park to the glass house that is perhaps as famous for the collection of Chihuley sculptures leftover from a recent exhibit is it is for the rare plants that it houses. The current exhibit, called simply "Chocolate!" takes a playful approach to the botanical history of cacao, showcasing plants like the vanilla orchid and chocolate mint. There are a few odd things about the exhibit. First, the cacao tree that lives at the Phipps year-round gets scant attention. Second, official exhibit materials get some of the facts wrong, facts as important as the location of Ghana (the world's second-largest cacao producer) on a world map. And third, there is absolutely no connection between chocolate and the exhibit's central motif: pink flamingos.

The second thing is disappointing, gravely disappointing. The third thing, though, isn't that much of a problem. It might be an asset. I've never met a lawn flamingo that I didn't like.

Exhibit designer Michele Frey McCann puts it this way: "I needed a way to light-heartedly represent our obsessions. I was searching for someone (or something) to dive into colorful pools of flowers to candy coat the 'chocolate;' someone (or something) to dip fruits into a 'chocolate' fondue fountain; someone (or something) to immerse oneself into the pleasures of a 'chocolate' spa treatment; someone (or something) to represent one’s favorite 'chocolate;' someone (or something) to shower oneself in 'chocolate' flavors; someone (or something) to enjoy chocolate desserts in a 'chocolate' garden where the pavilion, table, chairs, and other garden ornaments are all made from 'milk chocolate' and many of the plants feature 'chocolate' in their names. And at that moment... a vision of pink flamingos sporting rubber garden boots popped into my head…from that point on, these awkward looking summer birds became the stars of the show."

Fair enough.

Notes from Under the Pile

Earlier this month, I acknowledged that during the academic year I never watch TV yet constantly fall behind. For the past nine months, my filing system has been made up of a set of interconnected piles of paper. Well, the dark days--and both semesters of the 2007-2008 academic year--are over. I had one appointment today, only one, and it lasted only fifteen minutes. I don't have a single deadline to meet for another two weeks. Since I leisurely crawled out of bed about twelve hours ago, I've idled the day away by watching television (or episodes of TV shows that I rented from Netflix and wouldn't ordinarily admit to watching) and moving papers off the floor and into the two new file cabinets that I bought.

Here's what I found in the chocolate pile (pictured):

• Volume 116, Number 21, of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, contains an editorial by doctors Norman K. Hollenberg and Naomi D. L. Fisher warning that "If the [chocolate] industry wants us to use chocolate as a health food, then they will have to change their behavior. Specifically, what the world needs is a label on each package that describes the flavanol content of the chocolate. It should be obvious that the percent of cocoa, like the color of chocolate, does not represent a measure of flavanols at all."
  
• The Grand Tier Restaurant at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center will serve the Viennese signature dessert, Sacher Torte, from June 30 to July 3 in honor of The American Ballet Theatre's staging of The Merry Widow.
  
• The April 19 issue of Britain's learned magazine The Economist reported on the latest San Francisco bean-to-bar company, Tcho, of which Wired magazine co-founder Louis Ressetto is co-founder.
  
• Home Miami magazine reported the opening of an Argentine restaurant called Chocolate.
  
• A spam-like website offered an earnest news item about the coming of a chocolate festival to the Portuguese town of Obidos in February of 2009.
  
• The website of South Pacific-based Islands Business International magazine ran a piece in April about cacao growers in Fiji hoping to jumpstart a chocolate factory in the country of origin--they also hope to win support for a movement to display the cacao pod more prominently (apparently it already is displayed in some manner) on the nation's coat of arms.
  

Now back to watching television.

Escape to New York: Sleuthing Mast Brothers Chocolate Bars

As I mentioned to my friend Emily Testa at an impromptu chocolate tasting last night, I have a couple of chocolate informants in New York. The first is Rob Valencia, who's weathering the financial crisis as Citigroup's official pastry chef. Rob pointed me toward the plebeian Treats Truck driven by Kim Ima, who took an eight-hour round-trip bus ride just to check out the compressed-natural-gas-fueled vehicle that she now uses to deliver sandwich cookies and five varieties of brownies to fans at various street corners in Manhattan and Brooklyn. My second informant is David Arnold, a free agent in the chocolate industry, who suggested that we meet at the Food Emporium Fine Chocolates shop on Third Avenue, which opened just after this year's New York Chocolate Show because the supermarket struck a deal to exclusively distribute the German Coppeneur line in the New York area. The shop now carries bars and confections from fourteen different countries, and David recommended that I pick up Swiss company Felchlin's Bolivian Cru Sauvage 68% 60h (which means that the sixty-eight-percent-cacao mixture is conched for sixty hours, an usually long time), something I likely wouldn't find elsewhere. I'm munching on some of this "savage" bar now--it's velvety, and to use language that's equal parts pretentious and goofy, orange creamsicle notes underscore the solid structure of the chocolate. Still, David and I agreed that the shop lacks all the romance of West Coast chocolate boutiques like Bittersweet and Cocoa Bella. And while the Food Emporium has found good customers on Manhattan's Upper Eastside despite the financial crisis, we worried that too many products on the shelves were stale or out of temper. According to my informant, if I went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I might find a couple of guys who were doing something more inspiring: The Mast Brothers.

A former Jacques Torres employee and his amenable sibling, the Mast Brothers may be Brooklyn's first bean-to-bar producers. I started doing some research on the guys. According to their website, they sell their products at the Artists and Fleas market, which is open every Saturday and Sunday from noon to 8pm. I found that information on Sunday at around ten, so I decided depart the Upper Eastside and get on the L train to Williamsburg. Down the street from the insanely enticing Surf Bar on North 6th Street, I found the arty flea market. I made my way through a book dealer's impressive collection of contemporary fiction and a display of red velvet treats from the Kumquat Cupcakery, but I couldn't find the chocolate brothers. A jewelry maker pulled out a couple of Florentine paper posters advertising the Mast Brothers, but she told me the guys were only coming to the market on Saturdays because they're working on a new project. She referred me on to the Spuyten Duyvil Grocery in the Williamburg Mini Mall around the corner. I walked over, but the place didn't open until 1pm and I had to be back in Manhattan for brunch--it was Mother's Day. So I took the L back to Union Square, ordered an omelet, and then invited my mother to come back to Williamburg. She accepted, we returned to the grocery, met the proprietor, George, and picked up a Venezuelan 72%-cacao bar, a 60%-cacao milk chocolate bar, the toasted hazelnut and milk chocolate bar, and the punny "Wyeth and Berry" bar (named for two streets in the neighborhood, with dried cranberries mixed into white chocolate). A couple of days went by before I staged my impromptu tasting back in Pittsburgh. We liked the chocolate well enough, and the packaging--the same Florentine wrapping paper from posters without any official ingredient or nutrition info labels--were charming. But I can't claim any orange creamsicle notes. The stuff tasted like, well, the vaguely familiar result of an attempt to do something different with artisan chocolate. I keep turning back to the same story--when John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg brought their homemade chocolate to a Berkeley farmer's market, they were doing something new and inspiring. Now there's an entire micro-industry of micro-batch chocolate maker, and the Mast Brothers are competing with Amano, De Vries, Askinosie, Patric, and now Bittersweet Origins.

I hope they make it. Rumor has it the Masts are planning a shop on North 3rd street in Williamburgh.

Academic Chocolate

I once had a subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It wasn't so long ago. In December, over my first grad school Christmas break, I felt inspired by my new status as an academic and signed up. Then the semester started again and I barely had time to finish the reading assignments for my own classes before turning to the weekly stack of essays that my undergrads dutifully turned in. The Chronicle languished in the corner. On top of that, I admit to a twinge of embarrassment over the uncool vibe that such a publication languishing in the corner might send to visitors. It's bad enough that she doesn't watch TV, friends might have said to themselves, but she also sits around and reads the Chronicle of Higher Education on Saturday nights. (If only I'd had that kind of free time on Saturday nights). So I cancelled the subscription.

Of course, the Chronicle of Higher Education does sometimes run articles about chocolate. And one of my professors, who rightly shares none of my neurotic paranoia about being seen with this academic newsprint, kindly clips those pieces and passes them on to me. In March, a reporter focused on a introductory class at Southwestern University titled "Multi-Chocolated: An Aesthetic, Historical, and Scientific Journey into the Wonders of Chocolate," in which freshman explore theobroma cacao across the disciplines by using the move from dark to milk chocolate as a metaphor for evolution and study a chocolate airdrop into West Berlin as part of a European history lesson. Last year, the Chronicle profiled a biology instructor at Olivet College, affectionately known as "Doc Choc;" but I can't find that clipping and--the catch--you can only read it online if you're a subscriber.

You can read the Chronicle at the library, which is where I'll be spending a lot of time before I head off to the annual Association for the Study of Food and Society conference in New Orleans next month. ASFS maintains a food studies listserv (whose members include Bay Area chocolate legend Alice Medrich and the Boston-based chocolate-influenced gastronomer Beth Forrest), to which cultural anthologists occasionally write in to ask for advice on researching the concept of terroir in the chocolate industry.

Subscriptions to the Chronicle of Higher Education start at $40. The ASFS listserv is free and anyone can apply to join.