Archive by Author

Cooking with Fresh Cacao Pods (and a Recipe for Cacao Chips and Cacao Fruit Jam)

October 19, 2018 by Cynthia Jonasson

Cynthia is our Dean of Beans and the head of our educational programming. She’s been saving her allowance her entire life to buy every chocolate bar possible.

The flesh and peel of a fresh cacao pod is thinner than an acorn squash (and it smells similar to one, too), which might be why so many students in my classes ask if you can eat it. My answer used to be simple. “No. People don’t eat cacao pods. They typically compost them to put the nutrients back into their farms or use them as feed for livestock.”

And then my friend received a book, The Cocoa Pod Used in Recipes by Mercedes Mendoza, from his sister who had visited The Chocolate Museum in Belgium. Mendoza is from Peru and her passion is to help cacao farmers learn to prepare nutritious dishes from this byproduct (cacao flesh is about 80% of the weight of the fruit and it is typically discarded; chocolate is made from the seeds of the pod). The book shows readers how to prepare the pod and includes various savory and sweet Peruvian dishes that call for cacao pod flesh as an ingredient.

This was the first time I had ever heard of someone preparing the flesh of the pod as food. Some recipes were really interesting. Others I’m not sure I would ever repeat again. But as a curious cook and a huge fan of cacao in all forms, obviously I had to try it.

If you do decide to try cooking with fresh cacao pods yourself, here are some general tips for sourcing and preparing them:

Source quality fresh cacao pods. I am fortunate enough to have access to fresh cacao that we buy for our Chocolate 101 class. Finding them can be easier said than done, but I buy pods from a florist called Magic Flowers near Guayaquil, Ecuador. It’s expensive – about $80 for nine pods. When they arrive I put them in the fridge to keep them fresh for a week or two.
Cut the pods open carefully. Prepare cacao pods as you would an acorn squash. Stab your knife into the center of the pod deep enough to break through the skin and flesh. Then run the knife along the length of the fruit from the top to the bottom to cut it all the way through. Don’t cut through to the other side because you may accidentally cut open some of the beans.
Scoop out (and save!) the inner fruit and seeds. Scrape out the beans and save them for another use. You can suck on them to eat and enjoy the delicious, citrus-y pulp, or try to ferment them if you plan to make your own chocolate. You can also plant them to grow a cacao tree, or save them for another use (I’ve used them to make miso, an idea I picked up from a few doctors at Casa Mascia Apothecary in Belize).

Preparing Fresh Cacao Pods

All of Mendoza’s recipes begin the same way — peel, de-seed, and core the fresh fruit. It’s easier said than done!

Peel the pods with a vegetable peeler. Be careful, as they get REALLY slippery!
Cut the cacao into small, one-inch pieces. Again, be careful! I can’t emphasize enough how slippery these get.
Cut out and remove the dense center layer. The book said to do this because the center layer hardens when it cooks and becomes inedible. I believed the book, but after cutting away the center from my fourth piece I realized that it would not only take forever to prepare the cacao but the likelihood of cutting myself was a certainty (did I mention they were slippery?). I tested cooking them with this layer intact and then removing the inner core after cooking. It was easier to remove, but the cacao was even more slippery and dangerous. My helper used a butter knife so that he wouldn’t accidentally cut himself.

The first recipe I tried from the book was for fried cacao pod chips. I was immediately drawn to thinly slicing and frying the cacao in hot oil, but it was a lot of work, very expensive, and pretty tasteless with an odd slippery texture. It’s much easier to make chips with potatoes or nearly anything else. But if you’re curious:

Recipe for Cacao Pod Chips (adapted from Using the Cacao Pod in Recipes)

1 fresh cocoa pod cut, peeled, cored, and seeded
At least 2 cups of neutral, high-heat vegetable oil
Salt to taste

With a very sharp knife, slice the prepared cacao fruit as thinly as you can.
In a small, heavy-bottomed pot, heat the oil until it’s very hot; 350-375 degrees Fahrenheit. Drop the cacao slices, a few at a time, into the hot oil and fry them until they turn golden brown, about 1-3 minutes per batch.
With a slotted spoon, removed the finished chips and let them cool on a rack over paper towels. While they’re cooling, sprinkle with salt to taste.
Fry the remainder of the cacao slices, adjusting the temperature of the oil as needed to keep it steady.
Eat immediately and enjoy.

Many of the other recipes in the book–including a spicy chili dish I was eying–were quite similar in that the first step is to puree the pod. That didn’t sound hard at all! I make purees all the time due to my obsessive desire to make everything from scratch. But I soon found out otherwise…

The puree on its own is a nutritious and thick start to soups and stews that can be fun to play with in the kitchen. Though simply making the puree was so laborious and time-intensive that I decided to just use my own kitchen skills to make a jam from the pectin-rich cacao pod boiling liquid. My co-workers thought the jam tasted more complex than regular blueberry jam, with a subtle creamy flavor. While the cacao pods make for good jam, it wasn’t chocolatey at all, and it didn’t taste like the lychee/citrusy cacao fruit smoothie we serve in the SF cafes, either. I don’t think I would do it again.

Recipe for Fresh Cacao Fruit Puree (adapted from Using the Cacao Pod in Recipes)

Fresh cacao pods
Water to cover by at least one inch

Simmer the peeled, cored, and chopped cacao pod flesh until soft, about 25-35 minutes. Note that the water will turn yellow, then purple, and then thicken so much it looks like jam. (It turns out that cacao pods have a lot of pectin.)
Remove the cacao pieces from the liquid. Be sure to reserve this liquid if you want to make Fresh Cacao Pod Jam (see recipe below). Puree the fruit in a food processor until smooth. Pretend you’re not grossed out by the resulting slimy puree. :)

Recipe for Fresh Cacao Fruit Jam

3 cups cooking liquid from Fresh Cacao Pod Puree
12 ounces frozen blueberries (or another high-pectin fruit, like apples, cranberries, or pears)
1 cup sugar (or more to taste)

Remove the solids from the cooked cacao pod, and measure out 3 cups of the liquid into a heavy-bottomed pot. Bring the liquid to a boil.
Add the blueberries and the sugar. Uncovered over medium-high heat, let the jam boil, stirring often, until a lot of the moisture has boiled away and a spoon streaks across the bottom of the pot, about 30-35 minutes.
Serve the jam warm or ladle into jars. Keep refrigerated. This makes about a pint.

This was a fun project, and one that I’m glad I tried, but it was more intellectual than inspiring. I’m glad I finally tried preparing and eating the flesh of the cacao fruit, but I think I’d rather leave it behind for the farmers to add nutrients to the soil.

Education Station: Is that Cacao Pod Ripe?

April 28, 2017 by Cynthia Jonasson

You’re curious, so we find answers. Our education team fields lots of questions from our guests during classes, so we’ve decided to launch a brand new series of monthly installments in which we tackle some of those questions and share the answers with the world. We call it The Education Station. This week, Cynthia takes a close look at cacao pods, and answers a question she’s been getting a lot ever since she started importing fresh pods from Ecuador for classes: when is a cacao pod ripe?

A cacao pod—the fruit of the theobroma cacao tree—starts off as a tiny flower, and over the course of many months after it’s pollinated, that flower gives way to a plump and colorful pod filled with seeds. The fruit has a long growing season and even grows year round in some countries, typically between 20 degrees north and south of the equator. Unlike many of the fruits we’re used to in the US, cacao pods grow year round, and they don’t all tend to ripen at the same time or even in the same season.

Take a look at the tree below. Note that there are tiny flowers growing directly on the trunk. You can see two of them approximately in the middle of the trunk in this photo. At the same time, we notice the unripe cacao fruit which is the deep almost purplish red fruit with hints of green on the top left side. And there is ripe cacao fruit too, the yellowish pods with a dusting of red on the trunk near the flowers.

What does that tell you? You can have many pods on one tree all with varying levels of ripeness. You are likely to harvest some pods now, others next week or in a few months, and if you wait for those flowers to become ripe pods you’ll be back to harvest them in five or six months. So how does one know which pods are ripe?

IS IT THE COLOR?

You might think, based on your experience with fruit throughout your life, that we could guess a pod’s ripeness based on its color. You’re not wrong, but you’re not totally right either (sorry). Judging ripeness isn’t as simple as looking at the color because there are so many different types of cacao, and the way they express their ripeness varies.

Does this rainbow colored cacao pod from Brazil look ripe?

Think about apples. Are you thinking about apples? Good. Think about all the different kinds in a grocery store—green Granny Smith or Gravenstein, blushing red and yellow Fuji, or deep red Ruby Delicious. They’re different colors but all of them might be ripe, and the same is true of cacao. I’ve seen cacao fruit that was ripe when it was red and cacao fruit that was unripe when it was red.

A pile of ripe pods, every color of the rainbow. Thanks to Greg D and Dandelion Chocolate Japan for taking this great shot while visiting Marou Chocolate in 2016.

At the same time, if the apples on the tree in your back yard always started out green and turn red when ripe, you would know to wait until they turned red. Someone who had no idea what type of apple tree you had might not know whether it produced green, yellow or red apples, and wouldn’t know when to pick them. This is why cacao farmers must get to know their trees so well. But how are the rest of us to know? Luckily, there are a few tricks.

1. SHAKE THE POD

When you shake a whole pod, do you feel the insides moving around slightly? If yes, it’s probably ripe. Or is it sloshing around like a can of soup? If that’s the case then it’s likely overripe. As the cacao pod ripens, the sugars and pulp in the fruit develop and the seeds loosen from the husk, making a juicy, sloshy fruit. If a pod is unripe, the fruit will be more connected to the outer husk and will feel more like shaking a solid object, like that apple we started out with.

Imagine this cacao pod was whole and you shook it… see that gap between the inner fruit and the outer husk? You would feel the insides moving separately.

So, great! That was easy. Just shake the pod and listen. But wait, is there a way to test ripeness before you’ve gone and cut the pod off the tree? Good question. We learned another trick from our friend Will when we harvested cacao at his farm, Steelgrass Farms, in Kauai.

2. GET UNDER THE SKIN

Okay, this might sound like the most annoying option but I promise it’s not. (But I don’t promise to stop the bad jokes). The color of a cacao pod is the color of only the very thin, outer layer of the husk. The color of the thick husk beneath that skin changes depending on ripeness. If you scrape the husk with your fingernail and find green underneath like I did in the photo above, the fruit is unripe. If you scrape the husk and find yellow or white, then it’s ripe. And that’s that!

Progression from unripe to ripe.
Left: A cacao pod that is unripe. See the green color just below the layer of red?
Middle: A cacao pod that is slightly under-ripe. Note the slight greenish color just below the red outer layer of the fruit.
Right: A ripe cacao pod. Note the pale yellow color stretches throughout the husk of the fruit directly to the outer yellow layer.

Now that you can’t wait to try out these techniques (I can see you jumping out of your seat), your next question might be: where can I find a cacao pod?? Luckily for you, no need to get yourself to a cacao farm. We’ve got fresh cacao pods weekly in the factory, and all you have to do is sign up for our Chocolate 101 class! We’ll also bring them to occasional demos, like our upcoming demo on June 10th from 1-3pm at the Conservatory of Flowers.

EDUCATION STATION: Ground Chocolate

March 25, 2017 by Cynthia Jonasson

You’re curious, so we find answers. Our education team fields many questions from our guests in classes, so we’ve decided to launch a brand new series in which we tackle some of the questions we get most often. We call it The Education Station, and it’s where you’ll find the answers to just about everything from what cocoa beans are made of to why cocoa powder and ground chocolate are not the same. Speaking of…

What IS this?? Keep reading to find out.

It’s A Grind!

Sometimes people ask us how we make our hot chocolate so, well, chocolatey. Do we pour chocolate from our melangers (the machine that grinds, conches, and mixes cocoa beans and sugar to turn them into chocolate) straight into their cups?

Sadly, if we poured chocolate from a melanger into your cup it would solidify pretty quickly and be too thick to drink. So how then, do you make a thick, rich hot chocolate?

The answer is that we make a rich base with ground chocolate. But what, might you ask, is ground chocolate? Is it like cocoa powder? Most hot chocolate recipes are based on cocoa powder, which is in its own way a kind of ground chocolate so that would be a good guess, but they are very, very different.

Since this often seems to be a confusing subject, I’ve taken the opportunity to demonstrate some of the differences between the two.

What is cocoa powder?

Many people assume that cocoa powder is simply ground up cocoa nibs. It’s a good guess, but the thing is, cocoa nibs liquify when you grind them. Cocoa nibs are made up of approximately 50% fat, or cocoa butter, and when the heat from the friction inherent in grinding the cocoa nibs meets that cocoa butter in the nibs, it melts. Thus, when you grind up cocoa nibs you end up with more of a crunchy peanut butter-like paste rather than a powder. (Don’t trust me, try it! Throw some nibs in a blender, food processor, or between a mortar and pestle.)

So if not ground nibs, then what is cocoa powder? I’ll give you a clue: cocoa powder comes from a part of the cocoa nib. Cocoa nibs are composed of two things (if we’re being relatively simplistic): cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Now, it’s worth saying here that there are no definition of “cocoa solid” that is universally agreed upon. Technically, there are non-fat cocoa solids (the brown, flavorful stuff in a cocoa nib) and fatty cocoa solids (usually called cocoa butter). For simplicity, we call the brown flavorful component the “cocoa solids,” and the fat “cocoa butter.” So, we’ll roll with that for now.

Back to our programming: cocoa powder comes from the solids. But how do you separate the two? Well, it takes some heat and a lot of pressure to press most of the cocoa butter out of the cocoa nibs. To make cocoa powder, the remaining solid parts of the nibs are ground up. Since most of the cocoa butter was pressed out, cocoa solids won’t liquify when you grind them up, instead becoming a dry powder. In the video below, I’m pressing the cocoa butter out of our nibs using a seed oil extractor, and the butter that comes out is still brown because it’s not a perfect pressing. But, you get the idea.

An interesting note: Sometimes cocoa powder is chemically treated with an alkali solution to make it taste less acidic and more “chocolate-y.” These will be labeled “Dutch-processed” or “alkalized.” For more on Dutch-processed versus natural cocoa powder check out David Lebovitz’s informative blog on the subject.

So, what is ground chocolate?

In short, ground chocolate is just what it sounds like: chocolate ground into a powder. Most of the ground chocolate we make at Dandelion is made out of 70% dark chocolate (ingredients: 70% cocoa nibs and 30% sugar, by weight). So to recap, cocoa powder is basically cocoa solids (with a tiny bit of fat that couldn’t be pressed out), and ground chocolate is three things: sugar, and cocoa solids and cocoa butter (the two components of nibs).

We recently got a few new machines to help us make ground chocolate from untempered blocks of chocolate. You have to be careful not to heat the blocks too much or grind them for too long because, of course, chocolate melts. To grind the blocks, we used to use an industrial food processor, but we’ve recently upgraded to a fancy shmancy granulator that is much quieter, faster, and more consistent.

: This is Eric, our Ground Chocolate Wizard, working in his lair

: These are the large slabs of chocolate we break down and grind into ground chocolate…

: They go into the first machine

: Where large blades chop the chocolate block into smaller shards

: Yummy chocolate! But the particle sizes are too big still.

: So, Eric then scoops the broken down chocolate into the refining machine.

: Which are made of smaller, fast spinning teeth

: Leaving us with even ground chocolate, ready to make hot chocolate with!

Those were cool photos, but I’m still a little confused about how cocoa powder and ground chocolate are different….

Okay – well let’s look at them in the real world. To make hot chocolate we need some heat, right?

What happens if we gently heat cocoa powder and ground chocolate on a double boiler?

Ground chocolate melts over heat

Cocoa powder….does not.

Cocoa powder has between 11% and 22% fat (because it’s nearly impossible to press all the cocoa butter out) and ground chocolate has more like 35% fat, so they behave differently when heated. Heat cocoa powder, and virtually nothing will happen. It balls up a little, but can easily be whisked back to its starting texture. On the other hand, the ground chocolate, a fattier substance with some sugar in it, will melt fast. To return it to its starting state, we’d have to cool it and toss it in a food processor.

Okay, but we still haven’t made hot chocolate…

Another way of illustrating the difference between these too is by looking at what happens when we make hot chocolate with them by adding warmed milk to each. Behold:

When 3 oz of steamed almond milk were added to 2 tablespoons cocoa powder or 2 tablespoons ground chocolate, the cocoa powder rose to the top of the container. Meanwhile, the ground chocolate started to melt.

When stirred, the milk and powders mixed into each other in a similar manner, but the hot chocolate made from ground chocolate was slightly thicker. The hot chocolate made from pure cocoa powder was more bitter since it had no added sugar and a strong chocolate flavor, but it was less creamy and rich and noticeably thinner. The hot chocolate made from the ground chocolate was thicker and clung to the whisk a little more.

Here at the factory, without a 50-tonne hydraulic cocoa butter press, we don’t have or make cocoa powder, and so we’re only left with what we do make: chocolate. This is a fundamental difference between our pastry kitchen and most pastry kitchens, where cocoa powder is a baking staple. Our Executive Pastry Chef, Lisa Vega, and her team are constantly improvising ways to work with chocolate instead of cocoa powder to make cakes, cookies, custards, and more. Single origin ground chocolate brings a few more challenges to the table—the fat level varies from origin to origin—and you can’t just swap ground chocolate in for cocoa powder because, as you’ve seen, they are quite different.

But lucky for me, I get to savor the rich chocolatey hot chocolate from our pastry team every day. Later this year, you’ll get a full look inside our kitchen and all of its secrets as part of the book we’ve been writing for the last two years, coming out in late fall. But for now, we’ll include a recipe for our hot chocolate below. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go order myself another cup. And stay tuned for our next installment of Education Station, where we’ll explore some more chocolate mysteries. Next stop: Is White Chocolate, Chocolate?

“Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground [chocolate].” – Theodore Roosevelt

Our house hot chocolate is one of the simplest, most delicious ways to enjoy chocolate as a drink. We recommend it with marshmallows or nibby whipped cream, both of which you’ll find in our book—a guide to making chocolate at home, sourcing beans, and making pastries with single origin chocolate—coming out later this year!

Our House Hot Chocolate

2½ cups / 567 grams / 20 ounces nonfat milk

1 tablespoon packed / 10 grams light brown sugar

1½ cups / 227 grams / 8 ounces 70% chocolate, chopped

Combine 1 cup (225 grams / 8 ounces) of milk and the brown sugar in a large heatproof bowl set over a pot of simmering water.

Add the chocolate to the hot milk and whisk to combine, keeping the bowl over the pot to continue . Whisk the mixture for an additional 3 minutes, until shiny and emulsified. This mix——may seem quite thick at this point.

Whisk in the rest of the milk, adding it in a slow stream, and heat for another 4 to 5 minutes, whisking occasionally, until hot.

Remove the bowl from the pot of water, pour the hot chocolate into mugs, and serve immediately.

Sake and Chocolate: A Complex Relationship

May 5, 2016 by Cynthia Jonasson

Our latest pairing endeavor started when we took a recent tour of Sequoia Sake’s small microbrewery at the edge of San Francisco. We realized pretty quickly that there were many parallels between Sequoia Sake and Dandelion Chocolate, and the idea came to us in a flash: let’s do a pairing!

The most obvious similarity between the bean-to-bar process and Sequoia’s sake is the fermentation step, which is a key flavor developer in both products. Secondly, we both take a minimalist approach to our ingredients: Sequoia’s sake is Junmai, meaning it only uses water, rice, koji, and yeast, and Dandelion’s chocolate has only two ingredients: beans and sugar. Finally, Sequoia’s thoughtful choices at each step of the process were focused on creating the highest quality product rather than taking shortcuts, which reminds me of the way we sometimes do things the hard way to keep our product’s integrity and improve quality.

At first, when I asked some friends to taste the sake and chocolate together, they agreed because they liked one or the other but none of them thought the tastes would mix well. Surprising ourselves, we soon found that both products had layers of complexity that made it hard for us all to agree on our favorite combinations because they were all so interesting. It was really fascinating to see how pairing Dandelion’s Madagascar chocolate with Sequoia’s Genshu sake brought out the more vegetal notes that would usually be overshadowed by Madagascar’s strong, tart, fruity notes. But when paired with the more subtle Nama sake, it brought out elegant fruity and floral notes from Madagascar’s flavor range. Neither was a bad pairing, but each allowed us to more clearly taste notes that aren’t as evident when tasting the bar alone.

Inspired by all the parallels we found between our process and product and everything that Sequoia does, we decided to develop new class which will take place at Sequoia Sake’s Brewery starting Thursday May 26th at 6:30pm. Find tickets on our classes page, right here.

1476110_871275712981062_6536230065669826592_n

Guests from the sake industry previewing our new class.

Our class will start with a tour of Sequoia Sake’s factory to explore sake processing, and then we’ll taste samples from various parts of the process along the way. We’ll end with a flight of Sequoia Sake, then move along to learning about chocolate production with tastes from different steps of that process, culminating with a chocolate flight. Finally, we’ll leave participants to pick and pair as they please, exploring the range of flavor possibilities inherent in bringing these two crafts together.

Beans and Farms and Howler Monkeys, Oh My!

December 22, 2015 by Cynthia Jonasson

Eladio Pop, a longtime cacao farmer, touring our troop through his jungly cacao farm.

While I’ve been wrapping up our Chocolate 101 and Chocolate 201 classes for the year, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about our upcoming trip to Belize in February. Lately, these questions are making me nostalgic for my own time there almost three years ago, and I find myself remembering all of the things I smelled, touched, tasted, heard, and saw for the very first time on that trip.

I didn’t anticipate learning so much. After all, I had visited a cacao research center in Costa Rica, and read all about the process of fermenting and drying cacao beans. But there is something so different about what you learn through your senses compared to what you learn from reading about something. At this point, I’ve visited a handful of cacao farmers, farms, and fermentaries; but there was nothing quite like my first farm visit.

I’m thankful for these opportunities to answer our customers questions because I’m reminded of the first time I smelled the unmistakable and overwhelming scent of fermenting cacao fruit and beans inside Maya Mountain’s fermentery; my first taste of fresh cacao fruit (even the gross bitter flavor of the bean I wasn’t supposed to bite into but did anyway); the deafening sound of howler monkeys who resemble something from Jurassic Park; the feel of grinding cacao nibs into paste using a metate; and the sight of a sunset on the Moho River while resting on the hammock on my balcony.

If you’re considering joining us for our trip, you can check out our itinerary and reserve a space on our Trips page.

Or if you’re looking for a little more convincing, Molly, one of our chocolate makers and a great storyteller shared her experience during Chocolate 301 here.

Caffeine and Cacao: A Stimulating Discussion

September 14, 2015 by Cynthia Jonasson

At Dandelion, customers often ask me about the amount of caffeine in our chocolate. It’s a good question, but a complicated one; especially if you’re asking because you’d like to know how chocolate will affect you. To begin, caffeine is not the only stimulant in chocolate. Theobromine, a bitter alkaloid named after the genus of the cacao tree, is the primary stimulant in cacao—so if we only looked at caffeine in an effort to understand chocolate’s stimulating effects, we’d be missing the whole picture. That said, I’ll try to answer the question at hand by looking at some data we recently collected.

The amount of caffeine in a chocolate bar depends in part on where the beans for that bar were grown. Beans from some origins hold greater concentrations of caffeine than others, just as some beans have a higher or lower percentage of cocoa butter depending on genetics and origin (the farther from the Equator they grow, the fattier the beans tend to be). In order to better understand the properties and components of the beans we buy, we sent some samples to Adam Kavalier Ph.D, a plant scientist and the chocolate maker behind Undone Chocolate in Washington DC. Adam ran some tests and sent us his results, which means we know a lot more about the natural compounds in the chocolate we make! For information on compounds besides caffeine, check out Jenna’s post about our 100% bar.

According to Adam’s study, if you ate an entire Camino Verde 100% bar, you would consume about 350mg of caffeine. This is equivalent to approximately:

8 2oz dark chocolate (70-85%) bars* (according to the National Nutrient Database)
6 1oz shots of espresso
5 12oz cups of black tea
4 8oz cups of brewed coffee
3 2oz Dandelion Chocolate 70% Madagascar chocolate bars

A final note: Take these numbers with a grain of salt; they were used to simplify the question. The amount of caffeine and theobromine in other Madagascar bars will vary because different chocolate makers use different processes. The amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee or tea also varies based on processing.

*Chocolate bar percentages are calculated by the percent of cacao components that are in a bar. A typical mass-produced dark chocolate bar uses beans from West Africa and includes added cocoa butter, whereas our bars have no added cocoa butter and are made from beans with varying genetic makeups. Generally, the lack of added cocoa butter is why our bars tend to have more caffeine than the national average.

Considering A Last Minute Trip?

August 29, 2015 by Cynthia Jonasson

Considering a trip to origin? It’s not too late to join us for our Chocolate 303 trip to Ecuador from September 12-19th!

In Chocolate 303, we’ll be exploring cacao production from a small scale farm, learning to make traditional hot chocolate, and getting deep into what large scale production and exporting look like at origin. We’ll even taste some of the infamous CCN-51 chocolate liquor so we can make up our own minds up about the quality of its flavor.

Greg, Chiann, Arcelia, and Pearl on last year’s trip to Ecuador.

There are currently a few more spaces available starting at $1600. Registration will close on September 4th at 6pm Pacific Time. For more details on lodging (photos of each room are available when you select Book Now) and agenda, see the registration page.

And for those of you who like longer to plan, we’ll be updating our trips page with details of 2016 trips when we return from Ecuador.

How Low Can You Go?

June 13, 2015 by Cynthia Jonasson

One of my favorite parts of my job is teaching people to make small batches of chocolate in our Chocolate 201 class. It’s not just because it’s fun to make chocolate, but I really love geeking out about chocolate and answering people’s questions.

Every class, I get asked about what else you can put into the mini-melangers—vanilla, cocoa butter, types of sweeteners—and some about inclusions, but people most frequently ask: what is the lowest percentage chocolate possible? Since Dandelion Chocolate only uses cocoa beans and cane sugar, I decided to learn Dandelion-style by making a bunch of test batches to find out.

In class, the lowest percentage that we make is 65%—which describes how much of the bar is composed of ingredients made from cacao. A cacao bean is naturally about 50% fat (cocoa butter) and 50% solids (essentially cocoa powder). At Dandelion, we grind whole beans, but chocolate can also be made by separating the beans into its components and recombining those in different proportions. For example, our 70% chocolate bars are made from 70% cocoa nibs and 30% sugar by weight. A 70% chocolate bar could also be made from 50% cocoa nibs, 15% cocoa butter, 5% cocoa powder, and 30% sugar. The percentage on a bar typically refers to the percentage of ingredients that come from cacao. How much of each component exists, between cocoa butter and non-fat cocoa solids, doesn’t matter.

The limiting factor in making a low percentage dark chocolate bar is the amount of fat available for the solids to be suspended in. Chocolate is a “sol” (a solid suspended in liquid) which is similar to an emulsion (a liquid suspended in a liquid). Without enough fat to suspend the solid particles, the chocolate won’t work.

The lowest percentage of fat possible in chocolate according to the book The Science of Chocolate by Stephen T. Beckett is 25%. Since I wanted to stick to two ingredients: cocoa beans and sugar, I did some math to figure out a few recipes to test this fact.

Recipe 1: 55% Madagascar cocoa nibs + 45% cane sugar (approx. 25% fat in batch)

Recipe 2: 50% Madagascar cocoa nibs + 50% cane sugar (approx. 23% fat in batch)

The trials are underway.

The first trial is to make a batch of chocolate which contains the “minimum” 25% cacao. The second is to make a batch of chocolate which contains less fat than the claimed minimum. I expected the second recipe not to work, and I suspected failure would either mean the machine would stop turning and the chocolate would seize up, or clumps of chocolate would be tossed around the room (it’s happened before in our R&D space).

Starting both of these batches was painful. Adding that much sugar meant that the chocolate got really thick and as the wheels in the melanger turned, they flung chocolate out of the machine, so I had to put lids on and let them mellow then add more sugar. The entire process of getting these started took significantly longer than normal, and at the end of the night, they looked like frosting and fudge and I was mostly concerned that they would be too thick for the machines to keep turning and that they might ultimately stop over night.

The next morning, I was relieved to find them still running, but they didn’t look quite ready, so I left them to refine for four more hours more than usual and they still didn’t look like normal chocolate.

Normally, chocolate flows, but with this amount of sugar, and not enough fat to hold it all, it seemed like wet sand. The following photos show what it looked like after I spread out the chocolate and after I shook it to get it to settle so I could add more. The resulting “chocolate” reminded me of playing with non-Newtonian fluids (e.g. “Oobleck,” or cornstarch and water) as a child.

The consistency was so thick it resembled “Oobleck.”

When I tasted them, the first thing that struck me was mouthfeel, and the gritty texture of sugar granules instead of the smooth, blissful mouthfeel of chocolate converting from solid to liquid. It felt more like eating Mexican drinking chocolate than a chocolate bar.

There was too much sugar to be suspended in the small amount of fat for both recipes, which made the entire process difficult, so I wouldn’t recommend either of these recipes to someone making chocolate at home. Unless, of course, you get a kick out of pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

The Results:

In the end, it looks like I’ll have to do another round of recipes with a higher percentage of fat. The only way I could see a 55% cocoa batch of chocolate turning into something other than a gritty bar is by adding an additional ingredient like cocoa butter or soy lecithin, and that is a theory for another day. Even though we only use two ingredients in our chocolate and we’re quite happy with our recipes at Dandelion, it’s always interesting to explore how chocolate reacts to different things. We won’t be changing anything, but I’ll still be playing around with this idea in the meantime. If you’re curious about the math I used to work out the recipes, it’s all below.

How to calculate the percentage of fat in chocolate:

Last year, we sent a bar of 70% Madagascar to be tested and found out it had 32% fat. Other chocolate makers who use Madagascar beans will get slightly variable results because when beans are roasted in the husk, small amounts of cocoa butter migrate to the husk of the bean. Since sugar has no fat, all the fat is from the nibs:

.32 fat x 1 bar = .32/.7 = .457% fat/nibs

1 bar = .7 nibs

Our test batches are 1000 grams. To make a batch with 25% fat, I needed 250 grams of cocoa butter (fat). So 250/.457% is about 550g nibs and 450g sugar.

To try a lower percentage of fat, I had to decrease the nibs in the recipe. 50% sugar, 50% cacao which means 500g cocoa nibs * .457% fat/cocoa nib = 228.5g fat, out of a 1000g batch is about 23% fat. Since this is lower than the 25%, theoretically it shouldn’t work. In the end, it didn’t break the machines, but it turned out incredibly grainy and not at all like the smooth chocolate we enjoy eating. I imagine it would be impossible to temper too.

Le Grande Experiment: Part 2

May 12, 2015 by Cynthia Jonasson

This is the second in a series of posts about Le Grande Experiment (which translates into no language except the one we’ve made up), a recent adventure wherein we sent teams to Denver and Italy on a vital mission: to hunt down and test the best equipment for scaling up our process. Our current setup works well for our factory space on Valencia Street, but as we grow into our new factory space on Alabama Street, we believe there are better options out there for improving the quality of our chocolate and expanding our capacity to experiment. While we could do the work on the phone, we find the best results come from hitting the road and getting our hands dirty. Here, Cynthia recounts a trip to Denver with Greg to visit Steve DeVries.

When I travel, I love stopping by other chocolate makers to see what they’re up to. Somehow, even though I grew up in Denver, I never thought to visit Steve DeVries’ chocolate factory when I visited home. Steve is a sage researcher who I read about when I first started my chocolate studies a long time ago, so you’ll imagine how excited I was to visit him, learn about his process, and test our own chocolate on his machines while visiting my family for the holidays earlier this year.

The grand goal of Le Grande Experiment is to test refining and conching equipment in order to narrow our focus on the machines we will use in the new factory. At the moment, we use melangers (those spinning silver drums) in the factory to do both jobs—reducing the particle size of the nibs while evaporating undesirable, volatile aromas. De-coupling these jobs into two machines allows us more control over optimizing for flavor and texture. At least, that’s the hope. At Steve’s factory, we got the chance to test out a bunch of different machines, including a winnower that also cracks the beans (we use a separate machine to do that).

Before we went to Denver, we roasted Madagascar beans in our factory on Valencia Street, and shipped them alongside some organic cane sugar in sealed buckets to Steve’s factory. We flew to Denver, and after enjoying a lovely and snow-filled Boxing Day (yes, the Canadian government lets me claim citizenship), we joined Steve to make chocolate while the employees of Ritual Chocolate who normally use his machinery enjoyed some time off.

Part 1: Winnowing

A relic from Dandelion’s early days (and mine)

As you can see from this snapshot of my chocolate maker skills test from when I started at Dandelion, it was once considered highly skilled to winnow a batch of chocolate (30 kgs) in under three hours. Even four and a half hours was considered decent. Now, we winnow in about a third of that time. Back then, we had to continually scoop nibs into our winnower and regulate the flow by adjusting a valve at the bottom of the hopper. It was duck-taped together, the fan at the bottom frequently got backed up with nibs, and we had to make the nibs flow uphill both ways. Well, just kidding about that last part, but there were a lot of obstacles in the way of a good, clean, fast winnow.

Our current winnower

It was a great step forward when we started using our current winnower, with a modified design built by Greg, our Chocolate Sourcerer, and Snooky, now our Magic Man of Machines. The current winnower allowed us to start a batch and walk away, and decreased our winnow time to one and a half hours per batch, most of which was time we could spend doing other things.

The DeVries winnower

When we put all of our whole roasted cocoa beans into Steve DeVries’ winnower, a Lehman (originally owned by Scharffenberger), the winnower actually cracked the beans and very efficiently winnowed the beans and removed their radicals (the hard bit of a bean that would become the tree’s taproot—it looks like a tiny nail and is much harder to refine). And, it did this all in under one and a half hours. It was love! Even better, Steve has graciously decided to “store” his winnower at our new factory space for the next year. This is great news for Dandelion, but just how great? Check out the stats:

PROS: Faster and more efficient, cracks beans, removes radical, has cool-looking conveyor belts, and is safer than our current cracker.

CONS: Not much here. It’s louder than our current winnower (but not by much).

Part 2: Pre-Refining

The peanut grinder

The Hobart Cutter Mixer

Our pre-refining technique has also evolved since I started at Dandelion. Originally, we used a standard peanut grinder to make a paste which we slowly added to our melangers. We now use a Hobart Cutter Mixer which grinds our chocolate to a soupier consistency, but also heats it up a fair amount.

At Steve’s, we used a Molino Victoria to pre-grind. For smaller quantities or for chocolate makers who have a heavier roast than us, this might be a valid option. Our lighter roasts leave too much moisture in the beans which actually makes the paste much thicker. That means our time with the Victoria turned out to be a lot of time, filled with endless passes through the grinder. First we ran the nibs through, turning them into a crumbly paste, then passed the paste through over and over again, eventually with the sugar, until the particles were refined enough to pass through the roll refiner. It took forever (a day and a half), and it looked like this:

The chocolate paste was too thick to stir the sugar in by hand, so we took a break to run to the hardware store to buy a mud mixer attachment for the drill. As you can see, the equipment we use for making chocolate is very rarely meant for making chocolate.

We’re not considering buying the Victoria Molino, but it did give us consistent particle size, as well as lots of time to pick Steve’s brain.

Part 3: Refining

At the early stages of refining, the nib and sugar particles are still large and rough.

After a day or three in a melanger, the chocolate is smooth.

The refining process at Dandelion has been pretty much the same the entire time I’ve been here. We use melangers with big granite wheels and bases to crush the nibs and sugar together. The process also conches the chocolate, allowing aromatics to evaporate off. We’ve tweaked the process a bit over the years and upgraded in size, but still use the same type of refiners that we started with. We started using our first large Cocoatown, which we later affectionately called “Granny,” about two years ago, but she slowly ground herself to death over two years of continuous usage (disproving the theory that hard work never hurt anyone). The melangers do a good job of refining, but we’ve learned that there are areas where we’d like to have more control.

At Dandelion, we test the chocolate to determine the largest particle size in a sample using a micrometer (another technology we are in the midst of upgrading). Once the chocolate has gotten to a particle size of 20-29 microns, we pour the chocolate out of the melanger, cool it, and and store it. This process has generally worked for us, but after doing some more thorough tests we learned that our micron size in one batch covers too wide a range.

A grindometer shows the particle distribution in our chocolate

Steve thinks our chocolate is so viscous because of the sub 1-micron particles. Chocolate is a type of colloid known as a “sol,” and as such has cocoa solids suspended in cocoa butter (which, at this heat, is in its liquid form). The more we break apart large particles to refine them, the higher the total number of solid particles are suspended in the cocoa butter. If there are too many particles to suspend, they don’t have enough cocoa butter to surround them and end up gumming up the chocolate.

The roll refiner

At Steve’s we used a three roll refiner. I was most excited about trying out the roll refiner because I’d heard about other chocolate makers switching over to the roll refiner side. I’d heard that they took forever to use and that some chocolate makers spent twelve hours of active time on one batch just in roll refining! (In contrast, our chocolate spends about three to four days on our melangers, but it’s mostly inactive time for us since we don’t have to be standing next to the machine to ensure that it’s running correctly).

Since our chocolate was still thicker and more viscous than the chocolate that Steve normally passed through his machines, he had to do a lot of adjustments to make the machine function properly. We kept the pre-refined chocolate and sugar mixture in a heated cabinet to keep the cocoa butter melted so it would pass through the machine better, but adjustments were needed to help it work. We kept the middle roller in place and adjusted the rollers on either side either closer or further away, depending on how the chocolate was flowing. Meanwhile, a steady stream of water runs through the rollers to keep them from overheating due to the energy created from reducing particle sizes. As the rollers are used more, they heat up and expand and need to be adjusted.

After completing the first pass, we adjusted and put the chocolate through a second time. All in all, this is what we learned about using a roll refiner:

PROS: Mostly uniform particle size (varies because machine is adjusted by hand), eliminates both the large and small particle sizes that our current melangers create, and it’s a fun machine to operate and watch.

CONS: Takes a long time (possibly because the machine is small), requires active time, requires a lot of adjustments which means it needs a skilled operator. It’s a bit messier than our current machine.

Part 4: Conching

Conching is the process of mixing the particles evenly throughout the mixture and aerating the chocolate so that volatile aromas evaporate off. The process has also stayed relatively the same since I’ve been at Dandelion.

The only major changes we’ve made that I can remember are standardizing the time at which we add sugar to the nibs, and changing the speed at which our melangers turn based on each origin. And once, a long time ago, we held a heat gun to the machine with velcro to help heat off a very astringent and bitter flavor in a Colombian bar. Now we spend more time finding better beans, so we don’t need to do this.

At Steve’s, we were excited to try his Chef D’Ouevre, a longitudinal conche that held 80 lbs of chocolate. It was simple to use; we just poured the buckets of refined chocolate into the longitudinal conche and turned it on.

At first, we ran it with the top lid open (to help the volatile aromas which evaporate off dissipate), then we closed the lid and let it do its thing for about four days. The conche works by moving a roller over the chocolate. The movement creates a “wave” of chocolate because the sides of the conche are rounded which invites air to be mixed into the chocolate. The bottom of the conche is granite and the chocolate is squished between this and a roller which rounds out the particle shapes that start somewhat jagged from the refining process. This whole process creates a smooth chocolate that has a velvety mouthfeel.

Emptying the longitudinal conche

Take 2

PROS: Creates a velvety textured chocolate, easy to clean, can start it and walk away, very cool to watch working, and can be stopped at any point when flavor is best.

CONS: Loud, requires a lot of energy, hard to find since they’re a lost art(?), particles are rounded out on the machine, we could find ourselves loving the taste but keeping the chocolate on to improve texture.

Our Conclusions

First off, Ritual Chocolate and Steve DeVries were wonderful hosts and I enjoyed spending a few days out of my holidays with them. I loved the experience of making chocolate this way and left hoping that we would get a few similar machines.

We will have a post soon with the scientific results of our experiment, but from a technical standpoint, I like that the roll refiner can theoretically decrease our particle size distribution, which means the difference between the largest and smallest particles in a single batch won’t be so big. I’m also enthusiastic about the fact that we might reduce viscosity because the chocolate was sloshing around in the conche and I could never imagine using the word “slosh” with our current melanger which makes chocolate that would be described as “glop”.

The only piece of equipment we used that I would not want to continue using in the same manner is the pre-refiner. We really had to fight to get our cacao through the machine, in part because our we used a lightly roasted bean, but I think I’d want something that was easier to use.

A special thanks to Steve and the folks from Ritual for helping us in our mission to upgrade our process! You’re the best.

Baking with Nibs: Cynthia’s Sticky Buns

April 6, 2015 by Cynthia Jonasson

Sticky buns before going in the oven.

I don’t always find the time to make sticky buns, but when I do, they never last long. These are not for those avoiding gluten or dairy or sugar, and each time I make them I love the way the ooey, gooey caramel glaze on top counteracts the bitterness of the nibs I use in place of nuts. This recipe was adapted from Peter Reinhart’s excellent book, The Breadbaker’s Apprentice. I often use nibs in place of nuts when I’m baking, and I recommend anyone try it. Depending on where the cacao is from, they can add a ruddy earthiness, tart fruit notes, or smokiness, as well as a different kind of texture.

I’ve shared this recipe with others who haven’t been able to replicate the results, and I believe these three tips are what make these sticky buns extra delicious. Follow them for best results.

Weigh, don’t measure! After making these in a rental cabin where I didn’t have a scale, I can personally attest to this. Using a measuring cup, particularly for flour, can cause very different weights of flour to be used. For this recipe, you want to use as little as possible, or the dough will become dry and it’s very easy to use too much if you don’t weigh your flour. (The sticky buns will still be tasty, but results are always better when I weigh the ingredients).
The Window Pane Test. This is a technique I learned from the Breadbaker’s Apprentice. To test if the gluten in the dough is relaxed enough, grab a piece of it and stretch it apart by four corners into a rectangle. If you can stretch it to a thinness that you can almost see through it like a window, its ready. If it tears or is too sticky to do so, the glutens are not relaxed enough and it’s not ready.
Delicious ingredients = delicious bread. I am a firm believer of the instructions my Great Gramma gave my dad when he wanted to learn her bread recipe: “If you use ‘good ingredients,’ the bread could not fail.” I’m lucky to live in San Francisco, where its easy to find fancy organic, local, pasture-raised, biodynamic ingredients. (Although it’s also a bit depressing that the chickens whose eggs I use have significantly more space to call their own than I could dream of here).

Cinnamon. The one ingredient I never compromise on is Vietnamese cinnamon. It has a higher oil content than the average cinnamon bottle purchased at your typical grocery store, which means the cinnamon flavor is stronger and lingers longer than regular cinnamon.

Eggs. Even some friends who are used to San Francisco prices think I’m crazy for buying eggs that cost $1/egg. However, these eggs are not only more tasty, but also more nutritious. (And what else am I going to buy for $1?)

Milk and butter. Organic is okay, but at the risk of sounding like a Portlandia episode, the diet of the cows is more important since it determines the taste of their milk. I use whole milk and unsalted organic butter.

Sugar, brown sugar, and corn syrup. The more stripped of colors these ingredients are, the less delicious flavors they have. I use Wholesome Sweetener’s Organic Fair Trade Sugar and their Corn Syrup (with vanilla) for the topping.

Flour. Flour quality is important. In the US, mass-produced flour is made by pulling apart wheat into its separate components, and then reassembling them. While this creates a uniform flavor, gluten content, and product, I prefer flour that is closer to its natural state, not processed and reorganized in order to make it all taste the same. It’s the same reason I appreciate single-origin chocolate, because terroir and genetics furnish food with particular tastes, and the fact that those are different is what makes it interesting to me. Good quality bread flour is available, but make sure to do some background checking. I use King Arthur unbleached bread flour for this recipe, but for the rest of my baking I like to use Community Grains hard red winter wheat.

Now, if you can’t find all of the best ingredients, just use as many as you can. This recipe is not the simplest of sticky bun recipes, but it’s worth it, I promise.

Nibby Sticky Buns

Ingredients:

91 g sugar

7 g salt

77 g butter

3 g lemon zest

46 g egg

448 g flour (bread flour)

6 g yeast (rapid rise NOT dry active)

252 g milk (whole or half and half)

FOR CINNAMON SUGAR:

80 g sugar

13 g ground Vietnamese cinnamon

FOR CARAMEL GLAZE:

½ cup sugar

½ cup packed brown sugar

½ tsp salt

½ lb. unsalted butter (room temp)

½ cup corn syrup

¼ cup roasted nibs

1. Combine salt, sugar and butter in a mixing bowl. Cream with paddle attachment on high speed until smooth and pale.

2. Add egg and lemon zest. Beat until everything is mixed well, for another minute. Add in flour, yeast, and milk. Mix over low speed until all ingredients are combined together.

3. Switch to dough hook and beat over medium speed for 15 minutes, until the dough crawls up the hook.

4. The dough should be shiny and tacky, not sticky. If the dough is too sticky, add a spoonful of flour at a time and scrape the sides of the bowl during middle of beating process.** Continue until it passes the window pane test.

5. Form the dough into a shape of ball. Place in a bowl, spraying both bowl and dough with some oil.

6. Cover dough with plastic wrap. Let ferment at room temperature for 2 hours, until dough doubles in size.

7. Prepare the caramel glaze and prep your baking pan for later.

8. Dust working surface with flour. Transfer dough to the counter and use a well-floured rolling pin to roll the dough into a long rectangle with .25 inch thickness.

9. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar generously on the dough. Use your hands to roll the dough away from you to form a long log of dough with a cinnamon swirl, not pressing it too hard. The roll should be quite loose.

10. Slice the rolls into 1-inch thickness buns and gently place on top of the glazed pan, about ½ inch apart. Proof at room temp for 90 minutes.

11. Preheat oven to 350° F and bake on lowest shelf for about 30 minutes. (Caramel should be melted, and buns should just be turning golden on top.) Pull out of oven and cool before flipping over onto serving plate.

12. Eat all the sticky buns.

To make the caramel glaze

1. Cream sugar, packed brown sugar, salt, and butter (room temp). Add corn syrup (I use a brand that has vanilla, but you might want to add a teaspoon of vanilla extract) and continue to cream until light and fluffy.

2. Spread a ¼ inch thick layer of glaze on the bottom of a glass casserole pan. Lightly sprinkle nibs on top to taste, not too many or it will be bitter.