From The Blog

From Pod to Flight to Plate

October 22, 2019 by Roman Licea

Roman is the sous chef at Bloom, our chocolate salon inside the San Francisco 16th Street Factory.

The most important thing a chef can do to improve is to travel. Luckily, Dandelion Chocolate is founded by people who appreciate and foster these experiences. My journey into menu development for Bloom happened way before our 16th Street Factory was complete. In 2017, Chef Lisa and I had just finished off the last of the pastries for our pop up in New York and we were finding some peace in the quintessential “Christmas in New York” landscape. That’s when Lisa told me that I was chosen to live and work at our Dandelion Chocolate location in Kuramae, Tokyo for five weeks! My perspective and palate were about to change.

The Japan experience was wonderful in so many ways. I met friends with whom I still keep in contact and I learned a bit of Japanese. In our Kuramae café, they have a hot chocolate with hojicha (roasted green tea) . The tea is unsweetened, slightly smoky, and milky with just enough chocolate. Nothing like this existed in any of our San Francisco cafés and it’s purely a product of our Japanese union. I wanted to bring it back to the states as an ode to my time there, and as a familiar flavor for when our Japanese friends visit us. When guests visit Bloom here in San Francisco, they can order a pot of Hojicha Hot Chocolate to enjoy. Our version is lightly sweetened for an American palate, but the essence of what I loved in Kuramae is present.

Japan lit a fire in me to travel and explore other parts of the world. What flavors, textures, and cultural norms could I introduce with a Dandelion Chocolate twist? This past summer I staged in Copenhagen for a month. Just like in Japan, they value simple food preparations, and seasonality with a comforting and hearty sensibility. The Danes have a word–hygge to describe the concept of peace, comfort, and cozy vibes. I experienced hygge biking on the docks during sunset and starting my day with a bowl of warm porridge.

I wanted to incorporate a porridge like that one as a nutritious option for Bloom. Knowing the flavors of the region and our chocolate, I thought a spiced quinoa-based porridge with cardamom and our Camino Verde, Ecuador single-origin chocolate would pair well together. The aroma from the cardamom is soothing and well-balanced with the chocolate. Finished with fresh fruit, our cocoa nibs, coconut, and dried cranberries, it’s a great dish to start the day. As the temperatures drop in the SF Bay Area, I hope it will be a comforting morning breakfast in Bloom.

I am glad to share some of my experiences and memories from my travels to Japan and Denmark. I have a few trips lined up for the holidays this year, and I plan to return to Japan. I look forward to being inspired by my future travel and contributing to what we are doing at Bloom!

Alice Medrich’s Chocolate Drops

October 17, 2019 by Karen Solomon

This recipe for chocolate cookies comes to us from Alice Medrich and Renewal Mill. Several years ago Todd was introduced to Alice, and he invited her for a tour and tasting at our Valencia Street factory shortly after it had opened its doors. Since then, Alice has been a kindred spirit in chocolate and she was also part of our 12 Nights of Chocolate event back in 2015. She is a celebrated cookbook writer specializing in chocolate, and we are constantly inspired by her work. She makes us blush when she tells us how she’s enjoyed watching us grow up. For this recipe, Alice is working with Renewal Mill, makers of okara flour, a gluten-free and grain-free ingredient upcycled from the pulp left after making fresh soy milk, and she’s combined it with our single-origin dark chocolate, nuts, and coconut to make this delicate, decadent cookie. Alice writes, “If chocolate mousse married a brownie, these cookies would be their offspring. Note: To measure okara flour, spoon it lightly (don’t pack it) into measures and sweep it level—or better still, use a scale.”

Makes 30-36 cookies

1 cup (100g) toasted pecan halves
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons (22g) Renewal Mill okara flour
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon fine grain sea salt
8 ounces (225g) Dandelion 70% Chef’s Chocolate, either Camino Verde, Ecuador or Kokoa Kamili, Tanzania
6 tablespoons (85g) unsalted butter
1 cup (200g) sugar
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 ½ teaspoons water
About 1 cup (42g) unsweetened dried shaved/flaked coconut
Flakey sea salt for topping (optional)

First, toast the pecans. Spread them on a sheet pan and bake in a 325°F oven for 9-12 minutes until fragrant and toasty. Cool them until crisp, then break or chop the nuts into coarse pieces. Set aside.

Position racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven, and preheat the oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a medium mixing bowl, whisk the okara flour with the baking soda and fine grain sea salt and set aside.

Put the chocolate and the butter in a medium stainless steel bowl. Set the bowl in a wide skillet filled with about one-half inch of water. Heat the water over high heat until it’s just barely simmering, then turn off the heat. Stir the chocolate and butter until they are melted and smooth.

Remove the bowl from the water. Stir in the sugar, salt, and vanilla until thoroughly combined. Add the eggs and the water and stir until well blended.

Stir in the flour mixture. Stir vigorously for a few seconds to aerate the batter slightly. Add the pecans. For shapelier cookies, refrigerate the batter for a few minutes to firm it slightly before baking.

To bake, scoop slightly rounded tablespoons of batter and place them 2 inches apart on the lined baking sheets. Top each scoop with a few crushed flakes of the sea salt if desired, and lots of coconut pieces. Bake 10-12 minutes or until the cookies are puffed, slightly cracked, and dry on the surface (though they should still feel soft when touched with a fingertip). Rotate the sheets from upper to lower and front to back about halfway through the cooking time to insure even baking.

Cool the cookies in the pan on a rack; the cookies will firm a bit as they cool. The cookies will keep in an airtight container for 2-3 days.

Flavor in Chocolate: The Not-So-Secret Secrets Of Becoming A Great Taster

October 1, 2019 by Karen Cogan

Karen, our Flavor Manager, will openly and unapologetically tell you that she regularly eats chocolate for breakfast. She’s been a part of our team since 2013; first as a chocolate maker, then managing chocolate making, and now, managing flavor. In her current role, she gets to taste her way through the day as she helps build the systems and processes that encourage the development and preservation of our flavor.

This blog post is part one of a four-part series on flavor in chocolate. Karen will answer some of the most-asked questions around what we taste, how flavor happens, and how we as chocolate makers approach flavor in our process and in our bars.

We believe that chocolate is absolute magic. Becoming a great taster, however, is not.

As Flavor Manager since 2017, one of my absolute favorite things to do is to run our internal tasting training that we call Flavorientation. (And if you’re interested, we also offer a class in Tasting for the public.) Here I get the opportunity to meet each and every new taster in our growing team and use this unique moment to impart to them this one simple fact:

If you want to be a great taster, all you’ve got to do is practice.

In class, I keep the group size small, inviting no more than six people at a time to the table. This is purposefully done to create a safe space so that our new tasters can exercise this sometimes new and awkward-feeling muscle: the palate. I take them through a series of tasting exercises where I highlight the nuanced impact that both large and small changes in our raw product, production processes, and makers can have on the final flavor of a chocolate bar. I work hard to crack open the exciting world of flavor to our new team members.

As with any table full of new tasters, there is often at least one individual around the tasting table that says something like, “I’m terrible at tasting! I don’t taste a single thing that everyone else seems to be getting!”

If there is one piece of advice that I can give to anyone wanting to be a great taster, it would be to stop comparing yourself to those around you. I know, I know! That can be like asking some of you to stop writing with your dominant hand; awkward and unnatural. However, remember that comparison stifles your own experience and hinders your ability to practice pulling up your own unique aromatic memories buried deep within your consciousness.

Aromatic memories are, in large part, the things that breath life and brightness into your memories of that magical tropical vacation or the warm fuzzy feelings you have toward your favorite holiday. Aromatic memories can transport us miles in an instant with one whiff of the nostalgic.

This is what makes chocolate magical. Chocolate is known as one of the most aromatically complex things out there. The possible combinations of the chemical compounds within chocolate are essentially endless. Couple this with the fact that, unlike other craft industries like coffee or beer, chocolate, consumable by any age group, has typically woven itself into our earliest childhood memories. More often than not, understanding our connection to chocolate is so entangled within the story of our lives that it is near impossible to find its source.

This is one of the main reasons I absolutely love what I get to do here. I get to hear people’s life stories framed by their unique and deeply personal tasting notes. I get to literally hear them unpack some of their most potent experiences as they practice naming and identifying the aromas that have framed their lives.

Magic.

So next time you sit down to a meal, walk through your local farmers market, or step into your favorite relative’s kitchen, take a second and breathe deeply. These are the things your chocolate memories are made of!

The 2017-2018 Sourcing Report is Ready

September 11, 2019 by Greg

I’m excited to say that we have finished our fourth annual(ish) Sourcing Report! These were huge years of growth for us and the industry at large, but also years when we learned some tough lessons. The first lesson was that it takes a lot longer to write a sourcing report than you might imagine, so we’ve decided to combine two years together. As always, our goal for this report is to help you learn and understand more about us and our chocolate, but more importantly, learn about the producers with whom we work. Each section of this report is dedicated to a single producer and we’ve tried our best to represent them in the way that they feel is most appropriate. This includes having each producer guide, contribute to, and review the content.

The first thing you might notice in this report is that we bought more cocoa in 2017 than we did in 2018. Does this mean that we’re shrinking? No, we are still growing, but this was our next big lesson: building in San Francisco takes a long time. We thought our new 16th Street Factory was going to be finished in 2018. Since we buy all of our cocoa one year in advance, this meant that we needed to buy a lot of beans in 2017 to prepare for our new facility, which is designed to use up to 200 tonnes of beans per year, and to supply our Valencia Street factory, which uses approximately 25 tonnes of cocoa annually, and our Kuramae factory, which uses around 30 tonnes. In 2017 we were excited to finally start buying larger quantities of beans and the producers with whom we work were thrilled. For cacao producers, having a customer buy more is almost always a great thing. The specialty cocoa industry is growing quickly and most producers have more supply than they have demand. Unfortunately, we were wrong about how long it would take to complete our new factory. The good news is that our new factory is open as of April 2019. The bad news is that we started buying larger quantities of beans too early, which means that we are still working through our backstock. This also means we incorrectly set expectations with the producers with whom we work. They have all been very understanding, but this is why we bought more beans in 2017 than in 2018. Our goal in working with producers is to buy the same quantity of beans from them or more year over year. We are not trying to find the cheapest cocoa that tastes good. We are trying to build longterm relationships with producers that grow over time so that we all benefit. Fortunately, our plan is to buy more beans in 2019 so we can get back on track with our producers.

In 2017 we also started our customer trip program in earnest. While we’ve done periodic customer trips over the years, we’ve now turned this into a consistent and core part of what we do. We’ve decided to visit three producers regularly: Maya Mountain Cacao in Belize, Zorzal Cacao in the Dominican Republic, and Kokoa Kamili in Tanzania. Each trip allows us to introduce our customers to a different view of cacao. Belize allows us to highlight cacao as an integral part of the local Maya culture. The Dominican Republic allows our customers to see what it is like to have cacao as a core part of a country’s economy. Tanzania allows us to bring people to an operation so far off the beaten path you have to drive two days to get there. I’m excited to lead each trip and to get to share a part of my life with people who are interested in learning more about cacao and the people who produce it.  For more information, please check out our website.

While things have changed here, there have also been changes in the industry. As an industry we are getting closer to having quality metrics for specialty cocoa, inspired by the work done for specialty coffee. Specialty coffee has a system known as Q grading developed by the Specialty Coffee Association that provides a well understood, trainable, and consistent methodology for scoring coffee. This score allows coffee producers to negotiate a price based on an understanding of how their coffee compares to the rest of the beans on the global market. Cocoa does not have a similar grading system. Several chocolate makers and industry members have developed systems over the years, but none of them are universally accepted as of yet. We haven’t even agreed on what to call specialty cocoa, er, I mean fine flavor cocoa. While we have our work cut out for us, we are making progress. My sense is that the goals of a unified system for cocoa evaluation are:
– To analyze unroasted beans to allow producers to evaluate small lots of cocoa in a very short time frame.
– To rely on cheap equipment (so that even small, poorer producers can use the methodology if they would like to).
– The ability to be trainable everywhere in the world.
– To yield a consistent score for cocoa beans that everyone can agree upon.
If we could accomplish these goals we’d be well on our way. Carla Martin and the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute have developed a protocol that gets us much closer than we’ve ever been before. We are now working on the last mile to agree on a way to use the protocol in order to create a score that can be used by everyone. I hope that our next sourcing report will start with a discussion of how great this new methodology has become.

Lastly, the biggest challenge that the specialty cocoa industry is facing now is that it has grown faster than the demand from chocolate makers. There are great beans everywhere! The overall quality of what we taste as samples has gone up dramatically just since 2014. But, there either needs to be larger makers or there needs to be a larger number of makers willing to buy these beans at a premium price. While I believe this will happen eventually, right now it is a struggle for many cocoa producers to sell everything they produce. In this report we’ll talk about some of these situations and how it has impacted the producers.

While we continued to grow in 2017 and 2018, 2019 is the year that we finished our new factory. This means that we’ll be able to increase our consumption of cocoa as we had planned to do two years ago. We are now connecting our customers to cocoa producers more closely than ever before through our trips, and we are on the verge of having a consistent system for evaluating cocoa from around the world. The specialty cocoa and craft chocolate industry are both growing, and I couldn’t be happier. With growth comes more learning, better livelihoods for producers, and, of course, more chocolate!

Read the 2017-2018 Sourcing Report

Greg D’Alesandre
Chief Sourcing Officer, Dandelion Chocolate

Pairing Sake with Chocolate
at Umami Mart

September 4, 2019 by Karen Solomon

Kayoko Akabori is one of the founders of Umami Mart, an Oakland importer and retailer of Japanese food, barware, and household goods, and an online blog of food and drink. Brandon, our staff accountant, is a huge fan of the store, and he noticed that they expanded their space to include a tasting bar that can host events. He made an introduction to Leah and Christine, who happily worked with the Umami Mart team to taste chocolate after chocolate, and sake after sake, to find complimentary flavors between them. Together they hosted a sold-out event to highlight how sake and single-origin chocolate are made, and how complimentary they can be side by side. Kayoko blogged a recap of the event, and she kindly allowed us to share it here.

A few weeks ago, we hosted an event with our neighbor across the bay, Dandelion Chocolate, for a special event pairing sakes with chocolates. The event focused on chocolate and sake production, and we tasted through Dandelion’s bars made in San Francisco and Japan, paired alongside sakes that are also from the Bay Area, and Japan. It was an awesome night of discovery and our taste buds were awakened!

The event came about because as a chocolate lovers, we weren’t getting quite the right pairings with sake – but we knew there’d be a pairing out there! There is a lot of literature written about sake and chocolate. Many Japanese blogs and books suggest pairing sweeter style sakes like sparkling sakes and nigoris with chocolate. But we tried these pairings over and over again, and it wasn’t quite clicking.

It was time to bring the chocolate pros in – Dandelion Chocolate from San Francisco. Tasting through the chocolates with Christine really helped us open our eyes on how to taste chocolate and the production method of chocolate (from cacao fruit bean to bar).

The resulting pairings did not involve one sparkling sake or nigori! In fact some of the sakes we paired alongside these dark and complex chocolates were on the dry side. The only only outlier that was on the sweet side was the aged, vermouth-like Hisui red, which worked wonders for the extra dark Ecuador 85% bar we tried at the end.

Dandelion opened an outpost in Kuramae, a neighborhood in Tokyo, in 2016 where they make and sell chocolate. We were lucky enough to taste one of the bars made in Tokyo, along with three others made in San Francisco. We had worked with Christine and Leah from Dandelion to come up with these chocolate/sake pairings:

Pairing 1
Cahabon, Guatemala 70% (made in SF) with Enter Gold Daiginjo (brewed in Aichi, Japan)

Pairing 2
Maya Mountain, Belize 70% (SF) with Den Nama (Oakland)

Pairing 3
Gola Rainforest, Sierra Leone 70% (Tokyo) with True Vision (Fukui)

Pairing 4
Camino Verde, Ecuador 85% (SF) with Hisui Red Rice (Kumamoto)

Christine started off the event by cutting open a cacao pod!

The pods were slimy and tart, and when chewed, definitely tasted like a mild bean.

The tasting led to many lively discussions with our guests. I had personally never tasted sakes and chocolates alongside one another before and was astounded by how one enhanced the other. We all learned so much about sake and chocolate, and how to taste each individually, and together.

As someone who has paired lots of savory foods with sake, pairing chocolate with sake was pretty intimidating. With a little guidance and help from the pros of chocolate, exploring outside our usual pairing comfort zone was eye-opening and ultimately delicious.

Thank you to everyone who attended the event – it was our first ticketed event at the bar and we were so happy that it was a packed house. A very special thanks to Christine from Dandelion – she was so knowledgable and gracious. We hope to partner with Dandelion again in the future!