Chocolate, Chocolate Everywhere
Hey, I promised to tell all of you guys when our chocolate was for sale. Well we now have them for sale. Right now just the Madagascar bars are for sale but we’ll have the Ocumare at our shipper either the end of this week or beginning of next week.
I’m pretty excited. This has been our passion the last year or so. Although considering how involved and difficult getting a factory up was I’m not sure I’d have done it had I known what I was in for. But despite a few delays due to the difficulty of using restored antique machines in a state with a booming economy (and thus few available trade workers), we’re finally there.
Daniel, a regular commenter here, kindly wrote up a review over at the group blog he writes for. So you don’t have to take my word for it.
My favorite bar is the Ocumare which comes from a valley in Venezuela known for having some of the best chocolate. It’s a very chocolatey complex taste very much in line (in my opinion) with the best Italian chocolate you can get. (While my business partner loves French chocolate I’ve always been partial to Italian) The Madagascar bar in contrast brings out a very fruity flavor. This is actually the natural fruit from the cacoa. While many don’t realize it, chocolate is made by taking the whole pod which contains the fruit of the cacoa tree and the seeds and fermenting it. As it ferments the fruit flavors are brought into the seeds which are what we use to make the chocolate. So the fruity flavor is actually the flavor of the natural fruit of the cacoa tree.
Anyway, we’ve been getting extremely good feedback, including a lot of very positive reviews last week at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. I’m very happy with it all. A lot of people didn’t think we could do it. But we started out building our own machinery to see if we could make the kind of chocolate we love, which you just can’t easily get in the United States. We wanted to get that old world artisan feel and I think we achieved that.
Forgive me for gushing and I’m trying hard not to blow my own horn here. (I don’t want to be crass) I mention it here just because I know a lot of you have asked about it. So if I come off too self-promoting I apologize. But I’m pretty excited.
Posted on January 31, 2007, in Food. Bookmark the permalink. 57 Comments.
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I’m excited for you, Clark. Blow your horn all you want! This is really awesome.
Don’t worry. I’m glad for the post. It’s not crass at all. You’re among friends.
Last month I really enjoyed dark chocolate for the first time. I think it was from Holland or something. I usually only eat milk chocolate with nuts in it. But this was creamy and complex and delicious. Hershey’s was all I had had in the past and it just made me want nutty milk chocolate, but now I can definitely see the appeal in these fancy dark chocolates.
Well done, Clark. I am familiar with what a challenge such a project is and my hat is off to you!
Congratulations, Clark, it’s really an achievement to make it to market. For good chocolate (especially for cooking), my family mostly is into Scharffen-Berger, which is made here in Berkeley. How does your chocolate compare as for as style? Are you aiming for the same market?
Scharffen-Berger got bought out by Hershey’s last year and the guys who started it according to my sources aren’t really that involved. I note that they are now going pretty wide market with bars showing up in Albertson’s in Utah and presumably all over the country.
With that large of volume you just can’t use the rarer beans and one has less control over how one makes it. We’re doing very small batches and are modeling ourselves more on the wine market. We label the date and lot number since even beans from the same plantation can have very different tastes during different harvests. That’s because they are very affected by the environment and also the fermenting process to develop the flavor. We’re aiming at bringing out those subtle flavors that are so interesting to eat.
We will have cooking blocks in 10 oz blocks. Those aren’t for sale just yet as we’re focusing on the small bars initially. We also have a lot of other kinds of beans we’re in the process of roasting. So we’ll have some bars from a different area of Venezuela soon.
So I guess the short answer is that we’re going for smaller, rarer runs focused on different kinds of tastes.
Taste test at my house! Lindt 65% Madagascar vs. Amano 70% Madagascar. I’ll post results as soon as I find me some Amano.
My current favorites are the Lindt Madagascar and the Scharffen-Berger Nibby bar.
I love nibs. So we’ll be doing something like that eventually.
I do notice that Scharffen-Berger has definitely taken notice. They started doing some “limited” runs. To be fair, they were doing limited runs before, but there are some things I notice that are pretty similar – especially their discussion on their mailing list. They name the source of the beans like us, although unless I’m mistaken they are doing a blend of beans rather than single origins. (This isn’t clear on their website) If true then that is probably due to the volume they do.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Scharffen-Berger and the guys who started the company were very nice to us. In fact I think Scharffen-Berger helped inspire us in some ways. But just due to the volume it’s pretty different niches. We can do things they just aren’t able to do since we do batches in very small sizes. Further their getting bought out really helps us as well. Scharffen-Berger is aiming at a more mass market product and we’re trying to move chocolate to be more like fine wines.
I’m off to place an order! Yay, Clark! Thanks for letting us know- tooting one’s own horn is perfectly wonderful when you’ve done something fabulous!
BTW – if you are interested we have a page up of photos. Yes, that’s definitely a picture of me with the marriage weight. But hopefully I’ll be back down to climbing size soon.
Ocumare! Ocumare! Ocumare!
It’s the best chocolate in the world. Five years ago, I could only find it when I was actually in Venezuela, and even then it was a trick to track it down. I once went so far as to carry about 6 kilos of it back to the states in my carryon bag – that’s how good it is. Thank you, Clark, for helping make my life just a little bit easier.
Globalization, woohoo!
Now, if someone would just make the pure cacao powder easily available…
What do you use the cacao powder for? (I assume you mean just the cocoa butter pressed out) I find that for a lot of purposes (especially hot chocolate) I prefer to use the real chocolate rather than the chocolate powder.
“The marriage weight”? haha. I think you mean the baby weight. You look awesome Clark and your factory is impressive!
My wife didn’t appreciate me taking off to the gym for two hours every night at 11:00. It was hard to adjust. (grin) It’s 10 miles from my house to our factory and as soon as this ridiculous cold snap ends and spring weather arrives I’ll be biking it. I really want to be rock climbing a lot this spring. Which means I got to get back to 170 somehow.
The factory was pretty involved getting up and running. We built a lot of equipment ourselves. It helped that both of us come from technical backgrounds so we could do a lot ourselves. Who said a physics degree is useless?
I’m gonna buy some. I love this kind of chocolate.
Good work Clark.
Any chance you guys are going to do the New York Chocolate Show? (I know, they’ve got some other locations, too, but I’ve only been to the one in NY.) I don’t know how helpful or unhelpful it is for the business people, but it’s great for people who just buy tickets to go.
Well probably be there. I can’t make any promises since that’s next November as I recall. We do the Utah Chocolate show around the same time. Even if we don’t have a booth we’ll probably make an appearance. But it’s hard to plan that far in the future.
You can definitely expect an order from me ASAP. I’m very excited about this! Mmmmm. Dark chocolate is my passion. Congratulations!!
Sam B., thanks for reminding me about the New York Chocolate Show. I have a friend who goes there every year (at least I got that impression) and I think he’ll want to know about this new company.
Clark, I use it for baking and cooking. While I’d really prefer prepared bars of undiluted, pure cacao (which I was able to buy in Caracas), I find that unless I’m making a sauce or a drink, I much prefer the close-to-absolute control I have with powder to the slightly less fine-grained control I have with regular bars, even unsweetened bars.
Um, part of it is probably also just that I’m much less likely to give into temptation and eat the cacao straight before I have a chance to cook with it
. Confronted with a bar of chocolate, even one I bought with a purpose in mind, I’m a weak-willed person. And straight cacao powder, even Ocumare, is a bit much, even for me, so it goes farther.
And yes, by the way, my understanding is that the powder I used in Caracas was the cocoa butter. The bars certainly were. You’d undoubtedly understand the distinctions better than I would.
I have been trying to learn to bake with chocolate bars, but I find since I grew up using the powder (my mom thought good baking chocolate was a waste of money for some reason), my ability to predict the texture of finished products is diminished when I use the bars. Ah, well, I guess I’ll get it eventually.
Probably what you mean is 100% chocolate with no sugar. Cacao is about 50% fat. To make hot chocolate powder they typically put the beans in a press and squeeze out all the fat, which is the cocao butter. (An extremely expensive oil it is too – we buy it to help with the consistency of our chocolate so that it feels right in the mouth)
Some low end chocolate also does this – they separate out the solids and the oils and then mix it back together at the end. Although this isn’t as common anymore. There are technical reasons for doing this, but you’d never do that to a high end chocolate.
Our chocolate is 70% although once we’re a little more established – perhaps this summer – we’ll focus on baking chocolate as well. I know a few companies sell 95% bars or even 98%. So eventually we may have something like that.
If you’re cooking though all you need do is whip out a calculator to figure out how much chocolate versus sugar you have. So in a 2 oz 70% bar like ours you have 40 g of cacao and 16 g of sugar. Just reduce your sugar in your recipe by that amount and then adjust the chocolate.
Thanks, Clark, I really appreciate the explanation. And I’ll tell you right now: if you start selling Ocumare baking chocolate, I’ll be first in line to buy it.
Ocumare is too rare to probably sell as a regular baking chocolate. We’ll do special orders to sell it in 10 oz baking blocks, although since they’ll be special orders it’d have to be untempered and priced on par with our other bars. (i.e. fairly expensive) But if you want some I could probably arrange for it.
What’s the difference, result-wise, between tempered and untempered backing chocolate?
There is no difference since if you are cooking it you’re going to destroy the temper. You will notice fat blooms in the untempered chocolate but as soon as you melt it there is no difference between tempered and untempered chocolate for baking. (Now if you were just eating it, instead of cooking with it, you would notice a lot of difference – texture and hardness really affect the aesthetics of eating chocolate)
If you were making chocolates (i.e. candies where you melt the chocolate and then solidify it as a covering) then you’ll have to worry about tempering. Untempered chocolate is a tad bit more difficult to temper than chocolate that’s already been tempered. But most folks at home just don’t deal with those issues. And, of course, if folks are planning on making those kinds of candies they’d already have to learn how to temper chocolate.
Basically any baking chocolate we’d make at this stage would be special order and would consist of just pouring some of the chocolate into our molds. Our tempering process and molding process for our real chocolate requires much more chocolate – at least 500 lbs – to really be economical. So we’re holding off on baking chocolate until we’ve got our primary products out in sufficient numbers and until we have more of a name and can sell sufficient quantities to make it a good use of our resources. But, as I said, if someone really wanted it we have our molds here and could do some custom pourings, just not tempering.
Clark,
Maybe you could explain to us the difference between your chocolate and Hersheys (and yes, I’m very aware that there’s a difference, I just don’t know what it is ingredient-wise). Does it really have wax in it or is that what people say because that’s what it tastes like?
Hmm. We’ve made it a policy to only talk nice about competitors. I’ll just say that not everyone likes Hershey’s although they are making an attempt to get into the high end chocolate of late. (Thus their buying Scharffen-Berger)
A lot has to do with the difference between chocolate made industrially and chocolate made the old fashioned European way. You simply can control flavor more and with smaller batches buy small lots of better tasting beans.
So they don’t use some sort of additive or dilute it with industrial fat or something?
Some candy bars do use cheaper fats than cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is pretty expensive so there is an incentive. Check the labels. It really depends upon the bar.
However most chocolate bars (i.e. the kind you find in convenience stores) actually have very little chocolate in it. Between the milk and sugar the chocolate content is typically 15-20% in the chocolate itself. And of course most candy bars have other stuff that makes it cheaper yet.
So it’s hard to make a general comment. In general thought cheap bars use inferior beans (typically from Ivory Coast in Africa, although there are other sources), they may skimp on how fine they make the particles, and then there will be trade offs in how the roasting process works and how the conching process works. Then large facilities typically use pipes to transport chocolate between processes. That means that you never completely clean out the previous kind of chocolate run. So the transport mechanisms also affect things. But it always depends upon the bar. So, for instance a Hershey Bar and a Symphony Bar have very different textures with the Hershey’s Bar being much grittier. Yet both are made by the same company and cost the same amount.
In general (although not always) the higher the cost for the bar the more expensive the ingredients and labor. Some companies will advertise a bar being a single origin bean of some rare beans but then adulterate it with cheaper beans. There’s no regulation on that so unless they say it is a single origin bean you’re not always sure what you’re getting without further research. Since the expensive beans are expensive (we pay more for our beans than many people sell their finished chocolate for) that makes economic sense. And the final product may be very tasty. But it all adds up.
But you can’t really say “this company does this.” You have to check labels and do a little inquiry. Most companies are large conglomerates which have numerous lines of chocolate, often targeting different niches. So, for instance, there’s a big difference between a $0.40 Hershey’s bar, a $2.00 dark chocolate higher end Hershey’s bar and a $5 Scharffen-Berger bar even though they are all made by the same company. The Scharffen-Berger bar will simply be a much better product.
I’ve been anxious to hear about this coming to fruition. Congrats on a job well done. Your pics are fun (although some are just gobbly-gook when clicked on). Do you let people visit your factory? I would love to see how it all works. (Also, are your bars out anywhere, or is ordering the only way to get them?)
The bars are available at a few places, but more will probably be selling them over the next month. We don’t allow tours primarily for safety reasons and hygiene reasons. We’d like to set something up one day so we can. But it’s just too involved at this stage. There are lots of ways to get seriously hurt.
I’ll check on the problem with the pictures. I wasn’t doing that.
I’d love to see a video of the process. Maybe you could get a Fred Rogers impersonator to do a voice over. I can’t believe that the youth at your church aren’t dying to go on tour.
Clark,
Have you tried Cluizel Chocolates? I just picked up a Venezuela bar the other day to get my bearings before I have an Amano Ocumare bar and it’s fantastic. It looks like they’re doing similar stuff to you guys.
Yes, Michel Cluizel was one of my business partner’s favorite chocolates. So we were very inspired by them. As I said, I’m more an Italian chocolate fan. I think our flavor choices and the way we focus on bringing out the natural flavors of the beans are a nice mix between the two traditions.
Yes, we’re all familiar with the ways that one can be seriously hurt in such a tour, including being shrunk by a Television Chocolate camera, squeezed through a chocolate transfer pipe, sorted with the bad nuts, or converted into a human blueberry.
Hey, NPR did a story on us calling us the best. Wow. The story just went out an hour ago and we’re already getting orders off it.
GST, actually our factory is even worse. Big pulleys and belts by where you walk and some machines that scruntch things down to 20 microns in size. (The smaller the particle size for chocolate the better for the aesthetic experience on your tongue) So there’s a lot that can do serious harm.
Wow that’s awesome, Clark. The NPR story, not the dangerous factory.
Gratz on the NPR coverage Clark!
Congratulations–that was a great write-up.
Congratulations! I have only recently heard about Amano, and following the enthusiasm with which it has been greeted, would really like to try your chocolates. The trouble is I live outside the US, and so wanted to ask, if that’s OK, whether you might consider shipping small quantities to international destinations as well?
I hope you will…
Congratulations, Clark! Now all you need is for some famous music group to sell out to you. Maybe you could get PiL to let you use “Flowers of Romance”:
I sent you flowers
You wanted chocolates instead
Ali, we’d like to, but right now we’re a bit volume limited (i.e. more people want it than we can make) Also there are various issues with international orders were just not quite ready to deal with. It’ll be coming, but I can’t promise when.
BTW – for those interested the Ocumare is out now.
Clark,
Can you tell me where the bars are being sold locally?
Clark, that’s great! The growing interest, high demand and Ocumare availability, I mean. Thank you for taking the time to reply.
This all sounds very tempting, so I still hope to find a way of getting around those issues, and really wish you all the best!
Where is ‘local’?
In SLC both Liberty Height’s Fresh and Caputos are carrying it. We’re in talks with a few other folks like Pirate-O’s and several delis.
In Provo right now Shepherd Cakes up by the Church distribution center will be carrying us, although we’ve not shipped them chocolate yet. A friend Letitia Johnson is selling them at her beauty salon as well.
There will be more coming. It just takes a while to get things set up. I’m hoping to spend Monday trying to get a few more places around Provo to sell us.
Ali, one thing you might wish to try is to check out Chocosphere and see if they’ll ship overseas. I know we’re sending off a bunch of bars for them to sell this week. (We’ve not sent it off which is why we’re not listed yet – but if you call the guy who runs it he might be able to arrange things)
Oh, ignore that. I just checked and they don’t ship internationally.
If you were desparate I could arrange a special order but I have no idea how expensive the shipping charges would be.
Clark, could you send me an email with addresses in Utah County of places where I could get it prior to V-Day? hpsoandsos [at] gmail [dot] com.
Clark, seriously?!?
Self-indulgent is probably more like it, but unless I can get the good people at Chocosphere to revise their shipping policy (I don’t know, can I?), that option is out.
So, if it is possible without undue inconvenience (I don’t know, is it?), well… that would be great!!!
Exact shipping rates – I don’t have them either, but I checked United States Postal Service to get an idea for a 1-2 lbs. package, either EMS or Parcel Post, and the price range is, well, acceptable.
So I guess I’m asking for your judgment call on this. Can I contact you directly by email?
Either way, thank you so much for your kind attention! I really appreciate it.
HP, my business partner is out delivering it right now to Shepherd’s Cakes supply up near the distribution center in Orem. It is also at Consider the Kitchen down on University near main in Provo. (It’s a couple of blocks up – say around 200 N but I can’t remember the exact address)
BYU might be carrying it but their purchase person was pretty overwhelmed right now with Valentines and preferred that we not talk to her until after things are over.
Ali, feel free to contact me by email. Here’s the problem though, we can’t guarantee things internationally. Chocolate is fairly temperature sensitive. I wouldn’t expect it to be a problem – especially in the winter – but you never know. I just shipped off a big order of 20 bars over night via Fed Ex to a guy in Louisiana who read the review in the Wall Street Journal. (I didn’t even know they were doing a story on us and haven’t seen it yet)
Clark,
Thanks for the info. I’m hoping to get some this week.
and p.s. Congrats on all the media exposure. Probably a bit stressful while you are still in ramp-up mode, but exciting nonetheless.
Clark,
(I don’t know if you care, but they still had it back in the back room…I had to wait for them to bring the bars out. I think they are out in front now somewhere.)
I picked up an Ocumare today and got to try both kinds. At Shepherd’s Cake Supply, they let me sample before purchasing to see which I liked (and if I liked it). As an FYI, they seemed a bit more concerned about the customer not liking it than about selling it for you. (“It’s really dark,” they warned me; they also were grumbling a bit about the price.) Maybe you want to let them know that people who ask for it probably know what they are asking for…???
A friend of ours came by today. Chocolate is banned at his house because his wife gets migraines from it. Imagine his glee when I offered him some of the bar (because I’m nice like that). He loved it. (He said he’s been known to mix cocoa powder and butter and eat as is.) It’s good chocolate (much better than the Lindt 70% I recently tried.) Congrats again on a job well done.
For V-Day, I bought my wife some. I’ll let you know what she thinks. I will say that she is a Euro-Chocolate snob.
Here’s a copy of my comment that I just posted on the Amano thread at MM:
I have obtained two of each of the bars from Liberty Heights Fresh. The boxes are impressive and labeled as to lot number and the date made. Oddly the Madagascar label lists the date under “Made:†while the Ocumare using the clearer term “Date:â€ÂÂ.
Here is my first impression of each:
I opened the Madagascar bar and saw the back of the bar first. It showed some swirls and bubbles on the back of the bar. Turning it over the front of the bar is shiny, bloom free, and the molding is very detailed. I have to compare the thickness to my favorite bar, the Lindt Madagascar. It is about twice as thick as the Lindt bar. I prefer a thinner bar as it is easier to snap into little pieces and those pieces melt easily on the tongue. This is a very fruity chocolate, it seems to have a sweet flavor that makes it less bitter than I might expect a 70% bar to be.
The Ocumare bar is smooth on the back without any of the swirls and bubbles visible on the Madagascar. It has a very unique flavor, which comes through clearly. My initial impression is that it is almost minty. It has a slight herbal quality to it. It has a slightly darker taste to it than the Madagascar, but neither is bitter in the way that some 70% or darker bars are.
Both have an extremely smooth texture. Pay attention to a Hershey’s bar after eating one of these and you’ll think the Hershey’s is very gritty.
We had a small taste test with me, my two children, and my brother involving the two Amano bars and a Lindt Madagascar. My brother preferred the slightly milder Lindt bar, followed by the Amano Madagascar and then the Ocumare. I think I might have a new favorite in the Amano Madagascar bar. I like the stronger flavor. In my book the Lindt came in second followed by the Ocumare, but all are excellent and variety is the spice of life, right?
I’ll continue to pick up Lindt bars at Target ($2.99 for 100g) and get the pricier Amano bars ($5.99 for 56g) when I have the chance at Caputo’s or Liberty Heights Fresh. If they show up at Pirate O’s (walking distance from my house) then I might have a serious problem on my hands.
Oddly the Madagascar label lists the date under “Made:†while the Ocumare using the clearer term “Date:â€ÂÂ
Yes, a few people suggested the change so the rest of the packages were wrapped with that other label. Both bars now say Date rather than Made. However we still had quite a few bars wrapped with the older term.
I admit the Ocumare is by far my favorite, although I love both. I’ll check on the Pirate O’s status.
Clark,
If these do get shipped internationally you should note that the dates have the potential to be ambiguous. You might want to consider three letter abbreviations for the month. I’m trying to think of a single word that would make it clear that “date” isn’t an expiration date, and I’m coming up blank.
I failed to mention that my kids liked all the chocolate very much. They want more.
It’ll be a while before we ship internationally. There are simply too many headaches with shipping.
I agree that date is a tad ambiguous. I kind of liked the “made” label myself. I can’t think of something better though. My problem with “Date” is that it is a tad ambiguous as to whether it is the expiration date or manufacture date.