love in the time of cacao
true love and a few words (okay it's a rant) on our favorite food, the first lady of chocolate, and a recipe for edgy brownies
When I was a kid Valentine’s was a mixed bag of a day. We were supposed to feel love and also spread some around, and prepared for this event with little red construction paper baskets glued together with a thick white paste at least three of us would sneak into the supply closet to eat.
The V day was never the love fest some of us hoped it might be, save for the rich kid with the store bought valentines. The rest of us schlepped the homemade Snoopy’s we’d crayoned with professions of I luv Billy to the annual Procession of Who’s Popular (and Who’s Not), whereupon whomever had the most love stuffed into their basket by the end of the day was It.
At home my parents gave me a small heart-shaped box of chocolates. I’d save the box for collecting the peanuts from M&Ms, with their crispy (yes they do melt) shells, after I’d sucked the chocolate off, saving the ones that resembled something other than a peanut: a teensy bird, an oblong hotdog, one shaped like an itty bitty fez with a stem tassel. The box rustled with its ruffly pink paper cups ideal for my peanut collection, amongst the toppled six or so chocolate-covered mysteries. The coconut one: ick. The candied almond one (I think that’s what it was), foisted on an adult who would understand such things.
I’m not going to tell you how chocolate came to be luv’s dove bearing gifts to women, how an enlarged chocolate chip imploded into foil wrapped Kisses, or even offer a wtf! about ads showing closeups of swooning chocolate-drizzled lips, somehow always in sight of a fainting couch, but I will tell you that love has the least of anything to do with it.
Amalgamation, yes. One note flavor pony galloping toward the sunset of Samedom, oh heck yes. Bulk, aggregated, low quality beans to the point of inedible without chemically-induced artificial flavor enhancing, you got it. And by it I mean, 99% of the chocolate you and I and everybody else who’s ever eaten the industrial rendition, any and all editions since the first melangeur cranked up his conche and began transcribing cacao into chocolat, has ever tasted.
The beans are poor quality because that is the system: I need to say right now, not the farmer’s fault, but a system that exists by paying as little for the beans as possible, which has become the farmer’s lot. The actual flavor rendered by those beans is bitter, astringent, and unworthy of any heart-shaped box unless it is produced with the minimum % of cacao allowed, and anesthetized with a love potion of sugar, vanillan, palm oil, and in the case of milk chocolate, cheap commodity spray-dried dairy.
If what we eat is in fact very little cacao (the average amount in a Hershey’s is 11%) maybe what we’re craving is its bestie, dear sugar.
You might be thinking Not me sister. The Lake Lucerne vacay (those Swiss and their chocolates!), or but Belgian chocolate is the best (cacao does not grow in Belgium or Switzerland, fyi), or that time you ate the croissant at the table one chair away from Christian Louboutin and you had no clue about the tp banner on the bottom of your shoe until you swiped through your selfies. No matter the price, that chocolate is, quite literally, just more of the same.
Chocolate flavor, like all-purpose flour and parmesan cheese in a can and tomatoes in the dead of winter—anything commodified by our industrialized food hankerings—was yanked from the shelves of culinary know-how about the time a Dutch chemist discovered a method for making it taste better (add dairy), and a Swiss chocolatier figured out a machine to make it smoother and milder #tastemobetter both of which happened in the 1870s.
One hundred and fifty-some years of being fed, not just the same story but mostly only one story, takes its Tollhouse morseled cookie and makes it seem normal. Just is. No other choice, perfectly fine. Only it’s kinda worse: it tells us that this is what chocolate actually and truly tastes like.
I can answer yes to the following. Have you ever claimed to love it? Craved it, snuck a nibble behind the monitor? Dutifully cried Yes Chef! before slathering a buttercream stuffed with it, alternated handfuls between the Kitchen Aid and your mouth? Ordered a venti quad double pump? Chucked bags in the Target cart, squished it between scorched marshmallows? Yes, a thousand times yes.
Welcome to the let’s all read the same book club. We, my friends, are in good company.
That love thing? it’s a fire.
If commercial industrial commodity big ol bulk cocoa is a global political economic bon(bon) fire, it’s one we keep stoked by our willingness to Lucille Ball those truffles into our pie holes as fast as we can.
It coats our sad days with glaze, soothes our achey breaky time of the month with stashes of perfected thin-to-thick ratio of shell to peanut butter cups-o-bliss, crumbles into the wadded napkins of our cupcakes and cookie and cake questing. It melts so damn perfectly off the snickery insides of the bar we feel no compunction about licking it off our fingers. It cracks and slides in slivers off the ice cream, is the hurrah! to the dinner finale entremet, it’s the bomb of a bonbon shell.
Every mocha’d cupholder, every cereal aisle cocoa-puffed box, the malted milk balling at the movies, mini bars in the trick or treater’s dream haul, the Santa in the stocking, the eggs with their eggy-goo creme in the Easter basket. In the baking mixes. On the desert menu from the fanciest to the ma-n-pa neighborhood cafe. It’s Swiss Miss being the bestie on the cold riverside day and the Keebler Elves scrambling to keep up.
In a word, the flavor we know and trust as and believe in and order by the boxful for our pastry chefs to work with and pump into the morning joe’s and crumb coat the cakes with,
is ubiquitous.
It’s the red delicious version of applelandia which includes Fujis and Granny Smiths, Braeburns and Honeycrisps, Cox’s Orange Pippins, Arkansas Blacks, Esopus Spitzenburgs, Roxbury Russets, and all the other pip-filled renegades of the local fruit stand display that make my knees quiver come fall.
I’m not convinced it’s even just the red delicious: it’s the apple pie filling from the can, which denies everything apple about what the universe intended to be an apple. We say I love chocolate but we’ve been fed something else.
You were so busy looking at the fire you didn’t know it when he put the blanket around you.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
If we want the truth, we have to crack it open as close to the pod as we can and head for the shelves-less-traveled, which you may already do (on behalf of my fellow craft chocolate making friends, I heart you). I don’t mean we all have to learn to make chocolate from the bean. We just need to look at what we think just is and take a second look.
We can ask Tell me about the chocolate you used when the pastry chef hands us the cake. Ask the bakery in our hood if they know which origin went into the chunks. We can start a conversation, or at least, make the barista, the chef, the baker, the artisan grocer, the foodies and food-loving folks wonder what the heck we’re talking about.
Every new way of thinking begins with a spark. In my case, it began when I saw an entire room of barrels filled with different origins of cocoa beans for the first time and a tiny speech bubble over my head popped the question how have I never known that chocolate isn’t just one flavor?
Consider this rant my lil s’more stick.
Third grade, the year the rich kid’s valentines had little red lollipops attached to each card, her perfectly perfect cursive decisively penning each recipient’s name in ink, not crayola, was the year I didn’t make the cut. It was also the year my mom sent me to a kid’s cooking camp where we made brownies from scratch and I decided I wanted to be a baker, and I was finally allowed to ride my bike to the library by myself, so there was that.
And now, the edgy brownies I promised.
My go-to basic everyday (and yes, I would every day it) brownie recipe is Alice Medrich’s, even before she thrilled the living f out of me by stopping by my booth at Northwest Chocolate Fest that time and buying one of my craft chocolate baking kits. You may know her as a cookbook author and founder of the Chocolat shops. Her recipe is as straightforward as a brownie ought to be. But, when I’m jonesing for something edgier, something chocolate with snap, I make brownie brittle.
If you dropped by my house these are what I’d stack on a plate for us to munch while we chatted. No gluten, no dairy, no eggs. Crispy shards that, I kid you not, really deserve their own swath of the cheese plate. You can decrease the sugar which will bump up the chocolate flavor. You can spritz with a flaky salt. You can, and I hope you will, look at these and wonder about the cocoa powder the recipe calls for.
I’m so glad you asked.
Mostly, recipes that list cocoa powder will say nothing (“all chocolate is the same”) or might go out on a wee limb and mention “natural,” or “dutched.” Mostly, anything you find in the grocery aisle all tastes the same (see my post above).
My favorite cocoa powder is made from cocoa beans from Tanzania, from Kokoa Kamili. I have a tiny cocoa butter press which is how I press my own cocoa butter and how I end up with cocoa butter: roughly 50% of a cocoa bean is the fat (cocoa butter). The remaining solid bits are cocoa powder. In my press these look like shiny chocolate pencil shavings before I mill them into powder. You can read about the beans I get from Kokoa Kamili here. You can buy my cocoa powder here, which yes is me shamelessly pointing you to my day job. I promise I won’t do this every time but in this case your brownies and cakes and chocolate bread will thank you, anyone lucky enough for you to share your baked goods with will thank you, and you will thank me.
Thank you for reading. And thank you for sharing this post, as it will aid and abet me in playing hooky from making chocolate to be here.