Making Chocolate: From Bean to Bar to S'more: A Cookbook

CHAPTER

A BRIEF and OPINIONATED HISTORY 
of AMERICAN CRAFT CHOCOLATE

by TODD MASONIS

COFOUNDER AND CEO OF

DANDELION CHOCOLATE

Cocoa beans partway through fermentation at Maya Mountain Cacao Ltd. in Belize.

IT STARTS WITH A BITTER PURPLE SEED. A whole cob of them actually, in the hollow of a plump, grooved pod that droops straight from the trunk of a tropical tree. I might’ve seen a picture of a cacao tree when I was young, in an encyclopedia or a textbook, but nothing was further from my mind when I was ten years old and digging into a pan of brownies or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup sundae.

We keep a few cacao trees in our factory on Valencia Street in San Francisco to help us tell a story. They’re spindly, urban saplings, far from home, and at first their waxy leaves seem a little out of place against the molten chocolate and clank of beans on metal. But I hope that anyone who sits down at our counter to watch the chocolate makers behind the glass will see those trees while they throw a brownie down the hatch and feel the connection. For anyone who grew up like I did, with crinkly-wrappered chocolate treats far removed from trees and farms, it’s a weird connection to make. But that’s why we’re here.

Europe and North America consume most of the world’s chocolate, thousands of miles from Indonesia, Ecuador, Ghana, and all of the other equatorial countries that grow the world’s cacao. Those of us who do all that eating—the only sport I’ve ever truly excelled at—don’t get to see the cacao pods clipped from tree trunks during harvest, or smell the pungent vinegary fumes seeping from wooden boxes of pulpy, fermenting beans. We don’t see the decks, screens, or concrete lots where those beans dry, or the shipping containers loaded with jute bags. We also don’t see what happens inside the walls of the big, industrial factories where most of those beans become chocolate. Instead, it seems that chocolate just magically and immaculately appears in a wrapper on a grocery store shelf, with no sign of a bitter purple seed or the place where it was grown.

We’ve known and loved a lot of the chocolate on those shelves. It’s constant and reliable. For decades, grocery store milk chocolate bars and semisweet chocolate chips have tasted more or less the same. We have our choice of shades—milk, white, dark—and sometimes inclusions like sea salt, almonds, and caramel, but the baseline flavor beneath them stays static and unchanging: it’s the taste of chocolate as we’ve always known it. What we haven’t known, for most of our chocolate-eating lives, is that chocolate is not just one flavor.

The genetics of cocoa beans are wildly variable, even within a single pod. Their flavor changes from season to season, and industrial chocolate makers deal with thousands of tons of these seeds at a time. How, then, do those chocolate chips always taste the same, and why does one 35% milk chocolate bar taste so much like another? How could anyone possibly wrangle consistency like that from such a natural grab bag? This, in short, is the miracle and the tragedy of the Industrial Revolution.

Dr. Charles Kerchner checks the moisture level of cocoa beans at Zorzal Cacao in the Dominican Republic.

But let’s start this story before the Industrial Revolution, like four thousand years before, when Mesoamericans were growing cacao all across the Amazon basin. In the course of their long, domesticated life, cocoa beans have been many things; in ancient Mesoamerica, they were a ritual offering, a currency, a beverage, and a food flavoring. And interestingly but maybe not surprisingly, Mesoamericans treated varieties of cacao differently, depending on their ripeness and flavor, according to the records and recipes recorded by Maya scribes.

In hindsight it’s a little obvious that like any other agricultural product—say potatoes, grapes, or apples—cacao would have varieties that taste different from one another depending on the season, where they were grown, genetics, and climate. The fact that this variation was lost to those of us in Europe and North America is industrialization’s remarkably impressive triumph.

On our four-thousand-year timeline, that loss is recent. When the Spanish conquistadors brought cacao home from the Amazon basin, carrying indigenous traditions and recipes for drinking chocolate with them, they recognized the natural variety, too. Eventually they adapted those indigenous recipes for the European palate—more milk, cardamom, and cloves, less chile and achiote, but the beans were still coarsely ground and drunk just as they were by the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. (You’ll find more of this history unpacked in a paper by Carla Martin, PhD, and Kathryn Sampeck, PhD, The Bitter and Sweet Chocolate in Europe.)

Then the nineteenth century brought coal, the steam engine, and technology that could smash cacao into an incredibly smooth paste for the first time, and it could be done on a large enough scale to make it cheap and accessible to more people. (The darker side to this story is that it depended on a growing population of coerced laborers—notably, the indigenous labor of the encomienda system, enslaved Africans, and familial labor in Africa and Southeast Asia.)

This is when cacao’s spectrum of flavor started to dwindle. Factories scaled up production and, looking for consistency, blended different varieties of beans and roasted them heavily enough to wash out their character. Sameness and low cost won out over flavor and nuance, and within a generation or two, chocolate became little more than sweet brown candy with a monotone flavor. So much potential and flavor was gone, and, with it, the story that chocolate is actually from somewhere—somewhere specific.

But about twenty years ago, the wheels of a new chocolate movement started to turn slowly. Around this time in the United States, John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg entered the scene. Steinberg was a physician who’d fallen in love with European chocolate, and Scharffenberger was a winemaker who was probably intrigued by terroir, seasonality, and complex flavors. They went on to build a chocolate factory in Berkeley, California, and, as clichéd as this sounds to say, it changed everything.

The Scharffen Berger factory opened its doors to the public. I took a tour of that factory when I was still in my previous tech-industry career, and it was the first time I’d seen chocolate being made from scratch. That factory was the first place that many people had ever seen chocolate being made, period. The equipment was old-school industrial: large, steely, and mint green. Wide granite rollers crushed nibs into cocoa liquor; pumps pushed molten chocolate into a basin for tempering. Here was the process, right in front of my eyes. The chocolate in my life—and there had been a lot of it—never tasted like anything but, well, chocolate. The Scharffen Berger bars tasted like chocolate, too, but they also tasted like bright raspberries and roasted nuts, creamy caramel, and coffee—all just from the cocoa itself. I watched and tasted, and realized that something different was happening here. And I wanted to be a part of it, even if that meant just eating all the chocolate I could get my hands on.

In a big way, Scharffen Berger reclaimed flavor. It jogged our cultural memory with a simple reminder that chocolate was more than a single, classic, brownie-like note. Chocolate could—and should—have complexity, nuance, tone, and flavor.

By 2005, Hershey absorbed Scharffen Berger, and soon thereafter closed the factory in Berkeley, moving production to Illinois. Their chocolate seemed to change, but the seed of a new movement had been planted, and the stage was set for a new kind of chocolate. A handful of chocolate makers who had been quietly experimenting with the same traditional methods rose into the void that Scharffen Berger left, and in the following years, dozens more piled into the fold. Many of them didn’t have the industrial equipment that Scharffen Berger had, but they were after the same thing: to capture the potential of the cocoa bean and the flavor that industrialization had forgotten. They wanted to make chocolate that tasted like something. They scraped together chocolate factories in their garages with duct tape and welding torches, and refitted household vacuums and PVC pipes. They were experimentalists with little precedent to rely on, lighting up a new chocolate frontier.

The first few who took up the torch and were making and selling chocolate by 2007 included Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate, Colin Gasko of Rogue Chocolatier, Shawn Askinosie of Askinosie Chocolate, Steve DeVries of DeVries Chocolate, Art Pollard of Amano Artisan Chocolate, as well as Theo Chocolate and Taza Chocolate. A few years later, there were maybe only a dozen or so other craft chocolate makers like them, but by 2016, over 150 had risen across the United States. Their processes are diverse, but they’re all bound together by a common respect for the raw ingredient and the people who grow it.

Back then, starting up wasn’t easy. Even as Scharffen Berger intrigued and inspired a new generation of chocolate aficionados and would-be makers, making chocolate on a small scale in those days was hard, nearly impossible. Cocoa beans rarely came in shipments smaller than 2,000 pounds, and the only equipment for making chocolate was designed to process at least that much.

Luckily, a resourceful man named John Nanci had spent years piecing together a way to do things on a small scale. He’d been a coffee nerd who roasted beans at home, inspired by Sweet Maria’s—a beloved Oakland warehouse and online resource for hobby coffee roasters and pros—and eventually broke digital ground with Chocolate Alchemy, the website that launched a thousand chocolate makers. He worked to source good beans and sell them to aspiring makers in small quantities, retrofit equipment, and work with manufacturers to adapt bean crackers and grinders for chocolate. He created an essential online forum where home chocolate makers could (and still can) ask Alchemist John just about anything and discuss trade tips, tricks, and quandaries with each other, too. In short, he made it possible to make chocolate at home, and the great majority of chocolate makers who started up in the last dozen years got their start thanks to him. And with this, the fledgling New American Chocolate movement kicked into gear.

As more and more people got serious about it, some started traveling to where cocoa beans are grown (which we usually just call origin), met cacao producers, and learned to analyze chocolate like wine (it can, after all, have more flavor complexity than wine or coffee). Some of us tore through books, like The New Taste of Chocolate by Maricel Presilla, a culinary historian and well-respected voice in the industry who pulled chocolate makers closer to the beans they were looking for and the places where they grew. Many of us consulted with Steve DeVries, a chocolate scholar and early mentor who counseled us on what machines to use or whose beans to buy. He’s still the sage many of us seek out today, hoping to plumb his bottomless knowledge of old machines. And then there was Chloé Doutre-Roussel, author of The Chocolate Connoisseur and another guiding force in the community who connected (or brought) many of us to beans and producers at origin for the first time, and whose exquisite palate helped us understand the depth and nuance that chocolate could have. Some of us went to Europe, where family-run chocolate makers had survived industrialization, and learned techniques for fine-tuning the flavor and texture of chocolate. And, of course, many plied Chocolate Alchemy and taught themselves. Other essential resources popped up, like the Chocolate Life—a forum founded by chocophile Clay Gordon—where chocolate makers could connect and swap tips, or Pam Williams’s Ecole Chocolat, an online chocolate school where many curious makers have learned the ropes. So many of these key figures helped to shape the beginning of the craft chocolate movement, and without their kindness, generosity, and openness, many of us would probably still be kicking our homemade winnowers, wondering where all the good beans are.

The chocolate makers who got going around this time were using different methods and ingredients, but they were collectively fascinated by one thing: the natural flavor of a cocoa bean. Even now, it’s hard to define what craft chocolate is. Some, like us at Dandelion, are minimalists and use only two ingredients in our bars: cocoa beans and sugar. Others add all sorts of things—coconut milk powder, hazelnuts, cumin seeds, and even bread crusts. Some of us roast heavily, others less so, and a few of us don’t even roast our beans at all. But craft chocolate isn’t about process or aesthetics or flavor preferences as much as it is about celebrating the inherent flavors and variation of cocoa beans, and honoring their origins. There are plenty of ways to make that bean into chocolate, and all of them are probably being done by someone, but we’re all interested in what the bean naturally has to offer. Generally speaking, we seek out high-quality beans and producers or brokers who share our values, whom we can trust, and who aren’t interested in exploiting the land or the people who cultivate it. What that means in practice varies from chocolate maker to chocolate maker, but at its core, our movement is devoted to a respect for the bean, and for all of the people and places that bring it into being.

THE DANDELION CHOCOLATE STORY

When this new generation of chocolate makers was first emerging, I was still working in Silicon Valley. My friend Cameron Ring and I had cofounded a social-networking start-up, Plaxo, that—despite its regretfully dental-sounding name—was a good company. After plenty of ups and downs, we sold it in 2008 and made our exit. I took a sabbatical, and with more time on my hands to pursue some latent passions, I packed my bags and chased chocolate around the world to find and taste the best version of it everywhere I could. In hindsight, my life was probably always headed this way. As a child, I ate chocolate as if it were its own food group. My mother has always believed in enjoying dessert first, and our pantry overflowed with cookies and cakes. To this day, I’ve still never met a vegetable that I liked, and I’ve never actually eaten broccoli, but I’ve known many of the world’s best brownies.

My wife, Elaine, and I traveled and ate a lot that year. I took chocolate tempering classes in Chicago and baking classes in San Francisco. In Paris, we took the pastry chef and writer David Lebovitz’s chocolate tour and sampled all of the tiny French hot chocolate we could get our hands on. We visited Bernachon, a famous old bean-to-bar chocolate maker in Lyon, and battered their bean roaster with questions. I missed Scharffen Berger, but I didn’t know that something bigger was brewing underground right here in America.

One day at home, Elaine and I tried our hands at making chocolate in our kitchen. We bought small bags of cocoa beans from Chocolate Alchemy and experimented with roasting them on pans in the oven. We peeled the shells off one by one, until the shards stuck like tiny daggers under our fingernails. We bought a Champion juicer and ran the nibs through, ladle by ladle, crushing them into a cocoa paste with the consistency of rustic peanut butter. After a few failed attempts and knuckles bruised by what seemed like hours of grinding beans across the gritty, hollowed surface of the metate, we finally produced one Hershey’s Kiss–size lump of dark chocolate. It was grainy and potent, but the kernel of the idea was there.

I thought about the old salons in Europe, the chocolate houses in the 1800s that I read about where political discourse happened over cups of drinking chocolate. I thought about the taxonomic name for cacao, Theobroma, from the Greek for food of the gods. I thought about how important the beans had been in Mesoamerican culture, as both sacred, ceremonial matter and currency, too. I thought about how so much had been lost to industrialization later on, and how grainy and weird and delicious that lump on my kitchen counter was.

After my eyes opened to what chocolate once was and what it could be, I recruited Cameron back into action. We commandeered our friend’s garage in Mountain View and bought a tiny coffee roaster that looked like something between a toaster and a rotisserie oven. We roasted batch after batch of cocoa beans in small handfuls, exploring the different flavors that surfaced at certain times and temperatures. We strapped PVC pipes to a fan to make a winnower. We bought a small wet grinder designed for smashing dosa batter, and used it to grind our nibs into a paste.

We spent over a year making batch after tiny batch, without so much as selling or sharing our chocolate. As engineers, we were laboring relentlessly to crack the code and to find a way of getting the best flavor out of harvests of beans that changed all the time.

Every day, we ran tests. We chose a single variable and controlled everything else, roasting and grinding and tempering until we understood the huge effects that small changes could make. We were obsessed with understanding the complexity: how preparation affected the beans, and how roast times and temperatures drew different nuances out of the same type of bean. We chased the molasses tones of a darker roast or the punchy, sweet-tart acidity of a lighter roast, marveling at the dynamism of the beans. We learned how picking out the cracked beans or adding thirty seconds to a roast affected the batch’s flavor; and we learned how to manipulate the textures by grinding the beans with blades, burrs, steel, and stone. Making a business out of it was never the goal. We just wanted to solve the puzzle.

As far as chocolate makers go, we opted for a pure and simple approach, narrowing our focus on the clear and undiluted taste of each harvest. We decided to stick with two ingredients, just beans and sugar, because we like the way a bean shines through in all of its complexity without anything else around it. We were after the best and most direct expression of a cocoa bean and what that tasted like; we sought what industrialization had lost. Cam and I didn’t want just to make chocolate that everyone liked; we wanted to make something that challenged and inspired opinions. (Even now, there are no unanimous favorites among the team at Dandelion, but plenty of strong feelings. Our customers are similar—some buy 100% bars by the case, others can’t imagine how someone could possibly like unsweetened chocolate.)

Eventually, Cam and I made chocolate that we were proud of and shared it with friends and family. Mostly, we were just excited to have our own personal supply and happy that we had found roasts that pleased our own (sometimes quirky) palates. That’s why we were slightly dumbfounded, but pleasantly surprised, by the way our friends reacted. I’ve never tasted anything like this, they said, or Wait, this doesn’t look like Hershey’s. Egged on by requests for more, we quickly realized that our personal obsession could grow into something bigger. That feedback felt like the tip of a small iceberg, and we began to suspect what a few other chocolate makers knew: that many more people were craving this type of chocolate. They just didn’t know it yet.

Still, we were hobbyists working out of a suburban garage, without official permits, operating completely under the radar. Our operation looked suspiciously covert, and possibly as much like a meth lab as it did a chocolate factory to anyone who noticed the large deliveries at the back door or the strange clanking inside. A raid had recently uncovered unsavory activity only a few doors down, and at one point, some skeptical but curious neighbors sent their seven-year-old over to investigate. We sent him back with a handful of chocolate, and made fast friends instead.

We sold our first batches at the Underground Market, a scrappy San Francisco experiment that gave uncertified food makers a warehouse to try out their goods on the public (who were asked to sign a waiver at the entrance). For the first time, strangers opened their wallets for us, and within a few markets, we started winning awards and getting requests from wholesale customers for large orders, even though we were still running under the radar, relying on duct tape, in a garage.

Soon enough, we built our first factory. We bought, built, and repurposed more robust machinery, and constructed an open space where each step of the chocolate-making process is on display so customers can see exactly how bean turns into bar. We wanted maximum transparency and to dismantle a tradition of thick factory walls, corporate opacity, and a supply chain obscured from everyone. We started to visit countries like Madagascar, Costa Rica, and Belize, looking for cacao producers whom we could trust, whom we could treat as partners as much as suppliers, and whom we wanted to work with for a long time. We looked for sustainable land-use practices like diversification, as well as good labor conditions and great beans. We learned about cultivation methods, fermentation, and drying, and bought beans that spanned the flavor spectrum.

At the original Dandelion Chocolate factory, there are no walls between the production floor and the café, and the entire factory is visible from the front door: six spinning melangers in a soldierly row along the left wall, seated under shelves of untempered chocolate blocks waiting their turn; long steel tables where the production team polishes molds, unmolds the bars, and wraps them in foil; the tempering machine and melting tank where the bars are dosed into molds. If you cared to know, you could read the temperature and augur speed on the interface, a finicky set of parameters that varies depending on what chocolate is being tempered that day. All of this to say, Dandelion has no secrets.

Somewhere along the line, we learned that we were not alone, and we tapped into the community of chocolate makers that was emerging all over the country, beyond the dozen or so we knew of who were around when we launched in 2010. Each year, the community grows larger but also more tightly knit; many of us visit each other regularly, lend our machines, commiserate over pitfalls, and buddy up to buy whole containers of beans together when we can’t do it alone. Someone once told me that the most successful microbrewers in the early days of that movement were the ones who were most transparent about their processes, and although it might not be what the free market manifesto tells you to do, what we’ve seen is that when we work to elevate the whole industry, we all rise with it.

Wrapped chocolate bars for sale in Dandelion’s factory on Valencia Street.

Chocolate maker Kaija Bosket at the Dandelion factory.

Cocoa nibs refining in a melanger.

Finished chocolate pours from a melanger.

And indeed, back then it seemed to us that chocolate was going the way of coffee and microbrew, sitting on the cusp of an explosive growth spurt. For now, no one quite knows where it will go. Will local cocoa-bean roasters pop up on corners like coffee shops? Will it follow craft beer and take over its own aisle at Whole Foods? Some makers in places like Hawaii hope that chocolate will evolve like wine and draw devotees to its own version of Napa Valley, where enthusiasts buy bars in tasting rooms overlooking the colony of cacao trees where it all started.

Wherever it goes, this moment is unique for chocolate, and while Europe had the last hundred years, this century belongs to America. The New American Chocolate movement is now spreading across the world, but it started here and we’re proud to be a part of it. This book was born in the spirit of connectedness and sharing of that movement. We wanted to write a book we wish we had when we started making chocolate, both at Dandelion and when Elaine and I first ground nibs into our little lump. We wanted to share our process and techniques for making chocolate—at home or professionally—and what we’ve learned about cocoa beans, sourcing, scaling up your operation, and, of course, delicious things you can make with your chocolate.

This book is the story of Dandelion and how we make our chocolate, but more importantly, we hope it lights the way for you to make your own chocolate, whether as a hobby for yourself and your friends, or as a professional, joining our community. In that way, we hope this book will truly be about this movement, and the future of American chocolate.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN THIS BOOK

We wrote this book because there are no good resources for hobbyists at their kitchen counters who want to learn to make chocolate from the bean, or for chocolate makers who are interested in scaling up a bit and maybe monetizing their craft. Making bean-to-bar chocolate is still new enough that we’re all still learning by the day. Happily, we’ve made lots of mistakes so you don’t have to, and we’d like to help you along the way.

We’ve divided this book into five chapters. In the first two, Todd starts us off in his kitchen, where the seeds of Dandelion were planted. You will learn how to make chocolate from the bean with a low budget and only the basics: a juicer, a mechanical stone grinder, a rolling pin, and a few baking sheets. You will learn to winnow with a hair dryer, and to roast in your oven.

In the third chapter, our resident Chocolate Sourcerer Greg will bring us closer to the source of our two ingredients: cocoa beans and cane sugar. You’ll read about types of cacao and the farms where they grow, about the processes the beans go through that determine their quality well before they arrive at a chocolate maker’s door, why a good, trusting relationship is at the heart of a sustainable sourcing philosophy, and how land and people impact the flavor of chocolate.

In the fourth chapter, Scaling Up (and Diving Deep), we’ll look at the mechanics of growing a chocolate-making process or company, the machines we’ve worked with as we’ve grown, and how those methods impact the chocolate on a microscopic scale.

Last, we’ll turn it over to our illustrious executive pastry chef, Lisa Vega. Lisa came to us from the Michelin-starred kitchen of Gary Danko, and has worked magic in our little 12 × 12-foot kitchen (we have put on the pounds to prove it). Since baking with two-ingredient, single-origin chocolate is sometimes quite different from what you may be used to, she’s developed a few unique strategies for working with it. This section bears the fruits of her experiments: her favorite recipes and some tips on what to look out for when you work with chocolate from cocoa beans that change harvest to harvest, and place to place.

In this book, you will learn all of our secrets until there are no more left to give. But where you start is up to you.

Chocolate maker Elman Cabrera inspects the quality of temper on finished bars.

Every bar is wrapped by a German bar-wrapping machine from 1955.

Roasted and partially cracked cocoa beans.

Hand-foiled chocolate bars, ready to be wrapped in paper.

THE MANY SHADES OF CRAFT CHOCOLATE

As you dive in to make your own chocolate, it helps to explore what’s already out there. You might find inspiration in what other makers are doing and learn about what you do and don’t like.

Chocolate makers who count themselves a part of the craft chocolate movement do so not because we all make chocolate the same way—we most definitely don’t—but because we’re passionate about the same thing: the natural flavor and possibilities of cocoa beans. We’re fascinated by the whispers of citrus and roasted nuts, the coffee notes, hints of leather, thyme, and caramelized berries. The scope of possible flavors seems endless. The core of our collective identity is that we are all making chocolate, not starting with chocolate and making something with it, like truffles and bonbons (which, in our view, is the separate and noble art of the chocolatier). We are chocolate makers, and we’re finding every possible way to do it.

The craft chocolate scene has grown incredibly diverse in style. Many of us, because we are generally so focused on the natural differences in cocoa beans, specialize in single-origin chocolate, made with beans from one specific place. Some of us maintain that focus but blend beans from different origins to create interesting and delicious flavor profiles—like mixing coffee beans to create a balanced espresso, or blending different wines to make a signature bottle.

We have different ways of celebrating the natural potential of those beans. Some of us are direct and to the point, and add only sugar to make what we sometimes refer to as two-ingredient chocolate. Others add extra cocoa butter for a silkier mouthfeel