Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution: The Origins, the Makers, and the Mind-Blowing Flavors

463 Pages·2017·42.65 MB·English

by  Megan Giller

To Marcus
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
About the Recipes in This Book
Chapter One: From The Bean
Water-Based Drinking Chocolate
Cocoa Tea
Cocoa Nib Ice Cream
Chapter Two: A Sense of Place
Single-Origin Dark Chocolate Truffles
Grown-Up Peanut Butter and Jelly Truffles
Single-Origin Brownie Flight
Champurrado Drinking Chocolate
Chapter Three: Tasting and Eating
Mayan Chocolate Mousse
Ceylon Tea Fudge Sauce
Burnt Caramel–Amaro Truffles
Honey-Carrot Purée
Chapter Four: Chocolate Snobs Don’t Eat Milk Chocolate (and
other myths, debunked)
Olive Oil–Sourdough Truffles
White Chocolate–Hazelnut Mousse in Pineapple Cups
Chapter Five: Labeling and the Art of Design
Balsamic Strawberries in Mini Chocolate Cups
Iced Spicy Drinking Chocolate
Truffle Torte
Chapter Six: Ethics for the Next Century
Devil Dogs
Chocolate and Churros
Budino di Cioccolato
Chapter Seven: The Future of Chocolate
Chocolate Sorbet
Pop Rocks Chocolate Bark
Triple Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Epilogue: Chocolate Revolution
Appendix
The Historey of the World...in Chocolate
My Top 50 Bean-to-Bar Makers in the United States
Farms, Co-Ops, and Companies
Glossary of Chocolate Words
Selected Bibliography
Thanks
Index
Additional Photography
Treat Your Taste Buds with More Books from Storey
Copyright
Share Your Experience!

F O R E W O R D
By Michael Laiskonis, Creative Director, Institute of
Culinary Education
MAKING CHOCOLATE IS EASY. Making good chocolate is
extremely difficult.
Most chocolate makers I know share this sentiment to some
degree. While a bar of chocolate is indeed the sum of its ingredients
and its manufacturing steps, the art and science of crafting that
bar also rely on a subtractive process, much like a sculptor
liberating beauty from an uncarved block.
The chocolate maker starts with an unroasted cocoa bean — an
edible diamond in-the-rough — paring away the superfluous to
reveal its essential nature. The resulting flavors are an expression
of the bean’s time, place, and heritage, and even a bit of the
maker’s personality. Compounding this already complex task is the
skill needed to preserve the taste of the bean — its bitter edges
intact — and then steer the process toward showing that bean’s
potential. It’s a skill that relies on experience, endless testing and
tasting, and some intuition. The more I learn about chocolate, the
more I realize how much I don’t know, which is both wonderfully
satisfying and endlessly frustrating. Alas, the word craft itself
implies an endless pursuit of elusive perfection.
This is the driving force behind craft chocolate, and this book is
the first attempt at chronicling this movement in real time. With a
connoisseur’s obsession and an investigator’s precision, Megan
Giller has created a road map for chocolate lovers to better
navigate this brave new world of small-scale producers, their
processes, and the delicious diversity of their products. Megan’s
own story is like many others — a happenstance tasting bore a life-
changing revelation: not all chocolate is the same. It can be
different. What separates craft chocolate from the industrial goes
far beyond mere aesthetics and into the philosophical. Craft
chocolate embraces the variability of an agricultural product that
has subtle differences from one origin to the next, and from
harvest to harvest. Each batch — each bar — embodies the cocoa
bean’s individuality.
As we consumers seek to broaden our palates with the flavors of
fine chocolate, we also care deeply about where it’s from, what’s in
it, and how it’s made. Insight, which this book offers in great depth,
enhances the tasting experience. Ethical sourcing and
transparency of the process, too, are increasingly important. One
might argue that this homegrown movement and its followers are