I’m probably just late getting to the party, but I have only recently discovered how marvelously Dan Schreiber’s Salted Dark Milk Chocolate pairs with red wine!

Especially the less tannic, more fruit-forward, international style of wine that’s still dominant.  I first tried this “red wine” from Chile when it was on Piccadilly’s tasting last month and was immediately won over by this blend of Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Carignan, and Cabernet Sauvignon.  I am not usually a fan of the soft, easy-pleasy wines made from Merlot, but this but this one is quite a bit more serious while still being easy on the tongue and on the wallet.  It’s a Jorge Ordonez selection, so you’d expect it to be a great value, but unlike some of his Spanish wines, which now taste more like Vanilla Creamsicles from all the toasty American oak they marinate in, this wine spends a few months in French oak barrels.  Just enough to give it some backbone and smooth the edges of this concentrated and seriously ripe blend.  It’s a great value for $10 or so.

And yesterday, I had my first chance to try Dan’s new “Pious” bar, made with one ingredient: cacao beans.

(more…)

Let the games begin! After reading Porsha’s mold-breaking and mind-bending post on Chocolate-Covered Guanciale Toffee this spring, and Scott’s inspired attempt at a cocoa bacon this summer, I’m finally ready to get my hand in the game with my own cocoa-covered bacon. What tipped the scales for me was a jar of Panamanian cocoa nibs from our own amazing local chocolate artisan Dan Schreiber. (We have a clandestine meeting scheduled for tomorrow, where I will slip him some bacon in exchange for some chocolate.  The plan is for him to begin experimenting on some chocolate-covered bacon “bars.” Dan, I’ll be cleverly disguised with a fluorescent, pink pig on my head. Look out, Vosges!)

Here’s my current “master cure” for bacon:

for every 5 lbs. of pork belly
40 grams kosher salt
5 grams pink salt
60 grams panela sugar
¼ cup dark amber maple syrup

To complement the cocoa, I added the zest from 2 oranges, and generous pinches of ground allspice, cloves, and cinnamon to the cure. After 8 days in the cure, I rinsed and dried the belly, and then left it out in the fridge to develop a pellicle or tacky skin for the smoke to stick to. I hot-smoked it in the Bradley with maple and apple bisquettes until it reached an internal temperature of 150º F, basting it occasionally with a 50/50 mixture of the maple syrup and panela. This creates a nice, sticky coating for the finely-ground cocoa nibs, which I sprinkled all over as soon as the bacon was done.

I must confess that, for someone who loves bacon, I don’t eat a whole lot of it.  But it is absolutely irresistible when it comes hot out of the smoker – there is something indescribably delicious about well-seasoned pork fat just heated up to the point where it becomes meltingly tender.  Besides, all those rough ends need to be straightened out for the slicer, so off they come and down they go.

As I hoped, the sweetness of the cure and the basting balanced the bitter, almost “burnt” flavor of the unsweetened, roasted cocoa beans.  By coating the finished bacon with the cocoa instead of using it in the cure, the bacon has a clear, distinct cocoa flavor, but it’s not the first thing that you notice, it doesn’t overshadow the richness and sweetness of the pork.  The orange and spices are there, as hints in the background, complementing the cocoa, but overall this is pretty subtle, surprisingly sophisticated, for something as garish or gross-sounding as “chocolate bacon.”  It’s a refined, high-brow chocolate bacon, if such a thing is possible or even imaginable.  I’ll be giving out samples this week, and I hope people will post their reviews here!

Back at the beginning of this summer (wait! is summer over? where did it go? how did I miss its going!), I wrote about Dan Schreiber’s project to purchase fair trade cacao beans, roast them in his oven, grind them in a stone mill, and fabricate his own chocolate bars. Right here in Urbana. Yesterday, I had my first chance to taste some cocoa nibs (coarsely ground, roasted, hulled cocoa seeds or “beans”), as well as some dark chocolate bars from Panamanian and Peruvian sourced beans.

All I have to say is WOW! (For those of you who don’t speak the same IM or text message language, that stands for Wonder Of Wonders!) For early attempts, these are amazingly good. They are a little bit grittier and don’t quite have the same firm “snap” of the most refined Belgian chocolates, like Dolfin, but I actually appreciated that. Without detracting from the taste at all, they spoke of this chocolate’s hand-made origins. It reminded me of what John Ruskin (who initiated much of the Arts and Crafts movement in England in the 19th-century) wrote in The Seven Lamps of Architecture about how “hand-work might always be known from machine-work”: “the life and accent of the hand are everything,” he wrote, as opposed to “the smooth, diffused tranquility of heartless pains.”

Here were flavors I had never tasted in chocolate before–floral notes, rich, spicy undercurrents. Here was chocolate that was intriguing, that had depths, like a dense, diverse, tropical rainforest, as opposed to a monocultural plantation.

Right now, Dan is still making his chocolate in small batches, and samples are occasionally available at Café Paradiso. If you want to contact him about availability, follow the “local link” on the right or click here to go to his blog, artisanal thinking. As for me, the coffee that I made this morning and that I’m drinking right now, as I type this, was brewed with his cacao nibs, and I can definitely say that it is paradise to be alive, right here, right now.

If you thought my latest project, buying an antique churn and making my own butter, was bizarre and atavistic, get a load of this:

I just heard from someone here in town whose dream is to make his own chocolate, from raw cacao beans to finished bars. (OK, I doubted, but I’m beginning to believe. Just let me hear from someone in the greater Chambanoy area who is building a wood-fired bread oven, getting truffles to grow around their oak trees, or pressing their own olive oil in a granite mill, and I will believe that Jesus is coming back, that the Food Rapture is at hand, and that we can all die happy.)

Daniel Schreiber is a graduate student in computer science, but he admits he gets more pleasure from making things by hand and what he most wants to make is chocolate–chocolate as friendly to the earth, as fair to the people who grew it, and as delectable to the palate as it is possible to make it.

Chocolate comes from cacao “beans,” which are actually the seeds of a tropical tree.  The name of this genus, theoobroma, means “food of the gods,” and comes from Mayan and Aztec legends that the gods discovered cacao in a mountain and then shared this food with their people.

I don’t imagine he’ll be growing his own beans anytime soon, but he plans to work only with Fair Trade and Organic cacao beans, and then to roast, crack, winnow, refine, temper, and mold first the beans and then the cacao liqueur by hand, using a cacao mill and a chocolate mélangeur or mixer. Being a poor grad student, he can’t afford to lay out the $1000+ this equipment will cost, so he has set up a website to solicit donations, with the promise that you will get to be more or less involved in the project and get some dark chocolate at the end of it.

Is this cool or what?! What a great thing, to have people in our community dreaming such dreams. What a great use of the web, to connect with the people who can help make that dream a reality. Dan has only got a few days to go to secure the pledges he needs to get this project off the ground, so I urge you to check it out and support it if you can. As of the moment, his site is saying that the project is fully funded, but as someone else who put together a micro food operation on an even more microscopic budget, I know there are plenty of unanticipated expenses.

I’ve put my money where my mouth is and become a backer.  I’m already dreaming of a bacon bar or a barbecue bar that might be ready to unveil by next year’s Lar-B-Q, and offer up to the ancient Aztecs.  Daniel is planning to come to the Lar-B-Q tomorrow, so you can meet him and find out more about his project if you like.