This video does a pretty good job:
The Science Behind Chocolate, How to Temper it, and Millionaire’s Shortbread : What’s Eating Dan?
This is a very non-exhaustive list that we’ve pulled together. If you notice your favorite spot missing or found a new gem in our town, please add it to the list!
In San Francisco:
In NYC:
In Japan
In Atlanta, Georgia:
In Birmingham, Alabama:
Internet places that offer delivery:
There’s a lot of options out there for different subscription boxes that will mail you chocolate. Below we list a few and talk about what makes them special.
Cococlectic
Link: https://cococlectic.com/pages/chocolate_maker
Cococlectic focuses on single origin 2 ingredient American Craft Chocolate. They’re entire purpose is to give visibility to small chocolate makers, so you’ll almost certainly get chocolate from folks you’ve never heard of (though every now and then they’ll throw a more popular name in there). Since these are relatively new chocolate makers, their chocolate might not always be amazing. We’ve definitely had a decent number of bars where folks felt “meh” about them. Overall though, it’s a great way to get ahead of the scene and see what new up and coming chocolate makers are up to.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Cococlectic also only focus on America craft chocolate, so you won’t see any makers from outside of the US. Likewise, they also only do 2-ingredient single origin, so if you’re all about that, that’s perfect, but it can certainly become monotonous.
Raaka First Nibs
Link: https://www.raakachocolate.com/pages/first-nibs
With this, you’ll often get 2 experimental bars from Raaka as well as one of their classics. If you’re not familiar with Raaka, they’re a Brooklyn based chocolate maker. They’re main schtick in my opinion is finding interesting flavor combos (e.g. piña colada, pink himalayan salt, coconut milk with maple). They’re chocolate is also really smooth, which I love. Overall and amazing maker. I would go with them if you’re interested in trying out fancy craft flavors with your chocolate.
The Meadow: Mystery Boxes and Chocolate Club
Mystery Box Link: https://themeadow.com/collections/mystery-boxes/products/mystery-chocolate-box
Chocolate Club Link: https://themeadow.com/collections/clubs/products/chocolate-club-worlds-tastiest-chocolate-delivered-straight-to-your-door
This is a tiny little shop in Manhattan, NY. They sell 3 things: Bitters, Salt, and Chocolate. I always pay them a visit whenever I go to NY, they’re relatively close to Square’s NY office. Overall, they stock a decent amount of chocolate from a lot of different makers. The owners are connoisseurs themselves, so their selection is curated based on their tastes. Overall, everything is pretty solid, and you would not be disappointed.
They seem to have two different types of subscriptions: A concept of a “Mystery Box” where they send you 5-10 different bars of their selection, and also a more general Chocolate Club monthly, where it looks like they send you 3 bars. I haven’t actually tried these subscriptions, but I love the store front so much that I imagine it’s pretty good.
The places listed above also sell bars online that they will deliver. In addition to that, Barcacao has a nice selection of makers who let you purchase bars directly from them, or also retailers in LA and SF that have online stores that you can purchase from:
The percentage defines how much cocoa mass (derived from cocoa beans) is in the chocolate.
Well, sort of. It could be cocoa nibs and any added cocoa butter. For example, a 75% dark chocolate can be, but not strictly limited to, 75% cocoa nibs + 25% sugar or 70% cocoa nibs + 5% cocoa butter + 25% sugar. This depends on the chocolate maker, and could also depends on the laws of the country/region that the chocolate was manufactured in.
Unfortunately, the word “Dark” is meaningless. Most people tend to use the word “dark” to mean “greater than 50%”, but as we often say in the chocolate club, “there’s no chocolate police”
However, unlike the word “dark”, the FDA actually has strict guidelines of what is necessary to have something be called “milk chocolate.”
Probably the most relevant part:
Milk chocolate contains not less than 10 percent by weight of chocolate liquor complying with the requirements of 163.111 as calculated by subtracting from the weight of the chocolate liquor used the weight of cacao fat therein and the weights of alkali, neutralizing and seasoning ingredients, multiplying the remainder by 2.2, dividing the result by the weight of the finished milk chocolate, and multiplying the quotient by 100. The finished milk chocolate contains not less than 3.39 percent by weight of milkfat and not less than 12 percent by weight of total milk solids based on those dairy ingredients specified in paragraph (b)(4) of this section, exclusive of any added sweetener or other dairy-derived ingredient that is added beyond that amount that is normally present in the specified dairy ingredient.
Some good additional info in this video:
Food Theory: Chocolate is a LIE!
TLDR: white chocolate is fat and sugar.
The long: To understand white chocolate, you must first understand a bit about the composition of cocoa beans; the main ingredient in chocolate. Cocoa beans are roughly composed of 50% fat, and 50% solid particles. The fat of a cocoa bean is often referred to as “cocoa butter.” During the chocolate making process, the beans are crushed, releasing and often melting cocoa butter while refining the solid particles. This liquidy state is what we call cocoa liquor. To extract cocoa butter, people often press the cocoa liquor through a cheese cloth, leaving behind the solid particles (more commonly referred to as cocoa powder).
Normally, chocolate is cocoa liquor and sugar. So what’s white chocolate? Well, in its simplest form, it’s just cocoa butter and sugar.
As you can imagine, this by itself is not super appealing, so most folks tend to add things e.g. milk, flavorings, infusions, etc…
If you wanted to get super technical, FDA also has a suggested guideline of when to use the term “white” chocolate, though they don’t currently enforce it in the same way that they enforce the usage of the term “milk chocolate.” From the guidelines:
White chocolate is the solid or semiplastic food prepared by mixing and grinding cocoa butter with one or more of the optional dairy ingredients listed in 21 CFR 163.124(b)(2) (see question 3 below) and one or more optional nutritive carbohydrate sweeteners. It contains a minimum of 20 percent cocoa butter, a minimum of 14 percent of total milk solids, a minimum of 3.5 percent milkfat, and a maximum of 55 percent nutritive carbohydrate sweeteners. (21 CFR 163.124)
Conching is one of the many processes involved in creating chocolate.
Cocoa beans are composed of roughly 50% fat and 50% solid particles. Part of making chocolate is crushing cocoa beans such that the solid particles are so small, that they’re just swimming around in a pool of fat. The act of crushing the beans is called refining. The fats in cocoa beans melt at relatively low temperatures, so this process creates what appears to be a liquid which we endearingly call cocoa liquor. The process of conching is the process of agitating and exposing cocoa liquor to the air. This causes volatile flavors to evaporate and oxidizes the chocolate to some extent, which also affects the flavor. Conching and refining are often done at the same time, though not necessarily. Checkout the Wikipedia page for conching for more details.
When cocoa beans are fermented, they end up swimming in a pile of their own juices and ascetic acid. In order to stop fermentation, they need to be put out to dry, and there’s lots of different ways to do that. On dry sunny places, it’s common to just lay out the beans on concrete or wooden planks and let the sun do the job. Other places will lay out beans on top of a wire rack to circulate more airflow, some put them inside sheds if it rains often, others sometimes use powerful air blowers which could be heated. Lots of different ways to do it. Usually depends on the farmer and how creative they want to be as well as the region and what constraints they have given the climate.
Type V crystal magic. (too lazy to fill out for now)
Here, watch this instead:
Chocolate (ft. Sohla El-Waylly) : Basics with Babish
None of us here are a doctor, so please don’t take our advice and instead talk to your personal physician to fully understand the impact of your diet.
That said, it’s absolutely true that chocolate contains trace amounts of lead and cadmium. These are absorbed from the soil wherever cacao is grown, and get distributed throughout the plant’s system, including stem, leaves, fruit, and seeds (in this case, cacao seeds, i.e. cocoa beans).
Because of this, the amount of cadmium and led varies dramatically between cacao from different regions. If you usually get single origin bars, each origin will likely have very different levels of each.
For most commodity (and some craft) chocolate bars, the good folks at asyousow.org have compiled a table of the tested levels of both cadmium and led. You can find that here:
https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcement/toxic-chocolate
Unfortunately, we’re unaware of a similar resource for most small batch craft chocolate makers, but if you find one, let us know!
Oh boy, there’s so much speculation here, and not that much certainty. And to be quite honest, I keep re-learning this stuff over and over because I end up forgetting it after a while. Still, we can share the resources we’ve personally found useful and enlightening which can hopefully help shed light on the history of chocolate. For starters, this video does a really good job at giving an overview of what we know today:
And if you wanted more nitty gritty, the video’s author was kind enough to share their bibliography, which is rather intensive (and a little overwhelming!)
Chocolate: Food of the Gods - Blibiography
The one book that I’ve read which seemed to be fairly accurate and pretty enlightening was The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D Coe and Michael D. Coe.
The True History of Chocolate 3e
And that’s all we got so far. If you have more info you’d like to share, let us know and we’ll add it here!