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 helping to shift the entire chocolate industry, influencing how the largest chocolate companies approach, or at least market, their own products. This new era of chocolate is about hunting down the best raw material, respecting its sense of place, and sharing the untold stories of the farmers who make it possible.
As we trace the story of chocolate from its wild origins to its spread across the globe, we discover transformations and refinements along the way. There is romance in the idea that the current craft movement is about taking chocolate back into the realm of a hands-on, artisan aesthetic. Yet this movement is rather a leap forward in chocolate’s evolution that simply builds and improves upon its past. As you read the profiles within, you realize no two chocolate makers are alike and thus no two chocolate bars are alike. There is no right or wrong way to make chocolate, and I firmly believe there is little bad chocolate to be had. These personal styles and the strong opinions that guide them ensure an endless opportunity for new chocolate experiences.
Among the many talented experts that Megan introduces in this book is Ed Seguine (former researcher for Guittard and Mars and now an independent adviser). I once attended a panel discussion on the current state of craft chocolate, where he sat as an authoritative anchor of the industry. Regarding the very serious business of tasting fine chocolate, Ed reminded us of one simple truth: “If we aren’t having fun, we’re doing it wrong.” The best chocolate in the world is simply the one you enjoy most. With this book in hand, I encourage you to taste, taste, taste all that this movement has to offer. The best chocolate is always out there, waiting to be discovered.