Patric Chocolate Winners

The following very lucky people will be getting their Patric Chocolate orders for free:

• Stephanie B.
• Aimea S.
• Lynette P.

They won a combined total of $177.81 worth of Patric Chocolate!

Read the rest of this interview...

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Patric Chocolate - Virtual Chocolate Factory Tour

Join me on a tour of Patric Chocolate. Chocolate maker Alan McClure takes us step-by-step through the process of making chocolate from bean to bar! Note: At Alan's request, there are a few parts of this interview that do not have photos.

Before we start the tour, I want to remind you that Alan is offering Food Interviews readers a great coupon and a chance to win up to $100 worth of fine chocolate! Get the contest and coupon details here.

Smell that cacao - our tour starts now!

Me and Alan McClure at the beginning of the chocolate factory tour.

This is the place that my wife and I call “The Fac”, but actually, I tend to say it’s a workshop. A factory sort of hints at something much larger, much more substantial - like what the Big H would have, for example. What I do here is almost all done either by hand or is manual in some way, shape, or form. There are a couple of machines that I use, but they both require me to be there changing settings and monitoring things.

Bags of cacao

This is where everything starts, in the cacao-storage area. You’re actually here at a good time because I just got this cacao this past week. My storage area and the cleaning area were empty, I was out of cacao. Now I have about a metric ton, 2200 lbs of cacao. It’s from a single-estate in Madagascar.

How much chocolate can you make from this pile of cacao?

Each bag is about 150 pounds and makes approximately 100 pounds of chocolate, maybe a little more. We have 16 bags here or 32 batches, 1600 pounds of chocolate.

Cacao beans

This is cacao as it comes in. You’ll see that on some of these beans, the shells have started to come off or they’re broken or they’re double beans. Or sometimes, there is external mold on it.

Alan hand sorts every single bean to find problems.

There are problems with just using all of this material in chocolate. The double beans weren’t able to be dried properly because they were stuck together. The ones that are broken, there are potential mold issues internally because they’ve been broken apart. If I see mold, I know that inside it doesn’t taste quite right, so I don’t want to use that. Also, little shriveled beans are not going to taste right.

Other things that get thrown out are flat beans, germinated beans. The germ, or radical, is really hard and it pokes through the end in order to start growing a little sapling. Once cacao starts to germinate, the internal chemistry starts changing, just like with any seed. Again, it just doesn’t taste quite right after the fact. So, I remove germinated beans.
Really, what I want going into my chocolate are beans that are virtually perfect. I can’t cut open every single one and still roast them properly and it would take way too much time. If I could, I would, because you can tell things by looking inside too, to see if it was fermented and dried properly.

Do you manually sort through all these beans?

Exactly. By hand.

The cacao bean cleaning station

Here’s the cleaning station. A couple scoops go out on a screen . Everything that’s small falls right through - everything else is spread out and picked out manually. It gets rejected and the rejects are in those bags over there. So, all the cacao that gets cleaned goes into here.

Do other chocolate companies go through a similar process of hand sorting the cacao?

I don’t know what the other smaller companies are doing. I know some of what they do. Steve De Vries, he does stuff by hand, too. But the larger companies, do have machines that do it and what the machines do is they sift things automatically, so it gets rid of the small material, but then all of the large material stays on the top. They have vacuums that suck off leaves, feathers, or little pieces of rope. They have magnets to get rid of nails or anything like that and destoners to remove anything that’s much more dense than a cacao bean.. But, they still end up with germinated beans, cracked beans, double beans, anything like that that I get rid of.

It could theoretically be possible to have, like they do with cars, a very expensive mechanized system that has cameras and the cameras are trained somehow, programmed, to be able to figure out if each bean looks right and then have a little robotic hand come in here and pull it out. I doubt it’s going to happen because there are an awful lot of beans that go through one of those systems - millions and millions a day for those large companies. Whereas, I’m making one to two batches of chocolate a week.

Cacao shells

These bags over here, these are rejected cacao.

Rejected beans just gets used as fertilizer. I actually haven’t gotten rid of my reject beans. I don’t exactly know what I’m going to do with them. I’ve actually tried contacting a local farmer to pick them up and compost them and he says he will.

Alan continues the tour with his shelf of samples.

This is cacao that I bought back in 2005-2006 when I was still trying to figure out all the different origins and what they tasted like. I was making little test batches. This is more recent sample that I’ve gotten--just the other day, it's from Vanuatu, right near Papua New Guinea.

Alan smelling the beans

It smells different than the Madagascar, actually. It’s less acidic and it has an interesting, slightly smoky quality to it. It almost reminds me of smoked bacon or something like that, which isn’t something you’d normally associate with chocolate and probably isn’t a good thing, but we’ll see; it would normally be considered smoky or hammy, and a fault.

This [points to another sample bag] is from Hawaii - basically the only place in the U.S. where you can grow cacao. There’s not much of a scent any more since it has been sitting open, but when I first opened it, it really reminded me of like a floral, honey aroma. It smelled really good. There’s other stuff, Cuyagua, which is in Venezuela, one of the places I’ve visited. This is from Chiapas, southern Mexico. Most of what I get is junk—in fact, almost all of it.

Why are some beans so much better than others?

There are all kinds of differences and reasons for them and it’s really difficult to wrap your mind around the complexity that is cacao quality. To give you an idea, there are not really such things as varieties of cacao. There are clones, which is the closest things we have to varieties, which have been indexed and planted by certain scientific organizations like CIRAD or a center in Trinidad for example.

We’re still in the middle-ages in cacao. You’ve had people seriously thinking about wine for a very long time and growing it right in their backyard. Whereas right here, it’s totally different. It’s a raw product, It’s from another country, most of the time. It’s a relatively recent event that people are thinking about excellent quality and chocolate in the same sentence. So, it’s moving in the right direction. But, we’re probably hundreds of years from where grapes are right now, which is kind of infuriating for chocolate-makers, because we wish we could just pick up the phone and ask for excellent cacao grown under such and such conditions and fermented and dried in a specific way. At this point, it’s not really happening, and we have to be very involved.

There are a few companies trying to do some interesting things and move quality forward. Domori in Italy, they have a relationship with a company called Cacao San Jose which has an estate in Venezuela. They are trying to grow certain clones and make chocolate only out of those clones. They’re doing it at a relatively small scale at this point, thought the company is fairly big compared to Patric Chocolate. Who knows, hopefully that type of thing will catch on. But, there are also drawbacks to doing something like that and those drawbacks are diseases because we still don’t understand cacao diseases. You have diseases that will go through certain countries and can wipe out their cacao populations. So, all of the farmers that were growing cacao, are not growing cacao anymore.

Then you have terroir, the land itself, the climate right there, the microorganisms in that particular place. Because once you’ve harvested the cacao, then you need to ferment it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Lambic. It’s a Belgian style of beer. Everything that ferments the wort is right there in that particular brewery - on the walls, in the vats, on the floor, in the air. Every brewery has slightly different microorganisms. If you move out of that area to another area, then the microorganisms are even more different, and so on and so forth. In Madagascar, part of what gives the cacao this quality is in large part the yeast and the bacteria that are right there. You take the same cacao genetically to another place, process it the same exact way, it will not taste the same. That’s one of the exciting things, also, about cacao - that there’s so much that is left to be understood regarding the interaction of cacao and microorganisms—the fermentation.

So on one hand, it seems like a depressing thing - we don’t understand anything, no one knows anything, we’re in the stone ages. On the other hand, there’s so much still left to learn that you can be hopeful that things are going to get better for sure because people are getting better at understanding the complexity of cacao.

Alan takes cleaning seriously.

You can photograph this because, ask my wife, I am an authoritarian when it comes to hand washing. I’m always on everyone’s case, “Did you wash your hands?” I try to be nice about it. Nothing is ever 100% perfect, but you want it to be clean.

The oven

This is room number two. This is where we roast the cacao. It’s just a commercial gas heated convection oven. Nothing especially chocolatey about it, but it roasts well, so it’s what I use.

Oven thermometers

You’ll see all the thermometers numbered. Each tray of cacao gets a thermometer during the roast and then every five minutes, I write down the temperature and then I plug that into Excel so I get a roasting curve. I know exactly what every roast is like in terms of numbers but also I can compare the roasting curve of two different batches. If there’s a slightly different flavor, I want to understand exactly where that slightly different flavor is coming from, then I compare the two. I can see, “Okay, this one got up to heat much more quickly than the other one did.” That allows me during the next roast to know, say, in the beginning I need to be a little more careful and keep things a little cooler or if I want it getting up to heat more quickly, etc., etc.

How long does it roast for?

Generally, 40-50 minutes, in that range. Typically between 230 and 270 degrees is a pretty good range, but different chocolate makers use different times and temperatures

When the cacao comes out of there, I crack it and sift it to separate different sizes of material. This is another very manual part of the process. I’m extremely excited to be getting a new machine for this soon because this is the biggest pain in the ass in the whole place and I don’t mind saying so. When I first designed my cracker/sifter setup, I knew it would work, I knew it would be time-consuming, but I didn’t know it would be as time-consuming as it ended up being. I just knew I wanted to get in here and make chocolate and I didn’t have $50,000 to spend on a refurbished, vintage winnower, let alone the hundreds of thousands to spend on a new, fairly small but still gigantic winnower, probably not the space either.

What I did was I used these little crackers which are used for whole-grain malt, for beer-making. In fact, the company’s called Crankandstein. Initially, it was made for cracking barley, but I had them do a custom one that was adjustable so I could make the gaps larger and smaller and crack the cacao and hand-sift it.

Screens

There are three different sizes of screens. Everything is screened through them. The large stuff is re-cracked. It takes hours to go through just one batch and that’s only separating the cacao into three different sizes.

Then, it has to be winnowed using a machine, which I also built. It’s functional, though extremely slow also. Again, I wanted to get in and make chocolate, but I didn’t have the money for an expensive machine so I built this thing.

When you have the cacao, you have the internal part and the external part. The external part is what you just saw, I call it the shell, though it is actually the seed coat. It’s kind of light. The internal part is heavier and denser, it's called the nib.

It’s like mixing rocks and feathers together and then trying to separate them again. The easiest way to separate rocks and feathers is air. That’s what the winnower does. Air blows up and the vacuum sucks that through, the shell moves up and the nibs fall straight through into a bucket below.

Chocolate nibs

You’ll see different sizes of nibs. So you see the stuff on top is small and the stuff around is a little bit larger. The stuff at the very bottom is larger still. So those are the three different sizes that have been winnowed. You’ll see a little piece of shell here and there, but basically it has all been removed. It really starts smelling like chocolate at this point. During roasting, it kind of starts but a lot of the volatile acids are coming off the roast too, so you smell a heavy vinegar smell during the roast, actually.

It does take pretty much all day long to do both of these [cracking and winnowing] for one batch of chocolate. Whereas, with an automatic winnower for that amount of cacao, we’re talking an hour - max.

The next step is the refiner. It has two large granite rollers and a thick granite base. It’s a 600 pound machine, or something like that. I turn these infrared heaters on then, and I start adding nibs to it. Then, the heat and the friction through crushing just turn the nib into a liquid.

Once all the nibs are added, it's nice and liquidy and not very viscous and I start adding the sugar. So for my 70% chocolate, 30% of the weight of the chocolate is going to be the sugar and 70% is the nib. This grinding/refining/conching process takes about fours days. The particles sizes of the cacao and sugar are gradually reduced and the flavor and texture improve and refine as well. Without this part of the process, the texture of the chocolate would be granular and almost gritty.

Aging blocks of chocolate

After four days, when the chocolate’s done, it gets molded into ten to twelve pound blocks. I take those blocks out to another room where they’re aged.

You’ll notice that the blocks look odd. When you take molten chocolate and you put it in a container and you let it solidify of its own volition, let’s say, this is what happens. It looks like this. What that is, is that in each of these circles, there’s a crystal that forms in the center and it builds outward. So every one of those is actually a huge crystalline piece of chocolate and what happens is, you’ll get some really interesting patterns and colors. But, as soon as you melt that back down again, it’s just normal liquid chocolate.

What you see here is simply cocoa butter, the way natural cocoa butter crystallizes when left to its own devices. Its not mold, it’s not a disease. I had someone in here once where I explained all of this to her and then she said, “But is it okay to eat?” I said, “It’s just like water turning into ice.” It’s still okay to drink the water after the ice is melted. It’s just like that. So, this chocolate after it's done being aged, I melt it back down and then it's molded into bars, the crystallization is controlled and so what you get is a nice shiny looking bar instead of this. This would be crumbly, like you can kind of crumble it apart and it looks like little marbles.

Do these blocks taste the same as the bars?

It doesn’t melt the same in your mouth. Because the way chocolate melts impacts the flavor of the chocolate, it doesn’t taste quite the same, but it has the same chemical compounds in it that tempered chocolate has. It actually takes a little longer for this to melt in your mouth and it melts less evenly, but once you melt it back down and temper it, then it melts the right way.

Alan points out the tempering machine

This is the tempering machine. It's the most expensive piece of machinery in here. . This is how it came, just like this; I didn’t have to make any modifications. After the chocolate’s aged, then it comes back in here and gets melted down in this machine.

Mmmm...melted chocolate

I just put in some aged blocks to melt down, as you can see. That’s about 120 pounds of chocolate in there. You would need considerably more than 120 pounds to submerge yourself!

Do you ever just dip your finger in there?

I try not to.

The next step is that the melted chocolate gets deposited into these molds here.

Chocolate molds

When you have molds, you can’t deposit warm chocolate in cold molds or you have shock which causes a bad appearance. What happens is that the surface of the bar looks all squirrelly and there are lines you can kind of see where the chocolate first touched the mold and started crystallizing right away. So, what you have to do is heat it up.

I have a heat gun hooked up to a temperature controller. I dial up the temperature and it turns the heat gun on and off for whatever temperature. You also can’t heat them too much or else it will take the chocolate completely out of temper and melt all the crystals and you end up with a whole other set of problems. There’s a very fine line that’s perfect.

The agitator

After I deposit the chocolate into a mold, I throw it on this, which is a great machine. It’s a vibrating table. Chocolate is a weird thing. It has different properties of viscosity to it. There’s actually something called a yield value where even very warm chocolate will sometimes tend not to spread out unless you sort of tap what it’s in. If you just gently tap it, it’ll just sort of spread out.

This kind of takes that same principle. You can deposit chocolate right down the middle of the mold and put the mold on a tray , and it’s not really spreading out that easily, but as soon as you put it on the vibrating table , it just spreads it right out and any of the bubbles that get caught in the corner, they kind of get worked out. That’s the way that works.

The next step is cooling. I built my own cooling cabinets. Box fans blow air through filters from either side to cool the bars. Have you ever turned off the lights and shined a flashlight through a dark room and seen all the stuff that’s floating through it? Even with this filtration system and great cleanliness, that stuff’s all over the place. I don’t want that getting on my bars. So what this does is create positive pressure in here and as the air blows across the bars, the only place for it to go is out, so as I bring bars in, I put them in. It’s a great system and inexpensive.

What large companies use are cooling tunnels that are like 60 feet long and maybe $200,000 or more t. There is one company making cooling cabinets that hold two-thirds what this one holds and they are $2,500. You can imagine this did not cost me $2,500 to build. But again, it works.

No golden ticket needed for this tour, but there sure are a lot of golden bars.

These are our wrapped bars that I just wrapped yesterday. So you can see, they are pretty uniform, they’re pretty even. It’s very hard with foil to get things to look like that. It’s easy to make them look all crinkly. That’s sort of the problem with having someone wrap the bars because they can look pretty bad and you don’t want someone paying six dollars for a bar, seeing this box, “Oh that looks nice,” and they open it up and it’s like this golden turd coming out.

Alan even stamps the boxes himself.

Do you print the boxes yourself too? Or do you have that done somewhere else?

They’re stamped. The backs and fronts are stamped by hand here.

Of course.

As I grow, I’m going to have the stamped part printed onto the box, for sure. I have the designs all ready. I knew when I was starting out, “Okay, I’m going to have different products but I don’t know exactly what those will be. I know what one will be so I can get those boxes printed and get others printed as we go along and spend a lot more money. Or get one sort of more generic box and hand stamp it as we go along, and save a lot of money." For a start-up, I went with saving the money.

So you’re just stamping this right here?

Right. Exactly. Then the little sticker there that says 70%, and then the stamps on the back. The 67% also needs a sticker on the back. It’s a little more involved because the ingredients have cocoa butter, too, whereas the 70% doesn’t. But again, the cocoa butter I press right here. This isn’t unique because Shawn Askinosie does that, too. But it is quite rare. Most people just buy their cocoa butter. It’s just another part of the issue of the consistency. If you’re pressing your own cocoa butter, you understand it.

From the start of your process from that bag of beans to the end, how long does it take you?

Cleaning’s done in one day, roasting the next, and winnowing on the third day. I could, theoretically, do all three of those in one day but it would be a very long day and I wouldn’t be able to do it by myself. I’ve got so many other things I have to take care of. I have people placing orders, I have orders I have to ship out, I’m dealing with vendors, I’m ordering new things, and I have to deal with that. And there’s accounting that I have to do also, so I really don’t have the time to do all that in one day so it’s split up over three days. Then, the refining is started on another day and goes for four days.

In a normal week, refining is started on Monday. Monday and Tuesday I would mold bars (if need be, Wednesday also). Wednesday, the cacao’s cleaned (not by me, though, if I’m molding bars). Thursday, I roast. I always do the roasting and so far, I always do the molding, Friday is winnowing and I’m also emptying the refiner to blocks. Those blocks get aged. That’s kind of how the week breaks down. And then the dishes - every day, there’s dishes or something.

Alan's extensive library of chocolate books

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

That’s a tough one. I respect a lot of people. I love Jeffrey Steingarten's writing. Have you read anything by him? I think he’s a brilliant food writer. He has a strong personality so I’m not sure I’d get very far in an interview with him.

There’s a guy that just died, where’s the book? Bartley, he just died. The amount of knowledge that went to the grave with this guy - it’s actually pretty sad. What he was working on was so detailed and terse, this book right here. People weren’t really taking his research and adding on to it. It was sort of like, “This guy’s doing that and we’ll let him do his thing.” But, it’s just genius stuff. But I guess I can’t interview that person either. So, I don’t know. That’s a tough question. I don’t know if that’s a very good answer. There are so many people I’d love to talk to.

People are always naming dead people. I think half the people that I interview say Julia Child.

That’s the thing, so many of the people who were groundbreaking in terms of writing about chocolate, they’re dead.

Would you want to write about chocolate some day?

I’m always writing on the blog. I haven’t been publishing a lot lately because I’ve been working on a really long piece that, taking your advice, I’ll just split up into like 20 different segments; about the beginning of fermentation. Where does fermentation even come from? Because people assume that the Maya invented fermentation and, often, even academics will say that the Maya fermented. But even in academic papers, I’ve never seen anything that proves that point. And on top of that, the one thing that we know for sure about the Maya is that they used cacao as money.

If you are not an academic and you’re a chocolate maker and you have your hands in cacao, you’ll know that unfermented cacao is very hard, is not brittle at all. You could easily carry that around everywhere. But fermented and dried cacao is very brittle and if you really wanted to carry around cacao as currency, would it make more sense to carry around something that broke easily whenever you just move or something very solid and not easily broken? So, that’s one of the things that I’m writing about now.

Hopefully, I’ll look back over my blog at some point and say, “Wow, if I could pull all this together, that would equal a book.” Then I’ll say, “Why don’t I do that?” So that’s kind of my goal at this point. I’m not focusing on writing the book, I’m focusing writing strong pieces for the blog that I can later pull together into something interesting for chocolate makers or chocolate lovers or whatever. Hopefully the market will continue to expand for fine chocolate and you’ll get people that are the same types of people that are crazy about home brewing, they’ll be crazy about home chocolate making.

Read the rest of this interview...

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Patric Chocolate - Meet Chocolate Maker Alan McClure

Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate

You can't really know how special Patric Chocolate is until you taste it. However, after you read about owner Alan McClure's passion for chocolate and the care he personally takes with every step of the chocolate making process, I think you'll have a pretty good idea.

I've devoted two posts to Patric Chocolate. In this post, you'll learn all about Alan and the history of Patric Chocolate. In the second post, you will get to join me for a tour of the chocolate factory! You'll see where and how Patric Chocolate is made!

To make the experience a little sweeter, Alan is offering Food Interviews readers a chance to win up to $100 worth of fine chocolate! Every 10th person who places an order on the Patric Chocolate online store using coupon code 3FLMDE will get their entire order for free! That’s 1 in 10 odds of getting free chocolate!

In addition to the chance to win, your code also gets you 10% off of any purchase (including any already reduced items) and two additional complimentary chocolate bars on any purchases over $50.

The fine print: The contest and coupon code is good only through midnight (CST) on Wednesday, November 12, 2008. The “1 in 10” free chocolate prize applies only up to the first $100 of any order. You’ll be asked to pay at the time of purchase. However, on Thursday, Nov. 13, I’ll announce who the winners are and if you win, up to $100 will be refunded to you.

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How did you start Patric Chocolate?

One thing that has always been a constant in my life is that I’ve always liked food. I wouldn’t say that all the time that it was gourmet food or fine food or even decent food necessarily, but I enjoyed the process of eating. As I got older and started learning more and having food from different countries, I started to appreciate diversity in food and then I’d start cooking more and more. I kind of thought about being a chef, but that falls into one of those things that I was like, “I don’t know if I want to do that.”

I lived in France for a year and I tracked down some really good chocolate while I was there. I actively tracked it down because I knew I wouldn’t be there forever. I got back here and I couldn’t find it and so I said, “Maybe I can make it. I can cook. I can bake bread or whatever. How hard can it be to make chocolate?” Little did I know. But when I first started, I didn’t know that. I just bought some small table-top machinery , which seemed expensive at the time, but in reality, it was nothing compared to the cost of my current machinery, and I just started experimenting. As I did that, I first got my taste of the bottomless void of potential chocolate knowledge.

I’m sure people in other fields say the same thing about what it is that they enjoy doing. But I don’t know. I’ve just never come across anything like this before where just no matter what aspect of the process you look at, it just seems infinitely complicated.

How much time went by between when you got interested in chocolate and when you sold your first bar?

I got interested in chocolate in 2004. In 2005, I first experimented with Mexican chocolate. I got some cacao beans online and I roasted them in a skillet and then winnowed them by hand one by one - I got blisters on my thumbs and fingers. Then I transferred that to a food processor. That was my first experience making chocolate. I used it in mole.

That was my goal, traditional mole. Toast the seeds and the spices and the chilies and grind them as I did. It was great.

Then after that, that’s when I really started entertaining the idea of fine chocolate, bar chocolate, and that was still in 2005. In early 2006 was really when I first was able to make something that was on its way to being fine chocolate. 2006 was also when I started the company on paper. So there were four months after I had first made something that I considered to be on its way to being fine chocolate where I was like, “Should I do this? Should I not do this? Do I know anything? Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

This is when I got a hold of Steve De Vries (from De Vries Chocolate), who was already doing things and I told him , “I want to try your chocolate.” He wasn’t really selling it yet, and he told me, “Well, yeah, I only sell it here.” I said, “Oh, tell me where, I’ll have my dad pick it up. He lives in Denver.” Then he just said, “Oh, I’ll just send you some.” Additionally, Steve asked me what I had read so far I was like, “I don’t know. Chocolate Alchemy, and a couple of industry manuals.” So, he said “Okay, write these down.” So, I wrote down five books that he recommended. They are all old books from the early 1900’s, late 1800’s. But, I tracked them down on a used book website.

Anyway, so I bought those books a couple of days after that--got them and read them a couple of times and then I called him back. It was in a space of three weeks or so. I told him, “So, I got the books and I read the books.”

He could hardly believe it. He said, “I’ve recommended those books to a lot of people and no one’s ever read them.” So I asked him, “What else you got? I found this too, and this too.” “Those are good,” he said.

So, I just kept reading and then the summer of that year, 2006, I went to Mexico. I just felt, “I need to go somewhere and see cacao being grown and talk to farmers and see it fermented and see it dried.” If you’re going to be a chocolate maker or you think you might want to be, I feel you’ve just got to do that. It’s got to be an experience that you have. There’s so much that’s hard to understand without having that experience.

That was in the summer. About a year later, in 2007, I finally sold my first bar.


What’s your goal for the future of the company?

I don’t know. I’m just playing it by ear. I’m just trying to stay connected to every part of the company and try to really feel, “Am I going in the right direction? Do I need to slow down?” Because above all is the issue of quality, and if you feel like there’s risk of it deteriorating, then there’s a problem. So then it’s like, “Okay, can I keep this quality and change a few things and then do what I was thinking about doing? Is that possible or not?” I haven’t even come to that point. I feel like that question is way down the line for me.

Do you believe that it’s better to be smaller?

I made one metric ton of chocolate last year. Even the bigger guys, like Amano (and when I say bigger, I mean bigger than me, but still small), I don’t know what they made, but we’re talking two metric tons, maybe five metric tons, maybe more, but not 4,000 metric tons like some companies that are considered moderately sized

I just feel like there’s room for different companies to be doing different things and we should just be clear about what it is we’re doing so that people can know and see what’s going on. So, that kind of bugs me. I don’t expect every company to be so transparent that they tell you everything. It’s not going to happen, and I certainly won’t tell you everything either. It just feels like we need to be more open and honest with people as companies and with each other as companies as well.

I believe that there’s a limited amount of excellent quality cacao in the world. It’s limited and you can not make 4,000 metric tons of chocolate and have it all be of excellent quality - even if you have the expertise. When a certain Bay-area-based chocolate company first started up, their chocolate, from many reports, was excellent. Over time, though, some people thought that it decreased in quality . The reason is, their capacity increased over time. It wasn’t that they forgot how to make good chocolate or they didn’t care anymore, it’s simply that there’s a limited supply of what I would say is fine cacao. They needed to start bringing in other stuff that kind of bulked up the chocolate that they were making and it wasn’t necessarily as flavorful. That’s what happens.

Cacao

As people have more interest in quality cacao, do you think there will be more grown?

I hope so. It’s possible. That’s tied into something else that I’m always telling people, which is everyone is very concerned about fair trade, and I understand why. The reasons why people are concerned about fair trade are good reasons to be concerned, but when you start talking about fine chocolate, to give you an idea, I paid more than twice fair trade price for my cacao - more than twice! That is often the case. Why? Because when we’re selling products for six, seven, eight, ten dollars a bar, we can pay more for excellent quality cacao, it drives the price up because there’s only a limited amount. It’s just supply and demand right there.

The fact that this is twice fair trade price tells you something about where the demand is going. But, what’s not happening is that people aren’t growing more excellent quality cacao quickly enough to keep the price stable. They could be, but they’re not.

One of the things that I think is negative about fair trade is the fact that it gives people a feeling like that’s the best thing that could be done for farmers, when in reality if we wanted farmers to make even more money, we would say, “Grow better cacao.” Think about it in terms of some other crop. Are you going to tell a farmer growing bad apples that the best way to make more money is to become fair trade farmers, or are you going to say, "Grow better apples and you’ll make more money?" So again, I don’t want to attack fair trade. I think that they have a role to play; I think that in some cases, especially like the Ivory Coast where there’s been child slavery, it’s especially important. But I think in most cases, consumers who care about chocolate need to start buying better chocolate.

Buy chocolate that tastes better. If you buy chocolate that tastes better, it’s from better cacao. That cacao is bought for a higher price; the farmers are making more money. There are very few cases where that does not work out exactly like that. But there are cases where fair trade prices are paid and farmers don’t make anything more than commodity cacao prices.

What about organic?

This cacao right there is organic, by the way. That’s the thing, it doesn’t say that on my box and that’s a whole other issue. I have some retailers in other countries now who are wanting to carry my chocolate. Well as soon as I put organic on the box, I get into a whole other tangled mess because organic rules and regulations in the EU, for example, are not the same as they are in the States.

I’ve looked into it - I’ve spent a lot of time, and it’s not worth it right now because most people buying this chocolate are going to be fine with it not saying organic on the front, even though the cacao is organic. I feel like people should know that it just doesn’t make sense. It would be expensive for me with little return.

That’s one of the frustrating things (not to go on a rant here) about being a small company. Large companies can blow through that stuff. They have a team of lawyers and they have all the money possible to make that happen. Small companies don’t. It actually is kind of a burden, these new rules and regulations, though again I understand why they exist. But, they are kind of a burden on small companies just for doing what they would like to do. I don’t have sleepless nights about it.

Are you able to learn from other chocolate companies, or it a very competitive industry?

It’s a little bit of a mix. At the end of June in New York, there’s a Fancy Food Show. I wasn’t going to go because I had something scheduled in St. Louis at the Kitchen Conservatory and they called me the day before and said they only had five people signed up and they were canceling it. For a moment I was like, “Oh man,” then I thought, “Wait a minute. Fancy Food Show!” So I got a ticket with my frequent flyer miles, went up there, stayed with a friend, and I was glad that I did that because Steve De Vries was up there, Art was there, Shawn Askinosie, the guys from Taza, even the TCHO people. Everyone was there. I was like, “Okay. Perfect opportunity for us to finally meet face to face and be nice to each other and we don’t have to be dicks to each other. We can be cool and helpful.” That’s what happened, thankfully.

It was the start of a small artisan, chocolate organization in the United States. It’s something we’ve talked about and we’ve been emailing each other back and forth. I think there’s still a feeling of competitiveness. Though from the beginning I’ve said, "There are seven of us. Seriously, we’re not competitors with each other, there’s seven. There are 50 states, 270 million Americans or something like that, we aren’t competitors."

Let's get back to Patric Chocolate. Am I correct that the only people working with you are your wife and a part-time employee?

Yeah. I just hired a part-time employee and my wife is only here for the summer because she’s not teaching over the summer. She’ll go back to teaching. She has a PhD.

Does your wife like being here making chocolate?

Yes, but I can’t afford to pay her at this point. She’s making money out there, whereas if she’s in here, she’s not making that money, plus I have to pay more for our bills at home. So it’s still not quite working out. She would like to be here all the time and I would like her to be.

What parts of the business do you feel comfortable having other people do? You seem like you want to have your hand in all of it.

The things that I have other people do right now are sweeping, mopping, dishes, cacao cleaning, the winnowing process. That’s what other people are doing right now. I would feel comfortable with other people doing accounting or sending out literature and samples and getting orders together and stuff like that. In fact, my wife does some of that, but I just don’t have an employee to do it yet.

But, I’ll need to hire another part time person before the summer is over, though I’m not quite sure what they are going to be doing yet. Usually the people who want to do manual labor, they don’t want to do accounting also, and vice versa.

I would love to find someone who knew how to and was willing to do accounting and also pack up orders and also do dishes, but I don’t know if it will happen.

Roasting would be one of those things that I wouldn't feel comfortable having someone else do. You can’t have someone just go roast the cacao, it just doesn’t work. The same applies to understanding the tempering process. You can’t train someone to do that easily. You have to understand it yourself. I might be able to get the proper machine set up and going and tell someone, “Stick these molds under there and then put them on the tray,” that might be possible. But, I would still have to have a pretty large role to play in this process. Even wrapping the bars, I still do 95% of that myself.

It would be great to have someone who is as excited about chocolate making as I was and wanted to learn what I’ve learned and the things I’m still trying to learn. That would almost be like an apprentice type situation. I’ve never even had anyone come to me about that, so I’ve never even thought about it.

Alan is always thinking about chocolate.

What is your favorite part of chocolate making?

I’m still learning every day. Every day I read something - I go back to some book or some paper or I sit there and I think of something and often I go home from work and I can’t focus on anything else because there’s some problem I encountered and I just can’t get off of it until I think I’ve figured it out.

I guess you could say I’m obsessive. It’s probably true. I think there’s so much about chocolate that no one knows right now. Aside from the fact that I love chocolate, that’s what really drew me in to wanting to make chocolate, because every time I sat down to deal with it or think about it, I learned ten more things and it’s still like that today. There’s so much to be learned still. How can you go wrong with something like that? I can imagine a job where you learn everything there is to learn about that job - you get so bored you want to hang yourself. This job is never like that and I can’t imagine it ever will be.

Were you obsessed with something before chocolate?

No, in fact, that was my problem. Before chocolate, I had no obsession. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had a religious studies degree and I didn’t really want to do anything with that. Prior to that, I was never quite sure I even wanted a religious studies degree. That is really the story of my life, that I was just always unsure. There are those kids that want to be a doctor and they go to school to become a doctor and then they’re a doctor. That was not me. I wasn’t a six year old saying I wanted to be a chocolate maker when I grew up. Absolutely not. But now that I’m here, I really love it.

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Wade Groetsch: Noble Juice

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Welcome to the very first Food Interviews podcast. I would LOVE your feedback on this format. Please take a moment to fill out the short four question survey at the bottom of the post or leave your thoughts in the comments.

In this interview, Wade Groetsch shares the "juicy" details of running Noble Juice. OK, it's not all that juicy, but he answered a few questions that I have always wondered about - like what makes one 100% orange juice different from another, and what happens to the pulp that isn't used in pulp-free juice.

The best part about Noble Juice (aside from how tasty their juices are) is that their bottles and label are 100% compostable. They are the first juice company to be able to say that. In the interview, you'll hear all about how Wade is a huge recycling advocate.

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Marisa McClellan: Food Blogger Extraordinaire

Marisa at Coney Island from her Flickr account.

Marisa McClellan writes Apartment 2024, does a food podcast called Fork You, and is the lead blogger at Slashfood. As if that wasn't enough, she also holds a full-time job. In this interview, she shares her path to becoming a prominent food blogger. I'd be curious to hear how other Food Bloggers out there relate to her story. As I talked with her, in some ways, I felt like I could have been talking with myself.

How did you get into blogging?

I got into blogging about a little over three years ago, in late Winter 2005. I had been reading blogs for about a year before I started one, and I was desperately unhappy in my job. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and almost the kind of person I wanted to be.

I decided that I would create a blog and write my way to figuring out what it was I wanted to do. In the process of writing the blog, I realized that what I wanted to do was write. It’s been a pretty big life-changing experience for me.

What kind of work were you doing before then?

I was working as an Administrative Assistant. My titles were things like Staff Assistant or Program Coordinator. One job was at a non-profit and then I had two different jobs at universities here in Philadelphia where I was doing support work and hated it.

It sounds like your blog was almost like a journal at first.

Basically, yeah. I moved to Philadelphia six months after graduating from college because I had this feeling like I should move. Both of my parents are originally from Philadelphia and so I have a ton of family and family history here. There I was in my early twenties when my mom had been in Philadelphia in her early twenties and my grandmother had been in Philadelphia in her early twenties and my great grandmother and even my great-great-grandmother, so this feeling of being connected to these generations of women was also something that I wrote about a lot.

Did you have a lot of the same experiences that they had?

I don’t know if "same" is the right word, but I feel like there are certain foundational coming-of-age experiences that everyone begins to have as they move along, so I feel like I had similar experiences to my mom in that we were both similar on a very sentimental sense. We were walking the same streets and experiencing the city.

Did you initially have a focus on food on your blog?

Not at all. I liked food, I was interested in food at the beginning, but my personal blog never started out as a food blog. What would happen is that as I moved along, more and more of what I wrote about was food. I became known to friends, people who read my blog, as someone who could be depended on to write interesting things about food or tell fun stories about different food items. I started carving out a niche for myself.

How did you move to writing more than one blog?

Well, the way it grew at first was I became the city captain for the Philadelphia Metblog. I was in charge of Metblogging Philadelphia. Metblogs are a world wide chain of blogs - a blogging network that focuses on different cities. I helped get the Philadelphia one started. It’s sort of fallen apart a little bit since then though.

I found myself writing a lot more about restaurants and food out in the world. Then, my friend Scott and I decided to start making a cooking podcast. That was really how things started to take off in terms of doing things on the Internet related to food.

Scott was the movie blogger for The Unofficial Apple Weblog and so he was already all hooked into WebBlogs, Inc. Last summer, I was towards the end of my grad school experience, and I was desperately needing to be making some money. I was getting a Master’s in writing and what I really wanted to be doing was food writing. He connected me up with the folks at Slashfood and they hired me and I started blogging. That’s how I got into Slashfood.

The thing that I found remarkable about that experience is that it took about two weeks before the rest of the food blogging and food writing world looked at me as a legitimate food writer. It was amazing how little it took for the world to be like, "Oh yeah. Marisa’s a food writer." Whereas, I had been struggling and striving and scheming, trying to figure out how I could convince the world that I was a food writer. It happened in about five minutes all of a sudden, which was a relief and also sort of, "Wait, that’s all it took?" It was an interesting experience.

Marisa and Scott doing a live podcast of Fork You.
Photo from Flickr user dragonballyee.

Let’s talk some more about the podcasts.

The initial process to create a pod cast started in February, 2006. It took us about three months to figure out what to call it. You never think about naming as this vital and time-consuming thing, but just figuring out what to call this thing we were creating took us forever. Finally, by sometime in May, 2006, we were like, "Okay, we’re going to call it Fork You."

We initially had thought we were going to call Peaing Soup. It’s the punch line to a joke. You can roast beef, but can you pea soup? Scott thought it was the funniest thing ever to name a podcast after the punch line to a joke. But, I determined that I couldn’t live with Peaing Soup as our name. So, we finally went with Fork You. It was about food in Philadelphia and Philadelphia can have a little bit of an attitude, so that was it.

We filmed the first half of the first episode in that summer - July, 2006. Then, it sat around and we finally finished it and got the first episode up in November, 2006. Then, oddly enough, we kept doing it. We were as surprised as anybody that we kept it going. We kept making episodes and a couple of our friends got involved to run the camera and do sound and sort of be support for it.

We had a thing in Philadelphia last summer called Blog Philadelphia, and that was the first time I ever went to anything where I was meeting people who actually watched it and who enjoyed it and it was sort of shocking. Here was this random little thing we would make in my kitchen or a friend’s kitchen and suddenly I was exposed to a whole world of people who watched it and liked what we were doing. That was really fun; it was sort of validating. This isn’t just some crazy crackpot thing that we were doing. It was actually something that people were finding value in.

We’ve just continued and we’ve tried a bunch of different formats and settled on these two different formats that we do. The two minute Quick Fork and then the standard episodes, that are never longer than ten minutes. They really look at just one or two dishes because you can’t really fit more than that in and get all the information across and keep it interesting. On the Internet, people don’t want to watch more than ten minutes. That’s really pushing it. They like it better if it’s eight.

We’ve learned a lot and we’ve actually made several cooking show podcasts for Slashfood which they paid us for (which was pretty crazy because I can now say that I’ve been paid to make food online video content). It’s turned into something that people really watch. We get about 10,000 views an episode now, which isn’t huge but it’s certainly respectable in that little wacky online world.

In the process of making Fork You and being friends and all that, Scott and I actually got together. We are living together now - that was an unexpected bonus. It’s been a really fun experience. I keep talking about wanting to do a Fork You cookbook because we’re coming up on 50 episodes now. I’ve made a lot of food for this show in the course of the last almost two years now and I think it would be really fun to pull all that together and add Scott’s humor and my recipes. But, that’s just a dream right now.

Some podcasts take longer than others - like when you have to cook a turkey.
Photo from Flickr user Blankbaby.

How long does it take you to produce a ten minute episode?

Well, it takes me brainstorming to come up with what we’re going to cook and then having to do all the shopping and the prep. That can take anywhere from two hours to five depending on what I’ve signed us up for that day. Then, we film the episode, which again varies depending what we cook. One time we made corned beef and cabbage, where there’s not a lot of active preparation, but we had to hang around for four hours as the damn thing cooked. Then, it takes Scott between two and four hours to edit. So, a ten minute episode of Fork You can take eight to ten hours, which might sound like a crazy amount of time - but we do enjoy it, so it’s not that terrible.

We also do a monthly live episode at Foster’s Homeware,a local cooking supply store. Those episodes typically take me three hours to get ready for and we film for an hour. We do the cooking show for an hour and there’s a lot of footage there, so Scott ends up spending about five hours editing it down. It’s a time commitment, but it’s also fun and interesting and has given me a really good opportunity to feel comfortable in front of cameras, in front of groups, and develop this very random skill which is cooking in front of people.

How has the live expe