The Lull

Haven't blogged in a while and why??? No chocolate.   Jim has not felt inspired, we're getting ready to  move, we have to borrow the equipment now and even though we have looked for a Santha grinder on Craigslist everyday we have not found one.  We were lucky to find one before and took it to Costa Rica.  However, I (keli) am also running very, almost fearfully, low on chocolate and resisting temptations to call patrons and ask to buy back some of the good stuff.  So there will be a bit of a lull and hopefully one more batch before we go.

Jim says he will make a new batch of chocolate when he gets inspired or finds a used Santha grinder on Craigslist, whichever comes first.

In character, as people who want everything out on the table, we want to disclose that we (after much research) have found a chocolate bar that impressed us.  It is Askinosie.  Sold in Whole Foods.  It's "bean to bar," wrapped in earth friendly to the max material and, as Jim put it, they have done all the things we could think of and more as far as quality and fair trade and Eco are concerned.  Only my sense of flavoring is missing.  Each bar from different farms taste different and it's nice to see a product on the market which reflects the actual variation of farm life.
Check out his website at https://www.askinosie.com/

We both feel that Sonoma is due for it's own chocolate company and if it is not us at some point then it will be someone else. Either way it's been fun participating in what we have heard one person call "the food that will help tranisition us into the next age."

Here is a nice video about one person doing what we are embarking on.  Grenada Chocolate.
Although we have heard he is expanding and maybe even getting bigger than he intended, his chocolate is still very good too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbRA0NiQDxk

Fifty-Fifty Reviews

We have been getting tremendous reviews of our latest batch of chocolate.

Like this one, from a well known local musician and author...

"If chocolate were music, yours would be the darkest, deepest Mozart."

Or this one, from another local, Laura Chenel, of goat cheese fame...

"We had some last night, just after we finished a small amount of high-end chocolate we had been
enjoying.  Yours blew the other one out of the water!  After tasting yours,
the other one tasted flat, dull, lifeless, boring. It is really intense and
intensely "fruity".  The taste and the impression lingered for a long time. Absolutely stunning.  Off the planet."

                                                Keli preparing cayenne from our garden


 We had been a little surprised at the depth and complexity of the flavor. We weren't sure why this batch was so different. Then today I made some cacao butter out of beans that are so bitter I don't use them to make chocolate. I tasted the cacao butter and made a discovery - when these beans are turned into cacao butter, you can still taste the bitterness but it is transformed. It is as though the clarity and purity of the cacao butter is transmitted to the quality of bitterness - it becomes transparent to all the other flavors and enriches them without obscuring.

This home-made cacao butter is the same stuff we used for the fifty-fifty batch. I guess that is what made the difference.


So tomorrow I am going to make more of the fifty-fifty but with evaporated cane juice from Whole Foods instead of our own farm sugar. Keli is going to add fresh coconut cream and crystallized ginger. Last week we did a small experiment with the coconut and ginger and the results were impressive.

Latest update:

We made another small batch with fresh coconut cream and crystallized ginger. The coconut cream is prepared by running the meat of a coconut through a Champion juicer. A rich cream comes out of the strainer and coconut flakes come out the end. We mix a little bit of the flakes into the cream, freeze it and then pour chocolate over the coconut mixed with crystallized ginger. No added sugar in the coconut cream. The results are sublime...

50/50 Batch

Batch 50/50


16oz beans from San Jose, Costa Rica
16oz beans from our farm--unroasted ( that means raw food)
4oz home made cacao butter and 2oz regular cacao butter
16oz our farm sugar
8oz evaporated organic cane sugar from whole foods
flavored with cinnamon and vanilla from Villa Vanilla, (Rainforestspices.com) a biodynamic farm in Costa Rica

Most of this batch has been pre-ordered and it is a small batch.  We have available :
two large bars with roasted hazel nuts
four medium bars with roasted hazel nuts
three small bars with goji, bee pollen, and brazil nuts
four small plain
eleven leave - plain
 Please call us if you want to order any of this and we will see what is left and I can put it away for you.

Using Chocolate to give a plug to no impact man.

Here is a report of no impact man. I have personally tried to eliminate plastic from my life and it is very difficult. I have not been able to do so completely but i am attempting. This was inspiring to me. k

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/no-impact-man/trailer

Special Milk Chocolate

Recipe:

22 ounces of cacao beans (from our own farm, of course)
22 ounces of cacao butter (some of which I press from my beans)
2 ounces of ghee (Keli makes that)
12 ounces of whole milk powder
32 ounces of evaporated cane sugar



11:30 PM, Thursday night...

Tonight we’re making milk chocolate.  I think the chocolate devas have some inside influence about making chocolate at night because for as long as we’ve been making chocolate we have always ended up staying up late to do it even though we talk about timing it so we can get to bed at a reasonable time.

Jim is in the middle of pouring the sugar now.  This time we used “Rapunzel” which has a special technique for dehydrating it, according to their packaging, and it has all the nutrients from the sugar cane still in it.  He put it in the oven to make sure it was dry and it’s smelling a little like caramel.  It looks like we are going to be using three different kinds of fat, our own cacao butter, the de-oderized cacao butter we buy, and freshly made ghee, yes the recipe actually called for clarified butter.

This batch we will keep simple, just the milk chocolate and roasted hazel nuts.  In good conscience I have to disclose that the recipe for milk chocolate is a lot more fat added than dark chocolate, so it’s a good thing we’re using healthy fats. I also read that if you have a tendency for heart burn it’s best to avoid milk chocolate products, otherwise you can enjoy what we hope will be some of the best milk chocolate in the world.

But wait - Jim just came in; I’m hearing that this turned out to be our biggest batch which could be dangerous because we are using our old machine which used to get stuck under even the slightest stress. 

There are a lot of variables and the whole night has to pass as the grinding wheels turn.  If it comes out good I’ll be bringing it into work tomorrow.

Note: Now it is Friday afternoon, all the chocolate is in the molds and it is looking extemely good!

Inventory Update

We are getting close to the end of what we can offer till after Jim's retreat. He's going to be selling lots of chocolate at the retreat - all those spiritual types need chocolate to get a little grounded. We've only got a little bit left over after I subtract what I (Keli) need for "medicinal" purposes.
I decided not to go with the Pumpkin flavor - tasted like pumpkin pie but felt like chocolate, kinda weird, maybe some other time.  My thinking now is to go with a Winter bar.  A lot of heat, I'm going to experiment with lots of cayenne, and possibly cinnamon and candied ginger or just dried ginger.  Jim wants to do a milk chocolate and we special ordered some whole powderded milk from AmericanSpice.com who states "A meal, like anything else, is only as good as the quality of its components".My feelings exactly.  We have a couple of batches worth of beans from Costa Rica, and also need a new machine so we are contemplating what beans and what machine we should look into, not sure what we will be making a month from now. 

By the way, a friend made some fresh corn tortillas (gluten free).  I have a lot and if anyone is swinging by in the next couple of days, I'm happy to share.  From now on I am going to buy my tortillas from her instead of from the market. (hint)  So sweet she is, delivered it to me tonight in cloth, still warm and came with half her family to deliver it. 

Midnight Emergency

Keli on the floor at midnight watching the chocolate turn and writing in the blog.

This is the beginning of our tradition of naming each chocolate batch with the title of a blog post. We will also list all the ingredients and any special factors that went into the chocolate.

So this batch of chocolate is called Midnight Emergency, (or M.E. for short,) and, like the last batch it is flavored with vanilla and cinammon from Villa Vanilla, a bio-dynamic farm in Costa Rica.

The sugar is 80% from our farm - made by Keli, our neighbor and his wife. See my picture at http://chocolatefarm-costarica.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-flavors.html to see my tragic expression as I cut sugar cane. And as for the cacao butter... I pressed it myself with a new oil press from our own cacao beans. We added some cashews and dried cherries to a few of the bars.

Keli started writing this blog at 12:30 AM - way past her normal bedtime, but she was energized by the crisis. Below is her report.

I know that somewhere there is someone who would read this and say all this fuss is totally unnecessary but these are the times when love and devotion truly comes in - or is it just the fear of losing a batch of chocolate with great beans?

Tonight something went wrong, we think that there might be a little moisture in the farm sugar we put in. Any moisture in the chocolate makes it thicken up and eventually stop.
The machine did stop turning a few times and we had to take big clumps of sugar pieces out. I suggested we stop it and take it all out but that wouldn't solve the problem of the moisture. Jim said he would sit next to the machine all night if that is what it takes. So I told him this would be a good time to start chanting - so the chocolate can absorb some high vibrations.

Jim, devotedly watching the chocolate.

Honestly I don't know if this batch will make it, but it sure is adding to the adventure. And just as i wrote this i heard a sound - when i turned around to see there was chocolate on the walls. But not too much. To be con't.

Making our own Cacao Butter

This is really exciting.

I have a Piteba oil press which allows you to squeeze your own oil out of just about anything.

I normally buy my cacao butter from chocolatealchemy.com  They have good quality cacao butter (as well as anything else you could need to make chocolate, from beans to machinery to molds,) but I was attracted to the challenge of making my own.

I made some sunflower seed oil earlier today to warm up. Then I made some cacao butter which is harder because of the shells that get into the machine. In fact, I broke a screw that holds the handle onto the press.

If you watch the video you will see I was probably working that handle just a bit too hard.

As Keli said, "Why did you crank it so hard.?"

My answer?

"Because its my nature..."

New Flavors

We had an interesting discussion today about new flavors. We've actually got enough chocolate to last a while but I just bought an aquarium heater that I think will make it easier to keep the tempered chocolate at just the right temperature and I want to try it out.

So I asked Keli what kind of new flavors she might be interested in and she came up with the idea for a pumpkin pie flavor. It would include nutmeg, cinammon, cloves, vanilla and ginger. Sounds really good.

We started talking about the quality and nature of the ingredients we put into the chocolate. Keli is always focused on getting the absolute highest quality ingredients that are available. That means whenever possible using ingredients that we have grown and processed ourselves, like the cacao, the chiles and sugar. Next best is going to a farm like Villa Vanilla where we can see the way they grow their products and we can confirm their claims to being organic and bio-dynamic.



We have lots of vanilla and cinammon from Villa Vanilla, (http://www.rainforestspices.com) a bio-dynamic farm in Costa Rica. The other spices will be the highest quality that we can find in Sonoma.



The sugar for this batch of chocolate, like the last, will be from our own farm. Its kind of a hassle - but worth it.

I don't know why I look so sad in this picture - I'm gathering the cane for making sugar. I do know that you have to keep alert for snakes when you are in the cane field!


When I'm preparing the sugar for our chocolate, I first have to chop the sugar up into small pieces (it comes in 1 pound cakes, made with molds carved out of tree trunks,) dehydrate it, then I powder it and dehydrate it again so it will be dry enough to place in the chocolate. If there is even a small bit of moisture the chocolate will be ruined.

Today's Flavors

This is a report from Keli:

It should have been a full moon last night because we were both unable to sleep and i just started clearing out the fridge around 2am for the coming batch, and added the flavors for today which are the much loved cinnamon and vanilla. If you haven't heard about the origin of these spices you can check out this site http://www.rainforestspices.com/. We were there while they were pulling the bark off the trees and hope to get some vanilla starts from them for our farm the next time we go back. Last night when we ground the cinnamon we did a smell test. The cinnamon I ground two weeks ago had zero smell compared to the fresh ground. Imagine what we are buying in the stores???

Today's chocolate is 62.5 percent cacao and 90 percent our own farm sugar that we cut, juiced and made, (see video in the first post of this blog) - the same sugar you see there is the batch we have here. They all have a base flavor of cinnamon and vanilla.
We have our kisses which look a little unshapely but taste great, some large 4 ounce bars plain ($10) "cherry and cashew" medium bars($7.50), bee pollen, goji and brazil nut small bars ($4. with the nuts) The latter is my personal medicine, I eat the brazil nuts for the selenium, the goji and pollen for extra energy. Need i mention that the farm sugar, because it has not been processed, has all of the minerals that you would get in molasses.

We have untempered bars and hand tempered bars( my fav. is the untempered because it really melts in your mouth but it can't get to room temp and then put back in the fridge because it will "bloom" - this is bad, in case you don't know what bloom is.)

We also have our flavor of the month, Spicy hearts , which are a little more spicy than the last batch. These are flavored with chili that we have grown in our garden and dehydrated and powdered.



We have a little stock pile from the last batch so now we can rest for a week or so. We've done our best to keep all the different batches and flavors organized but there is a surprise element to some of it.

Please call or email us if you want to place an order.

Love ya
Spicy hearts

Welding

I've always been interested in welding and using the ocy-acetylene torch. These processes involve using either an electrical arc or a very hot flame to reduce steel to a pool of molten liquid.

Its a little dangerous and very, very useful around the farm. So I decided to take a class in welding offered by The Crucible (www.thecrucible.org)
If you are interested in woodworking, jewelry making, glass blowing, fixing bicycles or motorcycles, or simply making the biggest, baddest fire-breathing dinosaur/golf cart in next years Burning Man - this is the place for you.
They offer classes in lots of different subjects and have dedicated volunteers and excellent equipment.

In one weekend I learned that welding is not as easy as it looks. But I think I have the basic skills needed for simple and ugly repairs on the farm.

We were given the option of making a sculpture in our welding class. I thought that I would just concentrate on practicing welding on random scraps of metal - it seemed more important than doing a half-assed art project. But my random scraps of metal quickly assorted themselves into a primordial man sculpture.
Then I thought I would leave it at the Crucible because it would be worth more as scrap metal than as something that would just clutter up the house.
But as the day progressed, I became more and more attached to my little man and now he is sitting here on the couch with me.

Making Chocolate in Sonoma

I'm going to be jumping around a bit in this blog.
Keli and I are in Sonoma now and so we are completely involved in the life here - while at the same time we are trying to remotely manage the farm in Costa Rica.

So I'll be talking about making chocolate here in Sonoma and also posting some pictures of the Chocolate Farm.

My ambition is to make a batch of chocolate where all the ingredients come from our farm.
We make our own sugar from sugar cane at the farm and I love the taste.
We squeeze all the juice out of the cane, get about 50 gallons of juice, boil it all day and we get what in India is called jaggady.
In order to use it for making chocolate, I need to dehydrate it - even a little bit of moisture would be enough to make a whole batch of chocolate seize up solid in the grinder.
And that is not fun!
Its happened to me before and its like chipping the concrete out of a concrete truck that has stopped turning.

I just bought a little oil press so I can make cacao butter from my own beans. This is a bit redundant here in the US, the land of plenty, where everything and anything can be had with an order on the internet.
But in Costa Rica, it will be very important to be able to make my own cacao butter.

This oil press can also make oil from coconuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, etc.
I've already made a little bit of cacao butter and it was, as you can imagine, incredibly good. Such a delicate flavor and so fresh... It didn't look as pretty as the store bought, but who cares?

Its a lot of work but when I'm in California I miss the exercise I get at the Farm. If I can post videos on this blog, you will soon see a video of me cranking out the cacao butter. Below is a video of me and my neighbor Dianey (he deserves a few postings himself - he is an incredible guy.) We are making sugar. You will see the machine that squeezes the juice out of the cane and near the end of the video will be a short view of the cauldron that boils the juice.

The History of the Chocolate Farm

Keli and I bought a farm in Costa Rica about 1 1/2 years ago.

We were looking for a place near the beach, with a waterfall and a beautiful view of the ocean.

We ended up buying a farm that didn't have a waterfall and is two hours from the beach. Later, after the dust had settled, we tried to figure out how it was we had bought something so different from our original ideas.

The simple answer - we fell in love.

This property had huge old trees in a 15 acre virgin forest, 16 acres of cacao trees that produce up to 15,000 pounds of beans a year and lots and lots of land - almost 100 acres.



After we bought the farm, we realized that we were now caretakers of a beautiful, living organism that the original owner had built up over a 50 year period. We planted fruit trees, trees for lumber and indigenous trees to reforest the pastures.
We planted vegetable gardens, cleaned up the coffee plantation and sugar cane field and started to fix up the old barn (which had doubled as an evangelical church for many years,) so we could live in it while we built a new house and yoga studio.

We installed a solar system and fixed up an old hydro-electric system that runs on a creek that originates on our property. We were happy to have reliable electricity.

This is the original generator for the hydro-electric system - it must be 50 years old!


The first few months we lived on the farm, Keli washed all the clothes by hand. I now know first hand the incredible advance in civilization that a washing machine and vacuum cleaner represent!




But most of all, we were intrigued by the vast amounts of cacao beans coming out of our plantation. We were told that they were of very high quality - an this was confirmed by "cacao mystic" we met recently who told us that the cacao devas told him that we were meant to make our high quality cacao available for cacao ceremonies (more about that later.)

We started to investigate the process (really, the alchemical art) of making chocolate. And today we have machines in both Costa Rica and in California that enable us to make high quality, luscious chocolate in both places.

In fact, after extensive experimentation, we have just started selling chocolate here in California.

More later...