Category: chocolate

Assorted Links

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  • The power of the smell of chocolate. I add cacao shells (from Tisano Tea) to the tea when I brew black tea. This adds complexity. 2.5 g of black tea plus 0.9 g of cacao shells.
  • Madonna’s diet is rather hard. “I am basically dying on this diet. . . . It is so hard to give up all those foods.”
  • Sous vide basics. “Using extra virgin olive oil results in an off, metallic, blood taste.” DIY sous vide, I want to read it to learn how controllers work.
  • More about Steve Cooksey and the ADA. The North Carolina branch of the American Dietetics Association attacked Cooksey for making nutrition recommendations on his blog. For free. This post explains why they did such a strange thing. A friend of mine, a nutrition professor at UC Berkeley, gave a Freshman Seminar (unpaid classes with about 10 students) on how to fix a car. Later he got a letter from a dean in the engineering school at Berkeley saying that only engineering professors can teach such a course.

Thanks to Richard Sprague.

Tisano Chocolate Tea and Combining Complex Flavors

Seth Roberts2 Comments

After I interviewed Patrick Pineda about how Tisano Tea began, he gave me several tins of chocolate tea, their main product. Since then, I’ve had dozens of cups of chocolate tea. It’s a good caffeine-free drink, especially with cream.

My main use of chocolate tea, however, has been to improve black tea. Black tea + chocolate tea = great drink, better than any black tea alone or chocolate tea alone. So much better that I have stopped drinking black tea the usual way (without chocolate tea). Even cheap black tea (e.g., Lipton’s) plus chocolate tea tastes better than expensive black tea. I think I know why. Black tea (fermented) has a complex flavor, like most fermented foods. Expensive black tea is more complex than cheap black tea, but only a little more. Likewise, chocolate tea has a complex flavor (like chocolate). Combining two sources of substantial complexity produces tea with great complexity — much more than you can get by tweaking one source of complexity (e.g., varying black tea).

Here’s a recipe:

1. To 2.0 g of black tea and 0.9 g of chocolate tea add 8 oz of boiling water. Brew 4 minutes.

2. Add cream and sugar to taste.

Peet’s tea designers may have reached a similar conclusion. Peet’s sells limited-edition teas that are available for only a few months, one at a time. Several months ago the limited-edition tea was Red Cloud Cacao, which combined black tea, chocolate tea, and rooibos. The chocolate tea was from Tisano. I loved it. It sold surprisingly well, I’m told. Their next limited-edition tea, still available, is Anniversary Breakfast Blend. Here’s what the tin says:

We seek out small lot teas with unique characters and intriguing flavors . . . Then . . . we set out to make great teas even better . . . We artfully marry the elements of distinctive black teas until we have achieved a well-balanced, extraordinarily aromatic, and flavorful cup.

I told a Peet’s customer service person how much I liked the combination of black and chocolate tea. That’s funny, she said, the Anniversary Breakfast Blend is made by adding a chocolate mist to black tea. The blended teas are misted with chocolate. The website and the container say nothing about this. My guess is that the tea designers came to the same conclusion as me. Chocolate was so potent they couldn’t bear to omit it. But they couldn’t simply add chocolate tea to the blend, because that would repeat Red Cloud Cacao, appear formulaic, and spoil the story of “seek[ing] out small lot teas”. It would also be obvious: You could look at the tea and see the chocolate. So they used chocolate mist and didn’t tell customers. What the tin says is doughnut truth: The whole truth, nothing but the truth, with a hole in the truth.

Complexity is much different than other sources of pleasure in food (salty, sweet, chewy, etc.). My explorations suggest we can detect a lot more complexity that you can get from a single fermented food. But I have yet to encounter a single recipe that combines fermented foods. Most professional recipes produce complexity via many spices, which is labor-intensive (you need to add and adjust all those spices, and worry about their age) and, in my experience, produces no better results than adding one fermented flavoring, such as miso.

Salting tea also seems to improve it.

Health benefits of cocoa, a new study.

How Things Begin: Tisano Tea

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Tisano Tea, based in San Francisco, sells chocolate tea. It was started in 2010 by Patrick Pineda, Leonardo Zambrano, and Lucas Azpurua. I was curious about the company because I like two chocolate tea blends very much: Red Cloud Cacao (a black tea/chocolate tea blend from Peet’s, no longer available but they will bring it back) and CocoMate (from American Tea Room).

Patrick’s father was an ambassador from Venezuela. Patrick grew up in California and England and went to college at the University of East Anglia. After studying for a Master’s in Film Production from Columbia University (New York), he started working for Al Jazerra in Venezuela making documentaries. He also worked for a local TV station making segments for a children’s program. One segment was about cacao. He learned that Venezuelan cacao beans were among the most highly-valued cacao beans in the world. The cacao beans from one valley (Chuao) sold for ten times the usual price.

While making the segment, he met cacao farmers. He discovered a group of cacao farmers whose beans had been organically certified by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) due to local NGO sponsorship (the NGO paid for it). The farmers saw it as free training. The organic certification took lots of paperwork to maintain. The farmers had hoped that the certification would allow them to sell their beans at a premium. However, after four years, this hadn’t yet happened. At the end of each harvest, they’d had to sell their beans at the conventional (non-organic) price.

This struck Patrick as an opportunity – a niche (organic) within a niche (Venezualan). In the US, there was a growing demand for organic products. The co-op grew about 16 metric tons of organic cacao beans each year. In 2009, with the financial help of his older brother and friends, he bought 10 metric tons ($40,000). A month earlier, he hadn’t known that chocolate comes from cacao.

He soon realized there was a problem: How to get it out of the country? If taken straight out, the government would fumigate it and it would lose its organic certification. It would have to be processed in Venezuela. There were several cacao processing plants in Venezuela but to them 10 metric tons was nothing. Patrick finally convinced one of them that organic might be the future. He taught the employees how to process the beans organically while learning it himself. After that it was relatively easy to get the processing plant certified organic.

During processing, 12% of the weight is “lost” in shells that are normally discarded. Patrick took the shells with him back to America hoping he could do something with them. In Venezuela, he had met an indigenous tribal community that drank tea made from cacao shells as remedy for asthma and to sooth coughs. He looked academic journals for other uses. He eventually found about 120 published papers. The shells had been used as toothpaste and to increase the Vitamin D content of milk by feeding them to cows. The only common uses, it turned out, were as fertilizer (due to the nitrogen content) and animal feed (due to the fiber and Vitamin D content). Neither use was high-price.

What about tea? Patrick sent samples to his partners. They were unenthusiastic. “This tastes like grass. Why would anybody drink tea from a by-product?” However, he was selling chocolate butter and nibs online. With each order, he included an 8-ounce pouch of cacao shells with instructions how to brew the tea. His customers – at least, some of them – were enthusiastic: How unique, how great, they emailed him. A German woman said she hadn’t drunk such tea since World War II ended. During World War II, cacao shells had been added to tea to extend it. His customers wanted to buy more.

He convinced his partners to go to a trade show. In 2010, they went to Expo West, a natural and healthy food product show in Anaheim. Out of all of their products, the tea got the most attention. It won Best in Show for tea. Out of about 500 new products, it was one of four that won Best New Product of Show. People from Twinings Tea and Stash Tea complimented them on their product.

After the trade show, Patrick decided the tea was a good concept and decided to make it a separate brand. Dark chocolate without the guilt. No sugar, no caffeine. He launched Tisano. The name comes from tisane (herbal tea in French) and artesano (artisanal in Spanish).

When I tasted Tisano’s chocolate tea, it tasted very familiar. That’s because Tisano’s cacao shells are the cacao shells in both American Tea Room’s CocoMate and Peet’s Red Cloud Cacao. There is no doubt that Patrick has created a new niche within the American (and maybe world) tea market: chocolate tea. I don’t know how well CocoMate is selling at American Tea Room but I decided to buy it after smelling maybe 40 teas. At Peet’s, Red Cloud Cacao sold surprisingly well and they will bring it back seasonally.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Edward Jay Epstein, Bryan Castañeda, Paul Nash, Jay Barnes and Dave Lull.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Thanks to Tucker Goodrich and Allan Jackson.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts6 Comments
  • more evidence that chocolate is healthy. “The highest levels of chocolate consumption were associated with a 37% reduction in cardiovascular disease and a 29% reduction in stroke.” This is good news.
  • The great bank robbery by Nassim Taleb and Mark Spitznagel. “For the American economy . . . the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years.. . . That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine.” This is a new variation of “behind every great fortune is a great crime”.
  • Nutritionist, heal thyself. Fat is obviously good for the skin. Which suggests it is good for the whole body, just less obviously.
  • The Taleb/Spitznagel point is supported by this article (via Marginal Revolution), which concludes: “Who has been the first to lose confidence in the European banking system? . . . The European banking system itself.” As they say: Don’t con a conner.

Advances in Cooking: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Toni Rivard, a Dallas dessert caterer, makes one of the best chocolate-chip cookies in America, according to Forbes Traveller. She ages her cookie dough about three days. She says it improves the texture. I wonder if it improves the flavor, too:

Rivard’s secret? “I like to age my cookie dough and feel that it makes for a better texture in cookies. As a result, the aptly-named OMG! [which is what customers have actually said when they taste one] chocolate chip cookies at Creme de la Cookie are soft and chewy with a deep rich flavor.

Fermenting cookie dough should certainly improve the flavor, although chocolate already supplies a lot of complexity. My experience has been that cooking delicious stuff became a lot easier when I started using fermentation to help (e.g., miso soup instead of soups flavored without fermented ingredients).

Thanks to David Archer.

Powdered Ice Cream

Seth Roberts1 Comment

At the Fancy Food Show, Kriss Harvey, a pastry chef and frozen dessert solutions specialist, served me a spoonful of powdered chocolate ice cream, his invention. It looked like chocolate ice cream but it tasted unlike any ice cream (or any food) I’ve ever had. It was there and not there. It was in my mouth and then it was gone. It was the most ethereal food I’ve ever had.

We had been talking about El Bulli, the Spanish restaurant of experimental food. Two friends of Mr. Harvey’s had worked there one summer and had come back complaining about the food (rabbit ears) and the workload. Just because people will pay a lot for your unusual food doesn’t mean you are advancing things, said Mr. Harvey. Maybe your food doesn’t taste very good. He pointed to a certain now-forgotten fad among New York dessert chefs a few years ago. That’s fashion, I said; it has a perfectly good purpose (to support experimentation). Then Mr. Harvey served me his powdered ice cream. Which was more memorable and impressive than anything I had at Alinea, an American version of El Bulli.

Chocolate is Good For You (part 4)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From the January 2008 Journal of Nutrition:

In a cross-sectional study, we examined the relation between intake of 3 common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) and cognitive performance. 2031 participants (70—74 y, 55% women) recruited from the population-based Hordaland Health Study in Norway underwent cognitive testing. A cognitive test battery included the Kendrick Object Learning Test, Trail Making Test, part A (TMT-A), modified versions of the Digit Symbol Test, Block Design, Mini-Mental State Examination, and Controlled Oral Word Association Test. . . . Participants who consumed chocolate, wine, or tea had significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who did not.