cocoa | Pomelo girl thoughts

Mast Brothers Chocolate Tour

Posted on December 6, 2014 by elemonated

This is painted on the left wall.

I took a tour of the Mast Brothers’ factory on Friday. It was brilliant. I’ve taken “chocolate themed” tours before, and visited the Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco when I was a teenager, and neither of those visits made me feel as excited about chocolate as the ~45 minute walk around the factory watching things being made did. I feel more educated now, and not in the way Starbucks or Teavana wanted its employees to feel and to make the customers feel when I worked for them (apologies to the, honestly, really great people who complimented me on how genuine I was), but more like when we visited the Kitchen at Grove Station and talked to the guy serving Modcup coffee near the door about how cold it was to be right next to the door during a late autumn grand opening. I still need to try honey processed coffee.

Sorry for the potato.

I tried to take some pictures, but my new phone’s camera is kind of a potato (thought apparently an improvement on the old camera), and my hands are not the most stable. I should ask for a new camera for Christmas.

I like the wooden flag. The bags with the color on them are sugar and the bags with no visible markings are cocoa beans. I convinced my boyfriend not to go lay in them, somehow.

We weren’t allowed to take pictures after passing the counter, which is understandable, as the ideas behind any number of their machines is fairly simple and easy to steal with a few good pictures, and they have a policy of a human touch being most important, which means many of their machines aren’t perfect automatons. If they did, I’m sure someone with fantastic business sense and fewer ethics could probably drive them out with a few tweaks to make the machines perfect. Although the idea of keeping the machines imperfect and stressing out the employees is a little odd, they did make a comment about how the latest they’ve worked until was maybe midnight, made it sound outrageous, and confirmed that their job was way, way better than retail in that regard at least. Anyway, the machines obviously don’t hold them back. Read More

Chocolate: three ways

Posted on June 26, 2014 by elemonated

Damian Allsop’s Water Chocolates

Having used and shaped chocolate in the past, this is intriguing to me because water was usually the bane of my existence. I can’t even imagine what the process would be to keep the chocolate from separating into an unappetizing grainy mess. It’s apparently about 10% less fat than regular chocolate, and I believe the chocolatiers when they say the process makes eating the chocolate a lot more of a pure chocolate taste experience. I wonder if it’s genuinely creamy, or if it’s more of a hard candy texture. Obviously, I really, really want to try it ;D

I was also looking into some Latino literature and was thinking I would start reading Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Defying preset roles and destinies, growing the nerve to stand up to crazy people, and expressing oneself through food, complete with recipes? Sounds fantastic. In fact, a lot of Latino literature seems to include something food-related, generally as a mood indicator. I think that this common device, which, don’t get me wrong, is used in a lot of literature in a lot of cultures, is interestingly blatant. It’s very clear what Rebecca’s lime-eating tic in One Hundred Years of Solitude is supposed to indicate (though I’m sure there’s subtext in there that I haven’t yet examined), and Like Water for Chocolate creates a story where for a while, the biggest indicator of Tita’s emotions are her cooking (according to Goodreads, haha.) Antonio in Bless Me, Ultima is picked on for eating traditional Mexican food at school, an obvious indication of the difficulties of trying to stay true to both your roots and your leaves. It’s so clearly intertwined with descriptions of culture, it’s fascinating.

And of course, we return to modernity: chocolate chicken.

Have you seen how incredible chocolate fried chicken looks?

Unfortunately, it’s on the other side of the country, so I guess I’ll build up my Type 2 Diabetes some other way. Sigh.