Monkeytreats

Last summer, my wife and I went on a tour of the Theo chocolate factory in Fremont. Very cool place, very cool people, and it was really inspiring to see a local company making something so complex, with so much art, with such consideration for ethics, and at such a high degree of refinement.

I was briefly obsessed a few years back with the idea of making my own chocolate from scratch (after seeing Chocolat, lamely enough—terrible movie but it made me hungry). It didn’t take a lot of research to find out that:

1. if you’re just some guy, you really can’t get cacao beans
2. the equipment required is non-trivial: tempering might be within your reach, but conching will not

So, I gave up on that dream, but gained a lot of respect for those who know what they’re doing in the field of chocolate-making. It’s kind of like being an astronaut: lots of people want to be that when they grow up, very few actually get to.

When we were there, they were only producing flavored chocolates—they hadn’t started making their pure chocolates yet. The flavors were genuinely interesting: coconut curry, chai, coffee, bread (which provided sort of a salty crunch).

Anyway, long story short, ever since that visit, I’ve been crazy with anticipation for their single-varietal fair-trade bars that they were not yet selling, and they finally started showing up at PCC. 85% from Ghana, 74% from the Ivory Coast. The 74% is particularly good—more complex than probably any chocolate bar I’ve ever tasted.

And they make it in my city. Very cool.