September 17

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Updated 9/12/14 -- see the very bottom of this post for a link to another article about Shawn Askinosie's visit to Ann Arbor.



Rubber band in the sunshine.

Old dog, napping.

With his tongue out.

As so often happens, my attention seems to wake him up.

Chocolate tasting, in the evening.  Should you ever get a chance to hear Shawn Askinosie talk about making chocolate, I encourage you to go.

Shawn is a bean-to-bar chocolatier.  He works with the farmers who grow the beans.  He arranges for export of the beans (shipping them to the coast, getting them loaded into containers, getting the containers loaded on the proper ship with the proper destination, dealing with government agencies), he oversees getting the beans into this country (not a trivial task), and then getting the beans from our coast to Springfield, Missouri, where the beans are made into chocolate.  His son-in-law manages the daily manufacture of chocolate and his daughter also works for the company.  It sounded like he's rarely home, himself, as he is in Ecuador or Tanzania or Honduras or the Philippines, working on getting the very best beans he can get back to Missouri.

Shawn was one of the first, if not the first, chocolate maker to take the finished chocolate to the farmers, so they could taste the end result, and taste for themselves the result of the way they grow and handle the beans.

Askinosie chocolate is made from cocoa beans, and sugar.   Much of the chocolate (all?) is made from one single growing of one single variety of cocoa bean.  Only beans, and sugar (until you get to the extra goodies added to particular bars, like anise, or vanilla, or pistachios).

Cocoa beans are grown in warm places, preferably in shade, and preferably interspersed with other trees, like mango, or coconut.  Having a mix of trees "is better for the environment, and better for the farmers" as they are growing something they can eat, and sell to their neighbors, in addition to cocoa beans.

The pods are harvested, and the beans are scooped out.  They are fermented, and then dried.  We learned that they don't taste anything like chocolate until the dried beans are roasted.

We began with bean-to-bar tastes.  One variety of cocoa beans, and the steps from bean to bar, all tastes from that same sort of bean.

The tasting started with freshly-roasted cacao beans -- still hot when we got them, that's how "freshly-roasted".  (I took the pic before we got our beans -- as you can see, they go in square 1 of the grid.)  We ground the beans against each other in our palms, and sniffed the result, and tasted.....

After roasting, the beans are ground.  I am pretty sure there are lots of different words for the different grindings chocolate goes through, as it gets smoother, but I don't know what they are.

After the first process (grinding, let's call it), the result is called cocoa liquor.  (Why, I don't know, since it's a solid, as you can see in square 2.)  This is intense and bitter.  Like baking chocolate.

I think (memory fades...) that if you press the beans instead of grinding them, you get cocoa butter.  When pressed gently from good beans, cocoa butter actually has a very nice flavor, I learned.

I'm sure he told us how to get to cocoa powder, but I don't remember....  I do remember that it is often the case that cocoa powder has alkaloids added to mitigate the acidity, but that he does not add anything.

It was very interesting to taste the difference from one step to the next.....

To make chocolate, extra cocoa butter (made from the same variety of beans) is added, as is sugar.

Conching is a process that makes the chocolate very smooth.  (More grinding, I think....)  Unconched chocolate has a slightly gritty texture, but it tastes just like chocolate at this stage (as the extra cocoa butter and sugar have been added).

If I remember correctly, white chocolate is made from cocoa butter and sugar.  I'd never thought it had any taste, but I'd never tasted the good stuff.  This was nice.  I'd never choose it when I could have darker chocolate, but I would eat it (unlike other white chocolate I've tasted, which I don't eat).

We tasted a square of Hershey's Dark, just to remind ourselves what big-batch who-cares-which-sort-of-beans-go-in chocolate is like.

Only then did we taste the finished chocolate from the variety of beans we'd been following.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..........

Then we tasted other finished chocolates from different sorts of beans (from different places), and finished chocolates with different percentages of chocolate (and the rest of the 100% is sugar).

Askinosie milk chocolate is made from beans from the Philippines, and the milk is from goats.  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.............

Askinosie chocolate/hazelnut spread is much darker and less sweet than Nutella, and the hazelnut taste is more pronounced.  It's really good.................

I really liked the "taste of Mexico" inspiration, with vanilla from Mexico, and a bit of crunch from sugar crystals.  The one with pistachios also has a bit of chile hotness.  The pumpkin white chocolate is tasty (and is new for this fall).  The last one is a secret as they're not ready to go prime time with it, but it, too, is very good.

A big part of listening to Shawn talk is learning about the amount of difference one man can make in the world.

The Askinosie factory is in a depressed part of Springfield.  There is a homeless shelter on the same block.  Askinosie has seen to it that the homeless shelter has a computer lab for the kids who live there (and they maintain the lab).  They run programs for the kids in the shelter, from elementary through middle school, and they run a program called Chocolate University for high-school kids from the Springfield area, where kids learn how to grade cocoa beans, amongst other chocolate-related activities.  After two years in the Chocolate University program, the kids are taken to Tanzania.  Some of them have never been on an airplane before.

Twenty-two people from Missouri are welcomed by 1000 students from the area where the Tanzanian cocoa producers live and work.

The kids from Missouri get first-hand experience with how people live in rural Tanzania, and when they go home, they are invited to raise money to buy a well for the village, so people can have clean water for the first time ever.  They do, and the well is dug.  Another group of Missouri kids are invited to raise money to add two classrooms to the eight-room school which serves 1400 kids.  They do, and the school is expanded.  The Missouri kids also raised money to buy books for the school.

Few of the Tanzanian girls were graduating from the lower school to the upper school.  They were "selling themselves on the way home from school, for food."  When they become pregnant, they are kicked out of school........

Shawn works with PTOs to raise money to feed the children.  The PTO in the Philippines makes (by hand) disks of chocolate which make hot chocolate when put in hot water or hot milk.  The PTO in Tanzania sells rice.  These products are sold in the USA, where they realize more income than they could in their home countrys, and that income buys thousands of meals each year.

Clubs have been started in Tanzania for Empowered Girls, and Empowered Boys, to work on changing attitudes toward girls and women.

Shawn says "It will take a generation" to make a substantial difference, in tones that make it clear that he expects to be there to see that change, in 20 or 30 years........

Did I mention that Askinosie profit-shares with its producers?

It was a delicious and thought-provoking evening.  I surely don't mind spending a few extra dollars on a bar of chocolate, knowing how much good those dollars will do.......


UPDATE:  9/23/14 -- there's an article on the Zingerman's site about Shawn Askinosie's visit to Ann Arbor, with more intensive info about the non-chocolate parts of Shawn's message.

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