Issue 08
THE CHOCOLATE LAB
By Dona Bridges
Oh, cheap chocolate. It’s right there, at every supermarket, corner store, and gas station; in every vending machine, in everyone’s candy bowl. It comes adulterated with nuts, peanut butter, nougat, gooey fruit fillings, sugary marshmallow fluff, and chewy caramel. These confections are to a chocoholic what Night Train and Wild Irish Rose are to a wino—meant to be swallowed, not savored, with an eye firmly on the prize. As many chocolate connoisseurs will tell you (exhaustively), most bottom-rung chocolate is not really chocolate, composed mostly of sugar, vegetable fats, and powdered milk, with little in the way of Theobroma cacao, a.k.a. cocoa. Chocolate snobs sniff that chocoholics are really just sugar addicts who prefer their drug mixed with milk and a tiny bit of chocolate, usually of dubious origin and quality.
In the food world, chocolate snobbery means distrusting the Big Capitalist Giants when it comes to precious, delicate cacao beans. In 2005, Hershey acquired Scharffen Berger, the San Francisco chocolatier dear to the hearts and palates of true chocolate lovers, to the connoisseurs’ dismay. Interestingly, this fits perfectly with chocolate’s history: it began as a drink made from the beans, which grow almost exclusively in the tropics. This drink originated in Aztec holy rituals, then was secularized by their Mayan descendents and imported to Europe by conquistadors and colonists, where it was, of course, rampantly adulterated and commodified. Drinking chocolate gave way to eating chocolate. Industrialization made for mass production. Fast forward, multiply, and you have Chocolate for the Masses: give us a Kiss, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar, never lay a finger on my Butterfinger. I’m sure the mighty Aztecs are spinning in their burial grounds at the cheerful defilement of their sacred chocolate.
Luckily for the uneasy Aztec ghosts, there’s grand cru chocolatemaking. Fine chocolate-making has existed alongside Hershey, Mars, and Cadbury for much of chocolate’s industrial history. French chocolatier Valrhona, for example, postdates Hershey by only about 20 years; the more populist, Brussels-born Godiva by another 20. However, not only is Scharffen Berger one of just 12 American chocolate makers (“from bean to bar,” as their website announces), but they are now one of the only crafters of small-batch, artisan-fashioned chocolates to be owned by a gigantic corporation. There’s a certain degree of gorgeousness in this: In the marriage of high and low, we can all now have our cake and eat our chocolate too, and the Aztec warriors guarding the hearts of chocolate snobs can rest easy.
Scharffen Berger’s saga began in 1994, when Robert Steinberg, a Bay Area physician and food aficionado, retired his medical practice and decided to explore gourmet chocolate-making, studying the craft at the tiny Bernachon factory in Lyon, France. Upon returning to America, Steinberg contacted his friend John Scharffenberger, who at the time was producing sparkling wine for his own Scharffenberger Cellars. Scharffenberger agreed to give fine chocolate-making a go, and sold his winery in 1995. The duo’s first efforts took place in Steinberg’s kitchen, where they used a coffee grinder, a mortar and pestle, an electric mixer, and a hair dryer to sample 30 varieties of cacao beans. “Our goal was simple,” says Scharffenberger. “We wanted to create the richest, most flavorful chocolate, by using artisan methods and sourcing the best cacao in the world.” After acquiring some vintage equipment and testing their chocolate on friends and celebrity chefs, they produced their first commercial batch just one year after the initial kitchen experiments—a smash with Bay Area foodies and confectioners. By 2000, Scharffen Berger needed to expand, so they moved their factory from South San Francisco to a larger space on Heinz Avenue in Berkeley.
Scharffen Berger still gives free public tours of their Berkeley factory. During these hour-long tours they discuss what’s really meant by “from bean to bar”: the exhaustive process of sourcing the cacao beans (they favor small-plantation beans, avoiding buying from areas where the bean growers are not treated ethically), how the beans are fermented (according to my tour guide, Robert Steinberg can be so passionate when discussing fermentation that tears come to his eyes), the sun-drying of the beans after fermentation. This lecture on chocolate takes place in a small room adjacent to the factory proper, and is made sweeter by the plates of Scharffen Berger chocolates that accompany it. (Tip: Sit in the back and you’ll get seconds. Who says you can’t savor twice?) After the crash course in chocolate, the tour-takers don white caps to keep hair off the scene and head into the factory, where the real action is. There’s the machine that toasts the cacao beans, with an operator who hand-tastes each batch for flavor. There’s a winnower, which transforms the beans to “nibs,” i.e. bean pieces. Then there’s the gorgeous mélangeur, a 1920s-era German model. The two massive grinding wheels of the mélangeur transform the nibs into a tub of spinning, silken liquid chocolate. This chocolate then goes into the massive orange conch with whole vanilla beans and C&H sugar. The factory is small, even with the new equipment they’ve amassed since the Hershey deal. This part of the tour only takes about 10 minutes, but in that time you see what Scharffen Berger is all about: the vintage European methods clearly derived from Steinberg’s exploration of French grand cru chocolatemaking, and the strict attention to all the variations of taste that vintner Scharffenberger brought to the company. The tour ends, fittingly, with samples of Scharffen Berger’s drinking chocolate in wee paper cups—chocolate similar to that which the conquistadors imported to Spain from the New World 400 years ago.
Scharffen Berger chocolate is now meeting the masses. The Hershey acquisition means, at the very least, that they’re stepping up production in their Berkeley factory, joining San Francisco confectioner Joseph Schmidt in Hershey’s new Artisan Confections division. The staff and the chocolate at Scharffen Berger have remained untouched; the only change is that you can now buy Scharffen Berger knowing that it’s joined forces with the giant that brought us Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The sublime and the ridiculous are holding hands. Maybe they can finally be friends.