Seattlest Pix 09Nov21
Touch Me, I'm Sick
Seattlest Pix 09Nov22
Manifold Motion's Miscellenea II Wraps Up Tonight
Around The -Ists This Week
Blog called DallasFood is making big, brown waves with a ten-part (ten part!!) series about a small, Plano, Tex., chocolate-maker called NoKa. Point being, for starters, that NoKa's not a chocolate-maker per se but a chocolatier who purchases commercially packaged chocolate bars from a third party and uses them to make, or confect, a chocolate couverture. In installments of Dickensian intensity, DallasFood ferrets out the source of NoKa's chocolate: Bonnat, a respected firm based in the French Alps that actually processes beans from chocolate plantations in Africa, Asia and South America.
DallasFood's main point is that NoKa is charging a lot of money, between $300 and $2,000 a pound, for very little work (since when has that been a crime in Texas?), and misrepresenting its products besides (again, SOP for Texas). If only the same level of passionate, investigative journalism had been applied to the search for WMD!
Other blogs have chimed in, generally echoing DallasFood's shocked, shocked reaction. And a blogger who tried to defend NoKa turned out to be a flack. Some people in Texas are as passionate about their chocolate as Seattlest is about salmon...or pizza.
Here in Seattle, we actually have the country's only independently owned, genuine bean-to-bar chocolate maker. That would be Theo's, in Fremont, where founder Joe Whinney and his team import organic, fair-trade cacao beans from Ghana, Ivory Coast, Madagascar and Venezuela, and sell 3-ounce, single-origin bars of chocolate (sweetened with organic Swedish sugar) for $5.25 to $6 apiece. Which works out to under $100 a pound. Repeat after us: even if the raw materials come from half a world away, do what you can to buy local, buy local, buy local!
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Theo may produce good chocolate, but I am continually disappointed by how little the staff is informed about their product and chocolate in general. They seem bought into the "it's just hip" philosophy.
Theo offers a tour of their chocolate processing factory, which is very neat and informative, although unfortunately our tour was headed by a ditsy lady who kept speaking in inaccurate terms of coffee/coffee roasting in comparison to chocolate/chocolate roasting.
I must say my experiences at Theo have been quite to the contrary. I have always been welcomed with very friendly and informitive staff, and had a tour with an enthusiastic and knowledgable guide.
"Point being, for starters, that NoKa's not a chocolate-maker per se but a chocolatier who purchases commercially packaged chocolate bars from a third party and uses them to make, or confect, a chocolate couverture."
You have this a little wrong - the finished form of chocolate that all chocolatiers purchase from a supplier is couverture (chips or blocks of chocolate), which they then temper and mold into chocolates, truffles, etc. There's nothing wrong with the chocolate Noka uses to make their products, just how they characterize its origin ("It's our chocolate made to our specifications.") and how much they mark it up considering how little they actually do to it.