from zero to chocolate

Before my first-ever batch what I knew was bars snuck into movies or handfuls of tiny chips nibbled while baking cookies or big blocks whittled into slabs for campfire s'mores. A lifelong love for baking (and a brief career as a pastry chef) meant I knew it as chopped + melted +swirled, and licked from my fingers when the boss wasn’t looking.

Like most folks I knew end result without having a clue of the why or the how. Just bars, chips, chocolate kisses.

I've flipped sourdough pancakes on the banks of rivers, pickled grape leaves in Grand Canyon, baked a cake on a sailboat, made foraged-apple butter when I should have been reading my law books, checked a wedding cake on a Southwest Airlines flight and cross-country skied cheesecake to a yurt, but until a chance visit to a cocoa bean warehouse in 2014, I never knew I could make my own chocolate.

you never forget your first batch

It did not taste like a chocolate kiss, a Mars bar or any chocolate I’d ever had. What it tasted like was my chocolate worldview shattering, my cartoon brain skyrocketing chocolate fireworks, and a few Homer Simpson duh!’s thrown into the mix. Also, it had the clean + heady bite of a series of questions, of how and what, and who knew?! Each new question became a destination I began aiming for on my chocolate Map.