Review - Potomac Drinking Chocolate

Finally I get to talk about my favorite chocolate maker! Potomac Chocolate has been my favorite since I first tried a bar around 2011, and it's basically just one man, Ben Rasmussen. Originally working out of his basement, he now has a retail shop in Occoquan, VA. He's got single origin bars, milk chocolate bars, flavored bars, cocoa spreads, and even bonbons! It's been a fun adventure watching his small operation grow over the past few years, and his chocolate has remained consistent and absolutely amazing.

You already know I'm a fan of chopping up your favorite chocolate bar and making a drink out of it, but it sure is nice when the chocolate maker does the work for you and offers packets of drink mix. I ordered both the Duarte (Dominican Republic) single origin and the Spiced drinking chocolate.

Also, as I was only enjoying a cup for myself, I cut the directions in half.

First up is the Duarte. You can see what it looks like out of the package. This is real drinking chocolate! I made it with 2% milk. It is, literally, just a cup of bean-to-bar ganache. Very thick, rich, and perfect. The flavors Ben is creating over there in Woodbridge come right through, and are not overpowering or too strong. This is my favorite kind of drinking chocolate, where you can truly taste the artisanal quality.

Sometimes with strong, thick drinking chocolates, when I've finished, I find myself kind of exhausted on sweets for a bit. That's not the case with Potomac. I finished the cup and it was just right.

The ingredients are as pure as the bars - two simple things.

The Duarte has a prominent chocolate fudge flavor, I thought. The tasting notes say "cocoa and red fruit", and I think with the milk preparation, the cocoa really comes through the most. Sometimes when I make a cold chocolate milk, I'll simply use cocoa powder and honey, which really lets the cocoa flavor shine through, unlike the overly sweet, processed flavor of making chocolate milk with store bought syrup. This cup of Duarte reminded me of that, but amplified with the amazing flavor subtleties Potomac is known for. It's definitely got the complexity of a bean-to-bar chocolate, but it's not hitting you over the head with tangy notes or astringent bitterness. This is, of course, why I think Potomac is my favorite maker to begin with. Ben really captures the perfect balance of the specific flavors of the cacao bean while retaining a classic note of dark chocolate.

I wonder if the red fruit will come through more with the water preparation? We'll get to that in a bit.

A couple of years ago I picked up the green mug I'm using here, back before Ben was even making drinking chocolates. The original packaging was a pleasant green wrapper with the now-iconic fish, each bar having a slightly different shade, and this mug matched perfectly. It felt right to still use it, even though the packaging has changed a few times since then. In fact, the packaging has changed yet again since I took these photos! In my memory, I still see Potomac Chocolate as that light shade of green.

Here you can see a variety of Ben's bars: his production line from a few years ago, a few bars of his then-brand-new Cuyagua, Venezuela bar, and a few test bars while he was working out the Cuyagua production. These were a Kickstarter reward!

Now on to the Spiced drinking chocolate!

Again I cut the directions in half, using a digital kitchen scale to measure out half of the 85 grams in the package (well, roughly half). Checking the ingredient list shows you exactly the spices added to the chocolate.

   

It also came out thick like a European drinking chocolate. In my opinion, this means it's a chocolate you should slow down and enjoy, to sip like a dessert. This isn't something you'd grab with a donut, or in a to-go cup as you run out the door. This is an event. This is like opening an expensive bottle of wine (if you're into wine).

I served mine with some rolled wafer cookies and a small variety of Plush Puffs marshmallows, but once I began enjoying it, I savored it by itself. The chocolate needed nothing else.

The Spiced absolutely lived up to expectations. It's wonderful. The package doesn't list the origin of the bean, but I suspect it is the same Duarte bean as the other drinking chocolate. It's fudgey and rich, barely sweetened, and the spice is perfect!


The sea salt, cinnamon, and Aleppo chili pepper, while simple ingredients, add such complexity to this drink. It's got some heat for sure, but it's not the kind of heat that leaves you gasping for cool air afterwards. It's measured and careful, really something different.

So now to try these out with other styles of preparation, the first being my favorite way for most drinking chocolates. I used a full mug of 2% milk and the remaining 41 grams of the Spiced chocolate, which is a very different ratio of liquid to chocolate from what is advised in the instructions. It made a more traditional American style serving of hot chocolate.

And naturally, it's delightful this way. Not strong and powerful, not a concentrated, thick drinking chocolate. Also not very sweet, and the chocolate flavor is still comes through perfectly, along with all the nuances in flavor from the bean-to-bar process. The spice still hits pretty hard, too, giving it a finish to remember.

If I could change anything about it, I'd actually love for the chocolate to be the more prominent flavor rather than the spices. I just love what Ben does with chocolate so much, I want it to be the star. I could probably create that myself by simply making a mixture of the Duarte and the Spiced, or by chopping up a solid bar and adding some of that in.

 I made my last portion of the Duarte with water as instructed on the package. Wow, it's intense and chocolatey, and there's that sharp red fruit tang I was expecting in the earlier preparations! Not overpowering, though, which is very pleasant. Many water based drinking chocolates are strong and sweet and like a punch of concentrated flavor. This one, while more intense than the milk varieties, is not overly strong or sweet. And the portion size recommended on the instructions is just right.

Also part of Kickstarter rewards from years past were t-shirts emblazoned with the current logos and a little crocheted fish! Ben's wife Cyndi made these as an extra bonus during one of the Kickstarter campaigns, and I had to get the green one! I've also been taking the used wrappers and creating laminated bookmarks from them. I've even made some from the older original green packaging. As an avid reader, I can think of no better way to show off wrappers and share my love of craft chocolate!

      

Overall, Potomac Drinking chocolates are a delight, and in my opinion, one of the best in the world. If you love (or are interested in trying) bean-to-bar hot chocolates, you will love this drink. Go get some at the website, and follow them on Instagram. Send a message to Ben, and tell him Melting Mug sent you!

Class - Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Making, Day One

Obviously, I love chocolate. It's amazing stuff. Although I blog about real hot chocolate drinks, I do of course have tremendous love for chocolate in general. In the past year or so, I've also come to understand that chocolate doesn't only mean Hershey's, Nestle, and Cadbury's. We all know these names because these are the companies that are big enough to have their products in every gas station and market in the world.

Unknown to most, there is a world of artisan chocolates. People who make chocolate by themselves, in a regular kitchen, with utensils everyone can buy. I don't mean making chocolate as in melting down some baking chocolate and pouring it into molds. I mean taking a cacao plant and turning it into a chocolate bar. "Artisan" means they're doing it for the art of the process, not with the goal of making the most money, but with the goal off seeing what kinds of flavors develop from certain types of bean, and really letting that singular flavor come through.

This sounds odd until you try your first artisan bar. More often than not, they're fruity and tangy, sometimes they're earthy and nutty. When you look at the ingredients list and all it says is "cacao beans, sugar", that's when the surprise hits. Where did all that fruitiness come from? Why was one bar sour and citrus flavored, when another was smokey and bitter? That's what artisan chocolate makers are exploring, that range of flavors in different types of beans. It's astounding! It's really hard to fathom the variety until you try a few.

Some of these makers, like Mast Brothers, Patric, and Madre, have small factories or shops, usually just one building in one location. Some, like Potomac, are so small, the chocolate maker is literally working in his basement on machines he built himself. Others, like Taza and Chocovivo, stone grind their chocolates, or only grind them once, leaving them with a texture unlike any others. Chocovivo doesn't even temper theirs!

What is tempering? What does a cacao bean look like? How does it become a chocolate bar if all you have to add is sugar to make it? The more I tasted these amazing chocolates, the more questions I had. I searched online, read wikipedia entries, watched youtube videos, but it's not the same as seeing it done in a kitchen, being a part of that process from beginning to end. So when I found this two day class, I signed up!

It's held at a place in Orange County, CA, called Qzina. They supply restaurants, bakeries, and caterers all over southern CA. They also have a bunch of classes in pastry and confection making.

As much as I was interested in learning how chocolate is made, I also was really hoping to come away with enough knowledge to perhaps make a hot chocolate directly from the cacao bean! How awesome would that be?!

So, in that spirit, let me show you what it was like to make chocolate from a bin of cacao beans!

This is the inside of the Qzina showroom and demonstration lobby. We browsed the products they sell, admired the amazing chocolate sculptures created by the chefs, and ate lunch here.

Chef Francois Mellet was our instructor. He is very French, and absolutely amazing at what he does.

Which is work with chocolate.

Every day.

I can't even fathom...

In Qzina's huge storeroom, he explained to us the entire process. See the plastic bin his hand is resting on? That's 30 pounds of cacao beans. This room was amazing. They store many bins of beans from various places around the world, and the smell of them filled the entire place. Not a chocolate smell, but a tangy, fruity, earthy smell. 

There are three types of cacao beans that are mainly cultivated - criollo, forastero, and a hybrid of the two, trinitario. The beans we were using for our class were trinitario beans. This sack was from the Gran Couva Estate on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.

The beans were cut from their pods and fermented on the farm in Trinidad. Once they've fermented the desired amount of time (usually about two or three days), they are dried and packed into sacks for shipping all over the world.

First thing we did was sift them. Sometimes bits of the plant, leaves, insects, and other things can get bunched in there as they pack the beans. Sifting them gets rid of all that stuff and just leaves you with whole beans.

Which is what is in that bin right there. Sifted, ready-to-roast cacao beans.

Here's a portion of the storage containers of cacao beans they had there. It was fascinating reading the labels, seeing where each bean had come from. Such an insane variety!

The beans were scooped into the roaster. It rotates while the beans roast to make sure they all heat evenly.

We roasted them at around 185 degrees for over an hour. Occasionally, we would pull a couple out to check them and see how the flavor was developing. It was amazing to taste how the flavor changed as they roasted!

They slowly began taking on fruity tones and a bitterness that you could somehow sense chocolate in. It's hard to explain, because it didn't taste like chocolate yet. But the scents and tones of what our final chocolate would be were developed here, and I don't think I recognized that entirely until we were done and could taste those same flavors in our finished chocolate.

When they had roasted long enough, they had to be cooled quickly, so they'd stop cooking inside the bean. This pan connected to the front of the roaster was a metal screen that had air being pumped up through the beans. We took turns raking and churning them so they could all get cooling air over them.

Here they are, roasted cacao beans. They continue to call them cacao until the grinding process begins, when they finally switch to calling it cocoa.

The next step was to remove the thin crispy shell around each bean. This shell is the dried pulp of the cacao plant, which the beans are immersed in while inside the cacao pod. The acid that forms and penetrates the bean as that pulp ferments is the first step of creating an individual bean's flavor. But now that we've roasted them, the flavor is there, and it's time to remove that husk.

Apparently some pioneer of chocolate making learned that if you cracked the bean, the husk came off very easily. Not only did it come off, but it's very light compared to the bean chunks, so it can be separated out simply by vacuuming them away as the cracked beans fall into another bin. This is called cracking and winnowing, and this is the machine that does it.

And this is what you now have - cacao nibs. The cracked, shelled, roasted cacao beans. I don't know why they call them nibs. I bought a bag of these months ago online. These are a delicious, albeit bitter, snack, and they are really, really good for you! Chocolate doesn't become bad for you until the sugar is added.

You should order some! They are really good in yogurt, ice cream, almost anything. There's even some salad dressing recipes out there that use them, and some meat and poultry rubs!

It's still not chocolate yet, though. Those nibs need to be ground up a few times. This is the grinder. It has a filter on it that has little holes in it, and once the nibs are ground small enough, it comes through the holes and falls into the pan underneath.

It's becoming liquid because of the fat content in the bean. The friction of grinding the beans heats them up, which melts the fat inside of each bean. That fat is cocoa butter. So as the solids get ground smaller, and the fat gets liquefied, you end up with cocoa mass (also called cocoa liquor).

Here's the grinding discs. Yep, I tasted that.

Once that first grinding is done, we change the filter to one with smaller holes. So now the cocoa mass won't drip out until it's ground even smaller.

Finally, it's starting to look like chocolate! This is still nothing but the bean. Amazing! We tasted it after every grinding stage, to see if the flavor changed. Once the grinding began, the flavor changed very much, with all that warmed up cocoa butter. It actually got worse! Even though this looks delicious, it's pretty horrible!

Once the three stages of grinding was completed, we weighed it to see how much of the original 30 pounds we lost during the process. It was just a tad under 20 pounds now! Crazy!

The last stage of the day was the refining machine. This metal bucket was filled with steel balls, each about 1/4 of an inch around. Paddles inside the bucket rotated everything, and once we turned this on, it ran straight through the night and even after we all arrived the next morning. This really smoothed out the chocolate into a liquid, not grainy at all.

This was also the stage where we added the other ingredients to create our finished chocolate!

Once we got the cocoa mass into the refiner, Chef Francois showed us how to create a chocolate recipe. We decided to make a 72% dark chocolate. That means 72% of the entire final product had to be derived from the cacao bean.

67% of our recipe was the cacao mass we made, then we added in an extra 5% of cocoa butter. The extra cocoa butter would make it a bit smoother and shinier for a better presentation and melting smoothness.

This is the cocoa butter. Of course, we all had to taste this, as well. It tasted almost like nothing. Like plain wax.

We added 0.6% of lecithin powder. Lecithin is an emulsifier, so I believe it might help keep the cocoa solids and butter from separating once the chocolate is solidified.

You know when you have a chocolate bar for a really long time and it gets that white powdery coating on it? That's the cocoa butter separating out from the solids and slowly oozing to the surface. If you ever see that on your chocolate, do NOT throw it away! It's fine, it's still good, it tastes exactly the same. Would you throw away a salad dressing if the oil and water separated? No, you wouldn't. So don't throw away your chocolate!

To bring our recipe up to 100%, we added in 27.4% sugar. And that's it! Cacao bean, sugar, and a touch of lecithin. We put the other ingredients into the refiner with the cocoa mass, and it ground them up and smoothed them out right along with the chocolate.

For the remainder of the first day, we tried tempering chocolate by hand on the large marble table they had there, and we made some bon bons with some chocolate they had made the day before. I'll explain more about tempering in the Day Two post.

I'll get Day Two posted ASAP! Maybe I'll squeeze in a hot chocolate before that, though.