Adam Kavalier is a pertinacious person about his beans. The Undone Chocolate co-caster says he pays about $500 throughout the market price per ton as being his organic farm-direct cocoa beans to be~ a premium product. And if they’re not up to snort , he’ll sometimes send them back. Then, in every 150-pound sack of cocoa beans, he sorts on the ~side the small ones and the with a bee in the bonnet ones by hand.
“These are looking certain good. They’re uniform in glutinous substance,” Kavalier says, scooping up a handful and letting them fall through his fingers. If you prosy in, they smell acidic. “The cocoa beans are fermented,” he explains.
Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair” is playing in the background of the Union Kitchen workspace, in which place Kavalier is working on a late Thursday afternoon next to a dog biscuit composer and a chickpea chip producer—a few of the 50 or so artisans who application the food incubator. Kavalier launched Undone Chocolate by his wife Kristen Kavalier in December, and they at this moment produce 2,000 chocolate bars a month in D.C.
Kavalier spreads the beans loudly on pans and demonstrates how he roasts them in the oven. When they’re transacted, he’ll use a vacuum-powered organization called a winnower to separate the shells from the cocoa nibs. The hull will be packaged up and sold of the same kind with an herbal-earthy tea. But the nibs demise be combined with organic cane sugar—the no other than other ingredient in the chocolate—and fix for three days.
Kavalier lifts the red lid off the cylindrical grinder, which can hold up to 65 pounds of chocolate. It looks like a huge. stock pot with two big wheels interior turning in opposite directions—fast, afterward slow, fast, then slow. It takes a day or two to get the chocolate agreeable and another day or two to curtail the bitterness. “A lot of spirit development happens here,” he says.
The chocolate leave then be poured in pans and old for between a week and couple months, depending on the origin of the beans. As through wine, aging chocolate brings out complexity and develops the subtle fruit and nut flavors that hide under the bitterness.
The chocolate is at that time chopped into chunks, melted down, and tempered, that gives the product its “glare, snap, and buttery mouthfeel,” ahead of it’s filled in molds, wrapped, and labeled.
“People operate Willy Wonka jokes,” Kavalier admits. “I be perceived like an Oompa Loompa sometimes. It’s a parcel of work.”
This isn’t virtuous some whimsical pastime for Kavalier. He has a Ph.D. in biology by a focus in phytochemistry and was headed with respect to a career in cancer pharmacology face to face with he and his wife decided to sally their own chocolate company. While D.C. has chocolatiers like Co. Co. Sala, who constitute confections and truffles but don’t become bars from the bean, Undone is the District’s principal chocolate manufacturer. (The suburbs, however, are home to chocolate makers like Woodbridge’s Potomac Chocolate and Gaithersburg’s SPAGnVOLA.) Later this year, Undone decree be joined by Concept C, any other bean-to-bar operation opening nearest to DC Brau on Bladensburg Road NE from pair Colin and Sarah Hartman. She’s a São Paulo, Brazil, vernacular and culinary school grad who’s worked on this account that Valrhona and San Francisco’s Dandelion Chocolate, and he’s a Wharton MBA who served in the U.S. Marines.
Both companies behold themselves not just as producers of a agreeable treat, but as sources for familiar and environmental good. Concept C enjoin specialize in bars made with cocoa beans from Brazil’s Amazon and Atlantic rainforests, where fungal infestations devastated the cocoa assiduousness several decades ago. As a product, many farmers cut down their cocoa plantations internal the rainforest canopy and converted them into things like dumb beasts pastures. The Hartmans hope to relieve restore the rainforest, which has a symbiotic propinquity with cacao trees, by supporting the region’s chocolate endeavors. They plan to donate a still-undetermined portion of their sales to a Brazilian NGO that purchases deforested, inefficient farmland and helps bring back the vernacular plants and wildlife.
“We’re not honest a chocolate company,” says Colin Hartman. “We absence to be seen as a company that also actualizes rainforest conservation.”
Undone Chocolate is to boot interested in sustainable sourcing, but the Kavaliers are especially touting the soundness benefits of their chocolate. The bars approach with labels like “replenish” and “nourish” and a cardiogram figure. Whereas most chocolate bars advertise what they contain, Undone wanted to practise something different: “It’s manner of similar to vitamin water at what place you’re actually trying to person a feeling that it provokes,” says Kristen Kavalier.
Adam Kavalier came over cacao, the plant used to constitute chocolate, while he was studying put in seed biochemistry and how plants make therapeutical compounds in graduate school at the City University of New York. (He then got a post-doctorate degree at Weill Cornell Medical College.) He started make chocolate at home and bringing it into the lab to touchstone its antioxidant levels. He became obsessed by finding beans to craft the chiefly antioxidant-rich chocolate possible.
“It nature of started as this analytical processing deed,” Adam Kavalier says. “Making chocolate takes several steps and involves making some of your have a title to machinery. I love to build things and affection to make things … So it filled a fate of different passions for me, the two on the science side and the showing skill in applying the principles of beauty side.”
Meanwhile, Kristen Kavalier had her acknowledge lifelong tie to chocolate. She says at the time her mom found out she was great with child with her, she ate tons and tons of chocolate. “The sally was I came out as a chocolate baby instead of a crack baby,” she says. “Growing up, I had aggregate the really funny chocolate sweatshirts or pillows.” It seemed meant to have ~ing when Adam Kavalier gave her four homemade chocolate bars adhering their first date.
Adam Kavalier spent about five years experimenting with recipes in their 700-settle-foot New York apartment. The unite had to put an acoustic ink-fish barrier wall over their kitchen means of access because they’d often have couple or three noisy chocolate grinders going at formerly. Then, because they were worrie in an opposite direction the vibrations disturbing their neighbors downstairs, they stacked up yoga mats. The unmixed space was filled with huge containers of beans, and nibs, ginders, a temperer, a cool, and other equipment. “It just took up the entire apartment,” Kristen Kavalier says. “The alone room that never had chocolate in it was the bedroom, and actually at one point I think it did.”
The Kavaliers started Undone Chocolate without interrupti~ a small scale while they were at rest in New York, selling some bars to friends and hosting chocolate fondue parties. Then Kristen Kavalier got a do ~-work in D.C. with a affable analytics startup called NewBrand, where she continues to act full time. Adam Kavalier, who grew up in Chevy Chase, eventually moved the influence here with plans to move into a professional kitchen and construction the business.
Concept C’s Sarah Hartman had a real different path to a career in chocolate. She went to kitchen school in Brazil and worked concisely in restaurants. She knew she wanted to have ~ing in the food industry, but she didn’t apprehend where. Her mother-in-law gave her a main division on chocolate while she was quiet in school, and she started researching chocolate-make and its history. “I good-natured of fell in love,” she says. She went to one online school called Ecole Chocolat to learn besides about the craft before going in successi~ to work in corporate sales with a view to Valrhona.
Both chocolate makers saw some unfilled niche for their products in D.C.: Many greater cities have a chocolate factory. “We were surprised while we got here that there was none factory,” Adam Kavalier says.
Undone Chocolate popularly sells three 70 percent dark chocolate bars, including some with pink Himalayan salt and a different with cinnamon, cardamom, and chili. The bars are beneficial at Glen’s Garden Market, Yes! Organic Market put ~ 14th Street NW and in Petworth, Smucker Farms, and Compass Coffee, in the midst of others. The Kavaliers have national ambitions eventually, of the same kind with do the Hartmans. When they dart, Concept C will make Atlantic and Amazon rainforest mystic chocolate bars plus dark and milk “guiltless Brazilian” chocolates that blend the couple. Later, they’d like to gain bars that incorporate Brazilian fruits like cashew consequence and guava. Concept C’s factory will also host tours, tastings, and workshops.
As Kavalier sees it, the competition is receive. Both are creating high-end products that don’t advance cheap given the quality of the ingredients.
“It’s weal for all of us to receive more chocolate here,” Adam Kavalier says, “for the cause that it raises people’s awareness of what’s after the $7 or $8 bar put ~ the shelf.”
Eatery tips? Food pursuits? Send suggestions to ravenous@washingtoncitypaper.com.
Photos by Darrow Montgomery
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