A Study in Chocolate

If you know me at all, you know that I have a pretty bad sweet tooth (that has even given rise to my fair share of cavities). It shouldn’t be a surprise then, that chocolate is one of my favorite treats. Growing up, I ate all kinds of Hershey’s, Dove and Nestle branded chocolate, accompanied by the occasional Lindt truffle, Ferrero Roche, Almond Roca, or, even more rarely, the Belgian chocolate sea shells from Guylian (those were the most decadent, and my most favorite).

In the past couple of years, I’ve grown into the habit of having a piece of (dark) chocolate as an afternoon pick-me-up. At first, it would just be a couple squares of some basic Lindt chocolate bar, but now, I’ve been exploring more “craft” or “specialty” bars. Comparing the different offerings from the grocery story has been a fun little experiment. But after a while, I grew curious as to what makes some chocolate better than others. And so began my little dive into “bean-to-bar”, craft chocolate making.

To learn more, I visited a couple of top Google search result sites and was surprised to see that there are annual international chocolate awards and even chocolate tasting certifications (although it seems a lot less strenuous than becoming a master sommelier). I even borrowed a couple of books from the (amazing) NYPL, including:

  • Bean-to-bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution: The Origins, the Markers, the Mind-Blowing Flavors by Megan Giller
  • Making Chocolate: From Bean to Bar to S’More by Todd Masonis, Greg D’Alesandre, Lisa Vega & Molly Gore (this was not only a highly detailed, informative book, but also visually very beautiful)

Here are the biggest things I learned from my little exploration:

  • Much like how the variety and terroir of grapes impacts the taste of a wine, the specific type of cocoa bean and where it is grown dictates how the end chocolate tastes, which can be quite diverse. For example, Madagascar is fruity, Philippines is earthy, Ecuador is floral and Nicaragua is nutty.
  • The same beans from the same farm can taste very different depending on how long it is fermented and roasted. Chocolate makers have to experiment numerous times before settling on a “recipe” for a single type of chocolate. It takes a lot of patience because a day or two during the fermentation period and a minute here or there during roasting can really have a big impact. Having control over the fermentation period is another reason why some bean-to-bar chocolate makers work directly with farms.
  • Other steps in the chocolate making process (after fermenting, roasting and grinding) includes conching and tempering to further release some of the inherent bitterness of the chocolate and to make a more “shelf-stable” chocolate.
  • Fair trade is great, but direct trade is even better when it comes to rewarding the chocolate farmers. In fair trade, the farm is paying an annual fee to a central governing body to get a Fair Trade certification and to obtain a higher price for their crops. However, some small farms cannot afford to pay the annual fee, and some farms that do get the certification have questionable labor practices. Direct trade, on the other hand, isn’t a certification. It’s a description of the relationship between the buyer and the farmer. By trading directly, and cutting out the middleman and brokers, farmers are able to reap a higher reward. The direct relationship also allows the farmer and chocolate maker to collaborate more closely to produce a better product and ensure that the growing practices are aligned with broader environmental and/or labor goals.
  • Bean-to-bar chocolates highlight the original chocolate flavors by using less cocoa butter and vanilla. This is why there are so many different tastes in these more “craft” chocolates compared to the mass-produced international brand chocolates. Some chocolate makers (Raaka for example) also forgo roasting all together to produce a more “raw” chocolate product. Creative mix-ins are another common element of craft chocolate making, but some producers (like Dandelion) also like to stick to two-ingredient (cacao and sugar) chocolate bars.

With this new appreciation for the whole chocolate production process – the global growing regions (even including Taiwan!), the supply chain, and the different ways new smaller bean-to-bar craft chocolate makers are approaching their craft – I have a new framework to “evaluate” the unique, small-batch chocolate bars I’ve been buying. And, just for fun, I will start tracking my personal reviews here!

If —

By Rudyard Kipling
(‘Brother Square-Toes’ – Rewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

I really like this poem by Rudyard Kipling and turn to it every once in a while, whenever I’m having a tough time.
My favorite line:
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;”

Singularity by Marie Howe

A beautiful poem brought to me by Maria Popova’s brainpickings newsletter. I usually don’t gravitate towards poetry, but this is such a great piece.

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?

There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

April 14, 2020 Reads

My Bloomberg subscription suspended. Now my financial news largely comes from The Wall Street Journal. Not ideal (always better to get news from multiple sources), but I think their coverage of the Coronavirus has been fairly good? Anyway, I’ve still been wondering about all the debt – consumer debt, corporate debt, government debt, etc. – that was accumulating before and will continue to build  after this public health crisis. Here are some older WSJ articles that I came across on the topic, some of which I have yet to read.

The last article touches on leveraged loans and CLOs. I need / want to do a little more reading on them, but I know leveraged loans are used by private equity firms in company buyouts. Unfortunately, studies have shown that PE funds laden some of their portfolio companies with such high levels of debt that their bankruptcy rate is several times higher than that of their public company counterparts. This was an interesting article from last year on the subject.

Also, OECD raised concerns over the level of corporate debt before the Coronavirus crisis really hit.

April 10, 2020 (Good Friday) Reads

It’s Good Friday and the markets are closed, but given that everyone has been working from home for the past several weeks, it feels like the start of every other day. Here are the reads I am occupying myself with as I shelter in place.

  • We Were Planning an Inequality Project. Then History Lurched. from The New York Times. The New York Times Opinion section is running a series called “The America We Need” (introductory editorial below) and this is the editor’s letter.
  • From The America We Need by The New York Times Editorial Board:
    • Advocates of a minimalist conception of government claim they too are defenders of liberty. But theirs is a narrow and negative definition of freedom: the freedom from civic duty, from mutual obligation, from taxation. This impoverished view of freedom has in practice protected wealth and privilege. It has perpetuated the nation’s defining racial inequalities and kept the poor trapped in poverty, and their children, and their children’s children.
    • The United States does not guarantee the availability of affordable housing to its citizens, as do most developed nations. It does not guarantee reliable access to health care, as does virtually every other developed nation. The cost of a college education in the United States is among the highest in the developed world. And beyond the threadbare nature of the American safety net, the government has pulled back from investment in infrastructure, education and basic scientific research, the building blocks of future prosperity. It is not surprising many Americans have lost confidence in the government as a vehicle for achieving the things that we cannot achieve alone.
    • Corporate action and philanthropy certainly have their places, particularly in the short term, given President Trump’s feckless leadership and the tattered condition of the government he heads. But they are poor substitutes for effective stewardship by public institutions. What America needs is a just and activist government. The nature of democracy is that we are together responsible for saving ourselves. // Americans need to recover the optimism that has so often lighted the path forward.
    • A critical part of America’s post-crisis rebuilding project is to restore the effectiveness of the government and to rebuild public confidence in it.
    • This moment demands a restoration of the national commitment to a richer conception of freedom: economic security and equality of opportunity.
  • Coronavirus Crisis Legacy: Mountains of Debt from WSJ
    While I agree and know that the monetary and fiscal measures taken are absolutely necessary (and there may even need to be more), I do wonder how it all plays out and gets paid for in the end (increase taxes on the rich?). I’ve been reading Ray Dalio’s Navigating Big Debt Crises and from that I know debt creation ultimately is not sustainable if you do not have the income growth to meet the increasing debt payments. With unemployment set to reach record levels, we obviously won’t have the necessary level of income. At some point, we will need to de-lever until the economic growth rate returns to a level higher than the interest rate. Dalio points to four different methods of deleveraging: 1) debt reduction 2) austerity 3) printing money and debt monetization and 4) wealth redistribution. Right now, 1) and 2) are out of the question. The Fed is already doing a incredible amount of 3) debt monetization. They’ve purchased an unprecedented amount of US Treasuries and MBS (QE) and also expanded its usage of powers under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act to finance a broader range of loans and financial products. With the multiple rounds of fiscal stimulus coming through, the government is also ‘printing’ money. However, some of the stimulus package is in the form of loans (the small business loans are technically still loans backed by a government guarantee) and not actual free money (like the stimulus checks). As for 4) wealth redistribution, I wonder how and when that comes into play.  As Dalio himself is quoted to say in the article, “After the dust settles in the U.S. there will be arguments over who should pay for all of this spending and absorb the burdens of the debts, which will be political arguments.”
  • The Thing That Determines a Country’s Resistance to the Coronavirus by political scientist Francis Fukuyama (who wrote End of History)
    • The crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity and, above all, trust in government.
    • The capacity of people at the top, and their judgment, determine whether outcomes are good or bad.
    • And in making that delegation of authority to the executive, trust is the single most important commodity that will determine the fate of a society. In a democracy no less than in a dictatorship, citizens have to believe that the executive knows what it is doing. And trust, unfortunately, is exactly what is missing in America today.
    • Trust is built on two foundations. First, citizens must believe that their government has the expertise, technical knowledge, capacity, and impartiality to make the best available judgments. The second foundation is trust in the top end of the hierarchy, which means, in the U.S. system, the president.
    • What matters in the end is not regime type, but whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state. And on this score, America’s deepening tribalism leaves few reasons for optimism.

Update: This day off has effectively turned into a workday. Work-life balance worsens when your office is in your bedroom and you are stuck at home with no escape.

 

Get Involved

Many of our core American values will be challenged over the next four years – liberties, freedoms, civil rights. I am daunted by the battles that lie ahead to defend the progress our country has made, but it is a fight we cannot afford to back down from. 

Our history has blessed us with the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Harvey Milk, Martin Luther King, Jr., and countless other anonymous heroes who pushed against what seemed to be insurmountable obstacles for causes they believed in. I expect they had their own moments of doubt, times when their confidence was shattered, but they pressed on. Despite the disappointment, we must also search for a path forward. 

There are many objectives that I could support – immigration rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, religious rights, gender equality, racial equality … But what I feel most passionate supporting is our planet – saving our environment, fighting climate change, and finding a way to clean energy and sustainable food systems. 

I know that President Obama has been a great defender of our environment, at home and abroad. Under his presidency, he has used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish 23 new national monuments and expanded several others, more than any other president. In September, he formally joined the Paris Agreement to address reducing greenhouse gas emissions with China. He enacted a Climate Action Plan and has been striving towards energy efficiency. President Obama will be a sorely missed ally of our Earth.

I was flabbergasted when I read that President Elect Donald Trump plans on having Myron Ebell lead the transition of Obama’s EPA. It is no surprise that the Sierra Club is pleading people to tell President Obama to safeguard our environment from Donald Trump. (Please Do!) As this is the cause I am interested in fighting for (at this time), I turn to you – friends, colleagues, former teachers, acquaintances, the Internet – to figure out the best ways to get involved. Please share!

Kaleo

I’ve just discovered another band that I am excited to follow: Kaleo.

Kaleo (“the sound” in Hawaiian) is a four-piece band of best friends from a small town outside Rejkayvik. They’re a big deal in Iceland, but I hope their popularity will soon spread like that of my other favorite Icelandic band – Of Monsters and Men. After signing with Atlantic Records, Kaleo is now on tour in the US. Hopefully, I’ll be able to catch their show at the Bowery Ballroom next month!

The two songs that I think best showcase their range are “All the Pretty Girls” and “Way we God Down”. I’m digging the folk, blues, and country mix to their sound, and JJ Juliusson’s husky voice has a nice edge to it.

Watch them perform “Way Down we Go” live in a volcano: