Shavuot’s dairy customs celebrating the revelation of Torah at Mt. Sinai beckon me towards milk chocolate.

As Janna Gur, Chief Editor of Israel’s Al Hashulchan–The Israeli Gastronomic Monthly explained to me in a phone conversation, Israelis love chocolate and have a distinct preference for milk chocolate. The Elite brand developed several favorites in the milky realm. M’kupelet, bars of thinly folded milk chocolate similar to the Flake Bar of Cadbury from 1920, have been produced by Elite since 1935. The fondly remembered Hayal-Hayelet, a fifty-gram milk chocolate bar, was sold to Israeli soldiers at subsidized prices at canteens. The great majority of the Israeli population served in the military. Chocolate eating in the Tzava, the Israeli military, provided, as one person described to me, another means to klitah or absorption into Israeli society for what he called “exotic populations, immigrant groups from Morocco, Yemen, Ethiopia.”
While Elite attempted to capitalize on the culture of the military through Hayal-Hayelet, its Para brand cultivated the general Israeli population. Israel’s boutique chocolate purveyors of today compete with this long familiar taste of Elite’s pioneering Para (cow) brand, originally known Shamnonit. Wrapped in the distinctive red paper imprinted with a cow, Israelis fondly identify it simply as Para, or Para Adumah or Shokolada Parah. To find out more about Elite and its Para on a recent visit to Israel, I tracked down a phone number for the Strauss Group (which merged with Elite in 1996) expecting an ordeal to connect with the right person in the chocolate department, yet hoping to confirm an appointment during my limited time in the country. The receptionist responded with typically hospitable Israeli informality and immediately offered to gift me a book about the history of Elite from her home library . The next morning Mark and I drove to the company headquarters in Petach Tikvah to find Tzila Gilbert at her desk with the large commemorative picture book about the 60th anniversary of Elite stapled carefully into a white envelope. Not only that, but Tzila then encouraged us to enjoy a drink at the Elite café at the other end of the hall.

As I downed my hot chocolate with M’kupelet, Tzila contacted the director of the chocolate division for an appointment. Within just moments we were chatting with a very pregnant Hila Elad, Director of the Chocolate Division of the Strauss Group. Hila grew up on Para, having often lunched on a fifty-gram slab of Para chocolate on a roll. Twenty to thirty years ago all they had was Para, she recalled nostalgically.
Israelis also adore chocolate flavored spread. Around the time that Nutella unveiled its first modest version in 1946, Israelis developed a local formula, minus the hazelnuts.

As Haim Palgui, Elite’s “Chocolate Chief Technologist” made clear,  Israelis also adore chocolate flavored spread, “ … it spreads easily on bread, it does not spoil, it is cheap and sweet.” In the austerity period of the 1950s, the Tzena, his mother, z”l, (of blessed memory) whipped up the spread using margarine, powdered sugar and cocoa powder. One former Israeli army reservist recalled that chocolate spread was often served at meals in the army, its pareve (non-dairy, non-meat) nature making it an easy addition that caused no conflict with the laws of kashrut. Also, night patrols fortified themselves with sweet tea, bread and chocolate spread, both going out and returning, as my kibbutznik brother-in-law Jay recalls. In a sweet irony, our local, upper East Side, Egyptian-owned bodega, sells the Hashachar variety of Israeli chocolate spread. Why? Isaac El Neggar says, “Just to have. Some people crave it because it relates to their childhood.” He himself prefers the taste of Nutella.
Recipe: Israeli Chocolate Spread–Dairy Version
Ingredients:
1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
3 whole eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5-6 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder
Instructions:
Cut butter into small pieces and put in blender. Add the eggs, sugar, vanilla, eggs, and blend well. Then add the cocoa powder and blend well again. Put in a container and refrigerate.

Cross posted at Jew and the Carrot.

This St. Patrick’s Day green chocolate took on a whole new meaning for us. Green garbed celebrants lined up outside of Boston’s Back Bay bars as Mark and I walked over the Charles River for a quick factory tour in nearby Somerville. One of just a few “(cocoa) bean to (chocolate) bar” companies in the country, Taza’s several sustainability commitments make it a very green company.

Taza's Organic Cacao Beans

Taza’s minimal stone grinding, based on techniques from Mexico, reduces the more commonly intense usage of energy found in most chocolate preparation resulting in a grittier texture.

Hand Crafted Grinding Stones

Sourcing organic beans from Central or South America rather than the more popular West Africa, diminishes the chocolate company’s carbon footprint. Huge shipping sacks collect the light weight cocoa shells for recycling as mulch or tea. The minimal packaging uses recycled bio- degradable materials and until recently was wrapped by hand. Deliveries by bicycle to local customers and via UPS Carbon Neutral program to others, contribute to carbon reduction.

To further human sustainability, Taza avoids cocoa beans tainted by questions of child and slave labor known to be problematic in Ghana and Ivory Coast.
Its program for “ethically traded” beans means that it incentivizes quality, visits farmers once a year to inspect workplace standards and conducts its business with each farmer transparently and publicly. Working face to face with a 200 farmer-co-op means better financial deals for them as well as the opportunity to assist farmers with improved quality.
*More information about green and other values in chocolate will be in my forthcoming book.

I thought mine was the only one.  A supply of chocolate secreted away in a drawer at the office, just in case, just a little break, just for those moments.
This other drawer was disclosed to me by chance, when I spoke to the HUC-JIR First Year students about Jewish values and chocolate in the conference room near the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) office in Jerusalem. IRAC’s Executive Director, Anat Hoffman, sat in on the talk and revealed the stash to me. IRAC’s staff has one-upped me with a very Israeli style chocolate drawer. Perhaps inspired by the socialism of Israel’s pioneering years, theirs is a communal addiction. In a tip to fairness, the supply is replenished voluntarily. As would be appropriate in Israel’s security conscious setting, the chocolate’s location is hidden to newcomers to the staff, disclosed only after proper “basic training.” While I could probably retrace my steps without a map,  I have been instructed not to reveal its location. It is, as the Hebrew idiom goes, “ai sham,” or somewhere, in an undisclosed place.

Just the other day, Anat bemoaned in a recent email that she had returned to her office after a trip to the States to find the chocolate drawer empty! Her staff consumes almost three pounds per week, each department claiming that another eats the most. However, they had “forgotten” to fill it while she was away so it is now stuffed with American brands, instead of what I had glimpsed a few weeks ago, primarily Elite’s Shokolad Para.

Chocolate Drawer at IRAC

I am thinking about this particular IRAC collection of American chocolates, as they are kosher yet neither fair trade nor organic, certifications that my book will discuss in a section that explores chocolate and our Jewish values.  At least their after-lunch chocolate snack fortifies the lawyers and others to persist in their powerful advocacy and religious justice work.

Share your chocolate story at Chocolate Chronicles!

Menachem's Peruvian Chocolate

Chips of 96% chocolate ground with salt and coffee beans adorned the amazing homemade chocolate ice cream we tasted the other day. It is the wonderful pairing of the ice cream making mania of foodie David Leichman and the passion for food grinding of Hilaf Menachem at Melo Hatene, an organic farm and food center just south of Tel Aviv.

Tall, muscular Menachem makes his high cacao percentage chocolates from beans sourced from Peru.  The agricultural center boasts grinding machines for the chocolate as well as for techina (ground sesame seeds), almond butter and olive oil.

Grinder for Cacao Beans

He claims to run the only locale in Israel that grinds cacao beans and supplies Holy Cacao centered in Hebron. Menachem’s family farm, in operation since 1895, raises 54 types of fruit and 45 types of vegetables. We hope to try his vegetarian restaurant on our next trip with the hope that we might follow it with ice cream and chocolate at the home of Rabbi Miri Gold and David Leichman (ARZA Mifgash), who kindly escorted us to Melo Hatene.

When our genial host David asked us whether we wanted to taste the coffee ice cream mixed with the chocolate chip ice cream (adorned with the locally ground Peruvian chocolate) or taste them separately, we were not sure what to say. He suggested that we enjoy them one at a time, great advice since each flavor excelled on its own, deep and strong. While he and Miri have plenty of homemade ice cream packed in the freezer and many baked goods (she was once known as the cookie rabbi for her terrific baked goods), we also saw that they have quite an large stash of specialty and quality chocolate, even more impressive than ours.

Miri and David's Chocolate Collection

It all started in front of the TV on Susan Melowsky’s sick day. Chocolate featured on the Cooking Channel inspired Melowsky to dream up the first Cincinnati Chocolate Festival of 2010,  which turned into a project of the Isaac M. Wise Temple Sisterhood. Others say the Chocolate Festival really started as a competition with the very popular Isaac M. Wise Temple’s Brotherhood chicken soup cook off.  Whatever the true impetus the Festival has been vastly successful with over 2500 in attendance in 2010 and double that this past October.

Even though the scale differed, the New York Chocolate Show had already fortified me for the inevitable lines and the crowds at Xavier University’s Cintas Center. I loved meeting pastry chef Summer Genetti at her cooking demo. Not only is she a longtime friend of our Cincinnati family, she also knows how to make that fantastic The Egg dessert of Le Bernardin. In a very expert, concise presentation she clipped the top of the egg, cleaned the shells, and prepped the savory version for that day. When Mark and I first saw The Egg delivered to tables at our lunch celebration at Le Bernardin a year ago, I thought the gentleman at the neighboring table must have had an upset stomach and needed a poached egg to sooth it. Surprise. The Egg arrived at our table as well as a pre-dessert with multiple rich flavors of chocolate, caramel, maple and sea salt, a prelude to the mousses, ice creams and mini-cookies. Summer made it look so simple.

The Chocolate Festival’s first year engaged over 200 volunteers, including a few “good men,” and grossed over $50,000 from corporate sponsors, a silent auction, advertisements, venders and admissions. The financial gains benefited a number of local charities including: YWCA Battered Women’s Shelter, South Avondale School, Interfaith Hospitality Network, The Bedtime Bundles Program and others.

I look forward to seeing how next year’s Festival grows!

The chocolate batter splattered our studio’s microwave, the stove, and the floor as Hannah Gross energetically tested chocolate recipes constrained by my primitive and limited cooking equipment.

Chocolate Everywhere

Within two hours, this amazing sister of our wonderful daughter-in-law, masterminded the creation of three recipes, each quite delicious, all finished in time for a very respectable and genteel afternoon chocolate snack. Hannah kindly took time from her very full shifts as pastry cook for a fancy restaurant in New York City to adjust and improve on recipes for the forthcoming book, Jews on the Chocolate Trail.

Someone has to do it

In the process I learned the value of a bain marie, a hot water bath for melting chocolate, since microwaving is hard on the chocolate. I saw that rolling dough between sheets of parchment paper works much better than using a cutting board dressed with flour. Adding a bit of pepper or chile to enhance the chocolate flavor improved several items.
Hannah immediately knew that my need for a something evocative of Hispanic culture or a Day of the Dead chocolate traditions could be satisfied with bizcochitos, a very flavorful cocoa, anise, cinnamon version of a butter cookie dipped in chocolate. Our version dropped the lard. Her experience helped the truffle project intoxicate, literally and figuratively, everyone who tasted them.

She was enchanted by my recipe for bicerin, the multi-layered drink of Turin, Italy, and executed it much better than I would have been able to on my own.  Actually, Hannah’s was tastier than the ones I had recently sampled, even though she had never even heard of it before.

Chocolate, Coffee, Cream Layered Bicerin

Sure is great to have a chef in the family. What was that about lawyers and doctors?

Afternoon Yummies

Anticipating Hurricane Irene, I reviewed my chocolate resources while most people stocked food, water, meds and other necessities. Some folks anticipated entertainment needs and laid in dvd’s and books; some kept phones charged and pulled out the crank radio. I reviewed my personal chocolate inventory.
Fortunately, I am generally well supplied with my favorite bars and various types of cocoa which meant that I did not have to make a special run to a store. As the storm warnings bombarded us and sheets of rain dimmed the skies, I settled in with some Equal Exchange, Valhrona, Green and Black’s, Kallari, and some bars made by a little company in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I also happen to have on hand a couple of unusual items–one with citron and thyme, the second with orange–hand-made by a Swiss company, Beschle.
I could be tempted, if I were intending to bake, to explore a venerable Hurricane Cake while hunkered down at home. The recipe was posted just in time for Irene.
When Hurricane Ivan hit Grenada in 2004, the equipment at The Grenada Chocolate Company was destroyed, along with most of Grenada, while a batch of chocolate sat in the conch machine. The “hurricane Ivan batch” was blended and re-molded into aged, special edition ‘Hurricane Ivan Bars’ by Rococo Chocolates in London.

Hurricane Ivan Bar

I missed out on that Grenada bar, yet am comforted by the close proximity of my other chocolate.

Best selling author Kate Simon’s memoir, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, speaks to the potency of wartime chocolate. Her father preceded the family to America and she records her fantasies about his life in America and her reunion with him there. From grim World War I, Warsaw, Poland, chocolate occupied her young mind as she transported herself out of her deprivation, “as wartime supplies of food diminished to coarse bread and potatoes, my life was filled with images of raisins and chocolate … all waiting for me in a big box called America, which would be mine soon, very soon.” When she, her baby brother and her mother, finally arrived at Ellis Island in 1916, their father met them. Anticipating a long wait as they were processed through immigration, her father sustained himself with a couple of Hershey bars. She recalls that when he finally picked her up in his arms to kiss her, “I tasted the chocolate and announced to my mother, ‘Our father has a sweet mouth.’”

Chocolate smoothed and soothed other refugee and immigrant passages. Overall the story of chocolate 35 years later during World War II spans from deprivation to comfort, from degradation to rescue, from despicable to artful. European Jewish businesses, including a number of Jewish chocolate enterprises in Europe, shut down during the Nazi period. The Nestle Company’s chocolate subsidiary Maggi employed thousands of war prisoners and Jewish slave laborers in its factory in Germany near the Swiss border. For many years it refused to open its Nazi era records. Nazis used chocolate bars to lure Jews onto cattle car trains to concentration camps. German saboteurs designed an exploding chocolate covered thin steel bomb intended to blow up seven seconds after someone broke off a piece.

Nazi Chocolate Bomb

Chocolate companies accommodated war’s restricted food supplies and the severe rationing of the period by modifying their products. While chocolate businesses and civilians alike were chocolate deprived during the war, the United States military sought to include chocolate in military rations. To satisfy these government orders for chocolate in wartime, companies helped each other out. Chocolate was put to several uses for the varying war efforts.

At the same time, to survive, some Jews used their chocolate skills to advantage and for survival.

Learn more in the forthcoming book: Jews on the Chocolate Trail: Stories of Jews and Cacao to be published by Jewish Lights in 2012.

Kosher L’Pesach certification does nothing to improve the quality of the chocolate for the festival celebration and actually limits choices, increases costs, diminishes taste and undermines the powerful messages of the Chag.  While Passover themed chocolate in the shape of matzah or the Seder plate

chocolate seder plate

or other Jewish symbols may enhance the décor of the Seder table, the Pesach hechsher does not necessarily make it the optimal Pesach treat as it certifies only that the chocolate has not been contaminated by chametz leavening.  Admittedly for some markets that is absolutely enough.

Unfortunately, Kosher for Passover chocolate also unnecessarily divides Ashkenazim (Jews descended from Western Europe) and Sephardim (Jews descended from Spain).  The Ashkenazi prohibition against eating kitniyot (literally “little things”) including legumes during Passover precludes the accepted use of soy lecithin as an emulsifier to make the chocolate smooth.

This prohibition does not apply to cocoa beans or coffee beans as they grow on bushes and trees and do not fall into the legumes category.  Maxwell House Coffee developed its freebie Haggadah in 1932 in order to maintain its Jewish market during Pesach, reminding Jews through this marketing ploy that coffee beans may be consumed during Pesach.  Maxwell House acquired Kosher L’Pesach certification for its coffee in 1923.

However, Sephardi custom permits kitniyot and thus the soy additive.  This culture war between Sephardim and Ashkenazim with separate certification systems in Israel boils at Pesach when observant Ashkenazim in some communities are forbidden to enter the homes of Sephardim lest they be misled or tempted into eating kitniyot.  Chocolate should not further that Pesach dissension.

Given that the pricier Pesach hechsher that divides the Jewish people over the soy additive does nothing to further the quality of the chocolate, the value of the Passover chocolate certifications does little to ameliorate other serious ethical concerns related to chocolate, particularly child labor and slave labor farming of chocolate.

(See my chapter “Our Dark Addictions:  Chocolate, Coffee and Tea” in The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic.)

Some advocates for kashrut prefer to separate the hechsher from food ethics, hesitating to conflate the two.  The move to create ethical oversight for producers and purveyors of kosher food in general has taken the form of initiatives such as:
1.  Uri L’Tzedek “an Orthodox social justice organization dedicated to combating suffering and oppression”; its Tav HaYosher certification that kosher restaurants in New York are safe work environments and pay fair wages.

2.  In Israel Bema’aglei Tzedek “a pioneer in the field of Social Kashrut, offers the Tav Chevrati seal of approval granted free of charge to restaurants and other businesses that respect the legally-mandated rights of their employees and are accessible to people with disabilities.”

3.  and, Magen Tzedek “kashrut for the 21st century… the world’s first Jewish ethical certification seal, synthesizes the aspirations of a burgeoning international movement for sustainable, responsible consumption and promotes increased sensitivity to the vast and complex web of global relationships that bring food to our tables.”

This year’s Pesach chocolate should be different: organic,  fair trade, fulfilling the ethical values of the holiday.

Our family Shabbat dinner chocolate-tasting spontaneously turned into a form of kiddush (the blessing using wine which welcomes the Sabbath). In part I was thinking about Jews in Colonial period Mexico who sometimes used drinking chocolate for kiddush when wine was not available. Mostly I wanted to sample one of the Camille Bloch liquor filled bars we had bought when visiting the Bloch factory in Switzerland but I did not want to eat the entire piece.
This is what happened with the grappa filled chocolate on October 1: