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:

Mark and I were in Rockport, Massachusetts, for the wedding of longtime family friends.  There, we enjoyed many small world family and Jewish interactions which were profound in some ways and fun as well.  We:

• met the parents of a former boyfriend of a rabbinic student coming to our home at the end of the month,
• met another couple, parents of a former boyfriend of our daughter Avigail’s good friend,
• met a Jewish community leader coincidentally at the breakfast table at the B and B who was not attending the wedding,
• met a woman who communicated with our daughter through their work in Israel,
• met a colleague of Av’s EIE boyfriend,
• met the sister of a childhood friend, and
• visited with a very good friend now living in Boston.

However, all of these wonderful connections, the beautiful sea views, the balmy air contrasted with these kitschy and annoying chocolate aphorisms in several local stores:

After trying for weeks to get confirmation for our Rosh HaShanah reservation at the Pines in Fire Island–to pray in a new setting, to be with friends, to be at the beach, to have a break–we decided we had better go to our fall back option: Switzerland!

So it was chocolate that ultimately escorted us into Rosh HaShanah.  Until the last two days of the Hebrew month of Elul, the final days of the old Jewish year 5770, my personal preparation for the High Holy Days had included private meditations, some journalling, daily chanting of Psalm 27’s Achat Shealti, and an online shofar blowing every morning.

Then chocolate took over.

The 28th and 29th of Elul brought us to Zurich where multiple chocolate opportunities finished off the year:  beautiful, even snobby, chocolate shops of Teuscher, Sprungli, Schober, Truffe; four chocolate factories Camille Bloch, Halba, Maestrani and Cailler; multiple samples, freebies and purchases garnished the month’s meltdown into Tishrei with Yom Tov candle lighting on Wednesday evening.  Appropriately Mark and I toasted Rosh HaShana with a grappa filled chocolate after kiddush at the Reform shul in Zurich. An interview with CEO, Daniel Bloch, and tour at Camille Bloch, a third generation family owned company, was certainly a highlight.

With our tourguide

The local supermarket chain, Coop, displays a huge chocolate assortment.

Chocolate selection at Coop Grocery Store

The Halba and Maestrani factory stores offered great prices, but one of the Maestrani hazelnut bars contained rancid nuts.  Very disappointing.

Mark’s Nisus work contact in Zurich, novelist and screenwriter, Anne Cuneo, pointed out a couple of chocolate places we would not have otherwise found, lamenting however, that none of them really have good chocolate anymore.  It was a little like the old joke about the synagogues you don’t attend: this chocolate store is no good, that one is too expensive, that one used to be good, this one could be better, leaving us respecting her discernment but salivating for the good stuff.  Instead, we settled for drinks because she just could not bring herself to patronize her beloved Schober chocolate store, recalling the former higher quality when the two sisters, now very advanced in age, who ran it after their father had, prepared everything in the back, and shared specialties with her.

Several people we met in Switzerland confessed to me that they do not like chocolate, yet Camille Bloch’s largest market is in Switzerland.  And, several volunteered to us that they hate Hershey.  (I had read something of the competition between Swiss milk chocolate and American Hershey milk chocolate–very different formulations, which was not so easy to develop in either case, and clearly strong opinions.)

Our decision to be at home in NYC for Yom Kippur with Noam and Rachel was most importantly about being with family.  Had we stayed in Switzerland, avoiding the chocolate, plus the ubiquitous plum tart, (similar to our favorite family recipe but certainly not as good) would have been very difficult.  As it was, I did a lot of atoning at Yom Kippur for all the chocolate, the cheese and the plum tart I had eaten in Switzerland.

In response to a recent request:
(fuller information in my forthcoming book
Jews on the Chocolate Trail: Stories of Jews and Cacao)

1.  Some people think that Jews brought chocolate to France.

2.  In the eighteenth century, Jews were thought to be specialists in chocolate making.

3.  Woody Guthrie wrote a song about Chanukah gelt.

4.  North American Jewish Colonial traders were involved in the chocolate trade.

5.  The popular Israeli chocolate company, Max Brenner, is owned by the Israeli food conglomerate Elite Strauss.

6.  Jewish values such as oshek (honest and fair labor practices) and bal taschit (saving that which has potential for future use) should be considered when selecting chocolate.

7. We could add chocolate into more Jewish rituals and celebrations.

8.  It is very difficult to buy an over the counter mold for Chanukah gelt.

9.  Within the last twenty years, there were at least five Jews making artisanal chocolate in the San Francisco area.

10.  Jews have been on the chocolate trail since it was discovered by Europeans.