The Coffee Drink That Made Me Love Coffee

Hey, morning. Morning. Usual today? That would be great. I'll do for here. The first coffee drink I ever ordered regularly was a mocha. 16 ounces, hot, and made with whole milk. My gateway into coffee was cloaked in sweet chocolate and a heavy dusting of cocoa powder, something that I'm sure is not entirely unrelatable to most of us. But here's the thing, though. I still love mochas. Enough that they're still my usual even though I've moved down to a much smaller size and now take oat milk instead of dairy. Recently, I tasked myself with making a mocha that tasted like my memories of those first few I was ordering at 16 years old. Now, a mocha is a coffee drink of three ingredients. You have espresso, milk, and chocolate. The espresso I know enough about already. The milk is an easy selection and that left me with the chocolate component, an ingredient that I knew surprisingly little about even though the genus Theobroma closely mirrors the genus Caffeia in both terroir and processing. Armed with the knowledge that I needed to know more, I headed off to find a chocolate maker. Springdale, Arkansas has a population of 84,000 and a cacao lab that's lovingly dubbed the Chocolate Cave to those who frequent it. Preston Stewart is the director of chocolate for Terroir Chocolate and Onyx Coffee Lab, the one in charge of turning cacao into a wide array of bars, sauces, and delicious treats. The aroma of roasting cacao fills the space and mingles with the smell of coffee from the cafe upstairs. In a word, it smells like a dream but I was here on a mission to understand the relationship between coffee and chocolate. So, it's kind of fun to talk about cacao and how it becomes chocolate because there's a lot of corollaries between cacao and coffee. So, here, let's back up to the tree. So, once they're ripe, it usually takes four to five years for a seedling to become a viable fruit-producing tree. Yeah, once cacao is ripened, it's usually distinguished by its color. These are actually all ripe even though they look much different but they'll trim the pods off the tree either with like pruning shears or a machete. They hack the pods open to reveal the seeds on the inside. There's generally 30 to 50 seeds per pod. They're surrounded by like a slimy white pulp. It's really delicious. If you ever get a chance to visit a cocoa farm somewhere, it's worth it just to taste it. A lot of practices, they'll strip the seeds from the pod, leave the pod and the inner placenta behind to kind of break down and fertilize, and then they'll take that wet cacao to a central location on the farm or community to then be fermented and dried. During the enzymatic changes and the breakdown and oxidation, it starts out pretty deep purple and then it transitions to the familiar brown that we're used to. After the cacao arrives in Arkansas, it has to be roasted before the process moves on. It's a stage that looks similar to coffee but isn't exactly the same. This is a cocoa bean. It's maybe six times the size of a coffee bean. So in order to achieve the roast, it takes a little bit different thermodynamic situation than coffee. The mechanics of it are very similar. This roaster is a Dietrich IR-12. It's a cocoa specific one, so it's got a couple modifications that make it unique to cocoa roasting. It's only got one burner, so you don't obviously need as much heat to achieve lower temperatures. So it's got one burner instead of one on each side. The drum spins much more slowly, so it's got a gear reducer in the back. And then also inside the drum, instead of having fins to like loft the coffee and help it get more airflow, since cocoa is much bigger and more delicate, it has like humps and bumps to help move the cocoa around as it tumbles, as opposed to like lofting it up in the air, because cocoa is pretty brittle. So you can squeeze it and break it, whereas with coffee, I don't think you can. After the cacao is done roasting, it's time for winnowing, where the roasted cocoa is cracked open and the nib is separated. The nibs are then churned slowly in melangers made with rotating granite slabs. They slowly pulverize the nibs into silky chocolate liquor. However, the chocolate liquor isn't what's used in most mochas. Instead, it's cocoa powder, which results from moving the fat and cocoa butter from the chocolate liquor. So usually we make our own chocolate sauce in-house, and a lot of cafes do as well. Usually chocolate sauce is sugar, water, and cocoa powder. We add a little salt, a little vanilla, some other things to improve the flavor and the texture. But if you were to use like, what I would say, true chocolate in your chocolate sauce, because of the fat component, and it has cocoa butter in it still, it wouldn't emulsify. It thickens really, really quickly. So you could either make like a ganache daily, or you know, multiple times per shift, and keep it liquid. One thing that you could do that's a little easier to facilitate, then you could use chocolate shavings. And like you say, you've got a little espresso cup. You could put chocolate shavings in your cup, pour your shot over it, and that would start to melt it. Maybe you give it a couple whisks to fully melt it down, and then you pour your pour your steamed milk. So that would be an easier way to do a mocha with true chocolate, as opposed to just squirting the sauce. Sure. With cocoa powder and chocolate sauce on my mind, I now returned to my studio to work on my own version. Now those first mochas I ever drank were sweet, often being topped with whipped cream. But as I've grown older, I've come to prefer a more balanced bitterness to the sweetness. Achieving this balance was the foundation of making my own sauce. I heeded the warning about the fat content in chocolate and chose a high quality cocoa powder instead, pairing it with a dark brown sugar for a fudgy, rich flavor that still felt distinctly cocoa forward. To balance the sweetness of the sugar and act as a flavor enhancer, I also used smoked sea salt and vanilla bean paste. Now here are my measurements for the sauce. 100 grams of cocoa powder, 200 grams of dark brown sugar, 200 grams or milliliters of water, 2 grams of smoked sea salt, and 7 grams of vanilla bean paste. To a small saucepan on medium heat, I added the brown sugar, water, and cocoa powder, stirring continuously until it formed a sauce just below a simmer. After removing it from the heat, I stirred in the vanilla bean paste and smoked salt before letting it cool entirely and bottling it up. This sauce will keep for several weeks in the fridge and will tighten up as it cools. However, if it tightens up too much, you can always loosen it with a hot water bath. However, at this point, we are back to where we started with a mocha. For my mocha, I'm using a double shot of freshly pulled espresso. Something medium and nutty to pair with the rest of the ingredients. Then around an ounce of chocolate sauce, and finally six ounces of steamed milk. The very last thing is to dust with a liberal coating of cocoa powder. To me, a mocha tastes like home and fall mornings, but most importantly, it is the culmination of the seeds of two tropical fruits, cacao and coffee.