As we near the 3rd anniversary of the founding of chocophile.com, we are, as Emeril Lagasse is fond of saying, “Going to Kick It Up A Notch.” We’ve signed an agreement to produce a newsletter on chocolate for Chocolatier Magazine that will take chocophile.com and The Chocolate Co-Op to a new level. To celebrate, we’re accepting charter memberships in a club for chocophiles, chocoholics, and people of any and every persuasion who love chocolate. It’s called the New World Chocolate Society and as a Charter Member, you’ll be entitled to a number of special benefits:

Elise Macmillan was 11 years old when she co-founded her Denver-based company, the Chocolate Farm, in 1998. Her brother, Evan, was 13.

In 1999, the siblings received an Entrepreneur of the Year Award from accounting giant Ernst & Young. This year, they’ve received something else: a cease-and-desist demand from Kansas City, Mo.-based Russell Stover Candies. ...

Unbridled Chocolates of Keene, NH is hosting a chocolate making marathon to benefit local charities. The event begins at 3pm on Friday, April 28 in the window at the Unbridled Chocolates store, 36 Central Square, Keene, NH. Guest Chocolatier Peter Jost, formerly with Jacques Torres Chocolates, New York, will join local Chocolatier Alan Crofut of Unbridled Chocolates in creating beautiful chocolates all day and night. ...

A high-end organic chocolate company in Ashland is recalling 40,000 pounds of bars, bricks and drops because of high levels of lead in the products. The raw organic cacao from which the recalled chocolate was made came from a single supplier in Ecuador in a region of volcanic soils. He said company officials are planning to travel to Ecuador to examine the possibility that high lead content in the soil might be responsible for the test results. Dagoba, founded in 2001, has built a reputation as a manufacturer of high-end chocolate, sold through specialty and organic foods stores. 

New York Chocolate & Confections Co. laid off its 40 hourly plant employees on 3/27. The layoffs come as the company waits for a visit this week by officials from the Ivory Coast government and cocoa board. One reason for the visit is to correct an impression on the part of some officials that the plant is old and run-down. The visitors are also expected to approve or deny funds that will pay off the plant’s overdue bills. ...

This just in from the October 26, 2005 edition of The Christian Science Monitor:

To solve the mystery of life’s origin, scientists can no longer focus solely on Earth. They must take the entire universe into account. Reason: the discovery of nitrogen-carrying aromatic hydrocarbons throughout the universe. Prior to their recent discovery in space, scientists had thought these biologically important molecules were unique to Earth. One type is the main ingredient in chocolate. 

PastryScoop.com is an outreach program founded by The French Culinary Institute that is charged with “supporting the increasing importance of pastry arts and pastry chefs in American and International cuisine” and to act as a resource to both professionals and non-professionals. PastryScoop.com has a wide range of interesting resources online and hosts a number of offline events including two conferences annually and a regular Supper Club at The French Culinary Institute’s restaurant, l’Ecole.

I was invited to attend the December 2004 Supper Club dinner featuring chocolates from E. Guittard. Overall take: quite delicious and inviting in its relative informality. Good food, good wine, good chocolate, good company.

The word praline has many different meanings (not to mention at least three different pronunciations) in chocolate and confectionery so it can be confusing to figure out exactly what is being referred to.

The early history of three-year-old Dagoba can be neatly summed up by the following phrase, “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”

Although he made and sold only 80 pounds of confections during his first year in production, Lillie Belle Farms’ venture into chocolate started out as an experiment in figuring out how to take the berries owner Jeff Shepherd was growing on what had been a moribund two-acre berry farm and sell them in product that would enable him to make a living.

Although it was just introduced into the American market in September, 2004, Plantations chocolate has been in development since 1997. It was then that Pierrick Chouard (founder of Vintage Chocolates and eChocolates.com) visited Ecuador and got the idea to develop a chocolate using 100% Nacional cacao beans.

According to John Stanley, a lecturer in biochemistry at Trinity College, Oxford University in the UK, “Choosing the right sandwich can help you recover from a hangover and even perform better in bed.” He recommends ...

Yesterday (Monday, October 4th, the first day of Chocolate Week in the UK), chocoholic thieves made off with four lorries (trucks) full of Cadbury chocolate. ... 

There’s a funny little e-mail I seem to get every couple of weeks about how chocolate is good for you because it is a fruit. While this is more or less true (chocolate is made from the seeds of the fruit of the cacao tree), chocolate can’t really be thought of as a health food because of its relatively high fat content—approximately 60% of the calories in chocolate come from fat. Notwithstanding that fact, it turns out that most of the negative perceptions that we have about chocolate have nothing to do with the cocoa content of the chocolate, but with the other fats and ingredients that are in the chocolate.

When is chocolate more than just chocolate? When it’s molecular gastronomy as well.

Made “popular” by Heston Blumenthal at the seminal Fat Duck restaurant in the UK as well as Ferran Adria at el Bulli in Spain, molecular gastronomy uses laboratory techniques to “deconstruct” ingredients and use them in unusual ways to create textures and flavors not possible without an understanding of the science behind food chemistry.

Christopher Columbus “discovered” cacao almost exactly 500 years ago, yet had no idea of the value of that discovery.  Half a century later, cacao made its way to the court of Spain and almost literally disappeared from the written histories of Europeans in the New World. But cacao did not vanish from the New World. By the eighteenth century there was a thriving trade in cocoa between South America and Caribbean ports and ports all along the Eastern Seaboard of North America, from Boston to Philadelphia and south to the Carolinas.

In most histories, the story of chocolate in the colonies begins ...

As was mentioned in the article on chocolate in colonial America, Philadelphia was a hotbed of early chocolate manufacturing during Colonial times. To some extent, that independent pioneering spirit is still alive in Jubilee Chocolates, founded by John Doyle and Kira Baker back in 2001 in the borrowed kitchen of a friend’s apartment.

Jubilee—and John Doyle in particular—in many ways exemplifies the new generation of chocolatiers that is cropping up all over the country ... 

This evening (September 21, 2004) marked the official launch of Vintage Chocolates’ Plantations line of 100% Arriba chocolate products made from 100% Ecuadorean cacao. The launch was held at the River Cafe in NYC (well, Brooklyn, actually), and was co-sponsored by the Rainforest Alliance. Plantations chocolate is the first that is made with Rainforest Alliance certified cacao beans.

Scharffen Berger, the Berkeley-based chocolate manufacturer, has announced that they are opening a retail store in Manhattan. (At least they are posting listings for a store manager on Craigs List.) ...

Debauve & Gallais, one of the world’s oldest chocolatiers and one of France’s first luxury brands, recently announced plans to open a boutique on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (20 East 69th Street off Madison) joining Fauchon and La Maison du Chocolat among other top European brands in the neighborhood. The opening is scheduled for sometime in September, 2004. ...

Zingerman’s is to the upper mid-West, what Zabar’s, Balducci’s, and others are to New York: stores for the besotted gourmet. In addition to a wide range of deli items, they also sell a varying range of chocolate items and other sweets.

Let’s face it, as much as we like high end chocolate, we all have secret chocolate obsessions for one or two particular candies that, no matter how sophisticated our palates become, we always have a yearning for. Over at TheChocolateCritic.com I shared with you some of mine ... and now it’s your turn to share yours with the rest of us.

On August 3rd, 2003 a new European Union (EU) “norm” went into effect—2000/36/EG. This new norm will allow all chocolate manufacturers in the EU to substitute up to five percent of the cocoa butter they would normally use in the chocolate with what are called “replacement” or “substitute” fats. This means that the rest of the EU “catches up” with Switzerland, which has had a similar rule in effect since 1995.

Not surprisingly, the ruling has been enormously controversial, and it is now up to individual companies (and/or countries) to decide if they will take advantage of the new, looser, regulations.

During the quiet of the middle of the night as the Queen Elizabeth 2 plows through the waters of some ocean somewhere in the world, some of the pastry crew, which total a dozen, are working in the kitchen creating truffles which will be presented to the passengers at dinner each evening. By Phyllis Barr

A Canadian visitor to chocophile.com asked some very interesting questions about Callebaut and the confusion between Barry-Callebaut (the Belgian chocolate manufacturer) and Bernard Callebaut, the Canadian chocolatier.

Barry-Callebaut is now one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in Belgium, Europe, and the world. The company was founded in 1911 and was purchased by the Swiss company Suchard Toblerone in 1980. More recently they merged with Cacao Barry to form Barry-Callebaut, and Callebaut is just one of the brands manufactured by the Barry-Callebaut company.

Kraft Foods has abandoned plans to illuminate Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze, in the purple color associated with its chocolate brand, Milka.

... eat bad chocolate.
-- Anonymous

... or give me death!
-- with apologies to Thomas Paine

... are all better rich.
-- Anonymous, text found on a needlework pillow

... chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?”
-- Marquise de Sevigne (French writer and lady of fashion; Feb, 1677)