Bryan Graham and CEO Dahlia Graham. Photo courtesy of Fruition Chocolate Works.
October 14, 2011. That's the date of the first email I received from Fruition Chocolate founder Bryan Graham. It said, "My company, Fruition Chocolate, is a new bean-to-bar chocolate and confectionery workshop in the Catskill mountains of New York. Working in small batches with exceptional quality ingredients, we strive to produce world-class chocolate and confections. I believe our products would be a perfect fit for Chocolopolis and I think you will feel the same way after tasting them." It was fun digging into my email archives for this snapshot of the early days of the craft chocolate movement, when there were only a handful of craft chocolate makers in the US, and Fruition was part of a wave of new makers that entered the market after 2010.
One of my favorite anecdotes from the early days of craft chocolate was the time I received a shipment of chocolate from Fruition with an experimental bar nestled inside my order. It was packaged in a clear cellophane wrapper affixed with a yellow sticky note that said, "100%, just for fun." Bryan had included an unsweetened bar of single-origin chocolate he made to satisfy his geeky chocolate interests. He didn't think it would be commercially viable. I called him immediately and said, "Are you kidding? I can sell that bar." 100% cacao bars were our best sellers. You'll still find a 100% bar in Fruition's product lineup today, a lasting legacy of our budding chocolate relationship.
He Never Came Back Upstairs
Photo courtesy of Fruition Chocolate Works.
Many of the original craft chocolate makers were engineers, but Bryan came to the party as a pastry chef, one who brought an experienced and elevated palate to chocolate making. He was inspired by his grandmother, who was an excellent baker. On childhood visits to her farm in upstate New York, he joined her in picking perfectly ripe fruit and transforming it into pies, cakes, jams and jellies. This love of baking led him to take a job in a restaurant.
"I started working in a restaurant in Woodstock called the Bear Cafe. At the time, it was one of the few fine dining restaurants in the area. I started in the kitchen after school and on weekends doing simple things like peeling carrots and learning the operations of a restaurant kitchen. And then, one day, it seemed like there was nothing to do, or the chef just wanted me out of his hair, or who knows what the reason was, but he said, go downstairs to the bake shop and spend a day with the pastry chef. And I went downstairs, and I spent a day with the pastry chef, and then I never came back upstairs. I was just into pastry, and baking, and desserts, and bread baking. And I knew that that was the path that I wanted to go down."
Bryan attended the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, NY, where he studied with Chef Peter Greweling, a renowned chocolate and pastry instructor and author of Chocolates & Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner. Bryan said there was one lecture on cacao that probably lasted 30 minutes and covered the value chain, from where cacao is grown to how it's processed, ending with the statement that the cacao is shipped to Europe where it's made into chocolate. It piqued Bryan's interest because he loves learning how things are made.
"I asked Chef Greweling, who's one of the world's great confectionery masters, I asked him if there was any way to make chocolate, if that even was a thing that we could do. This is before tabletop melangeurs were readily accessible. Chocolate Alchemy, the website, was out there, but I don't think I even knew about it at the time. And Chef Greweling said he had taken this class at UC Davis, at Richardson Research, which is a class geared towards industrial chocolate manufacturing. But he figured we could probably cobble something together, so we took one of the pan coating machines — a big, stainless steel, drum, made for coating berries and nuts and things with chocolate — and created a very crude makeshift ball mill. We added stainless steel ball bearings, something to agitate them, and cocoa nibs from the storeroom of the school, which came in a jar labeled "Roasted Cocoa Nibs" — no country of origin, no indication of anything. And they tasted like cardboard. They were flat, over-roasted, one inch from charcoal. But they were cocoa nibs, right? The raw ingredients. So we threw them in this panner with ball bearings and turned it on. It made a racket, it was so loud! Then we turned a hair dryer on it and threw some sugar in."
He continued, "After a while, we started seeing it sort of liquefy and turn into something that somewhat resembled chocolate. And then we took it out, strained it through cheesecloth, because it was still incredibly gritty. I'm distilling this down, this was after days of noise and frustration and learning and making a huge mess. And then we finally had something that looked somewhat like chocolate. We tempered it, molded it, tasted it, and it was objectively terrible chocolate. But it was MY terrible chocolate."
No Standard Recipe
One of the things I appreciate is Bryan's pastry-chef approach to chocolate making. While he is steeped in the science of chocolate and confectionery, he cares equally about creating a memorable flavor experience. Many chocolate makers develop a standard recipe for their chocolate and stick with it no matter what origin they're working with. That's not how Bryan approaches his chocolate. He's interested in developing flavor, even if that means each chocolate bar has a different recipe. For example, he adds vanilla to one of his single-origin chocolates, but not the others. When I asked him why, he said, "Because I liked the flavor better." Our members tasted 5 of Bryan's chocolate creations, chosen to illustrate his talents.
Ghana Three Mountains Dark 74%
Photo courtesy of Fruition Chocolate Works.
West Africa produces the majority of bulk market commodity cacao used in candy bars around the world, but cocoa from this region has not been widely used in craft chocolate making. That's beginning to change. One of the disruptors helping make that change is Three Mountains Cocoa, a sourcing company creating socially and environmentally sustainable models of production in Ghana that support the long-term development and success of the cocoa-producing communities using regenerative farming practices. On the fruitier side for Ghana, I taste notes of dried cherry, coconut and fudge. Here's what Bryan said about how he decided on a roast approach for this chocolate.
"Sometimes we'll go between 4 to 6 different test roasts before we decide. For some of our dark origin bars, it won't be just a single roast — this chocolate is made with two different roasts blended together. West African cacao tends to have more roasty, chocolaty flavors that chocolate lovers are familiar with. I didn't want to roast away this cacao's more delicate flavor, some of those dried fruits and coconut that you're tasting. Even though a lot of people would classify both of these roasts as being fairly light, one is a bit darker than the other. And then, they're both blended together."
Dominican Republic Öko-Caribe 68%
Photo courtesy of Fruition Chocolate Works.
Located in the Duarte province of the Dominican Republic (DR), Öko-Caribe is a workhorse of excellent organic cacao production. Öko-Caribe is a centralized fermentary that purchases wet cacao from farmers and manages post-harvest processing (fermentation & drying) to maintain quality flavor that is prized by the craft chocolate market. Öko-Caribe produces more than 500 tons of organic cacao annually. It maintains close relationships with its 165 farmers, providing technical training in agronomic and organic production. This is the bar of chocolate I mentioned earlier — the one with added vanilla. I taste notes of tropical fruit and chocolate with a hint of warm spices.
Brown Butter Milk Chocolate 43%
Photo courtesy Fruition Chocolate Works.
This multi-award-winning bar is the first brown butter chocolate I tasted. Bryan created it before brown butter was a trend, drawing on his pastry skills to deliver an addictive milk chocolate. Brown butter is butter cooked until the milk solids turn brown, giving it a nutty flavor — the French call it beurre noisette (hazelnut butter). Made with cacao sourced from Rizek Cacao in the Dominican Republic, this chocolate begins with flavor notes of brown butter, followed by rich caramel notes and an unexpected fruity finish. Rizek Cacao uses fermentation recipes to deliver cacao with unique flavor profiles that it can replicate consistently. It's not an easy feat to deliver consistent flavor and quality during post-harvest processing, which is why many quality chocolate makers source cacao from Rizek.
Dark Chocolate Almonds with Smoked Sea Salt
Photo courtesy of Fruition Chocolate Works.
Bryan puts a lot of thought into ingredient sourcing to ensure he has the right flavors and textures to deliver what he envisions. These California-grown Treehouse almonds, chosen for their clean flavor and satisfying crunch, are coated in Öko-Caribe (DR) 68% dark chocolate, dusted in cocoa powder from Kokoa Kamili (Tanzania origin), and finished with smoked sea salt. I'm not usually a fan of smoke in my food, but in this case the smoked sea salt adds a savory hint to the almonds that works perfectly.
Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups with Caramel & Sea Salt
We couldn't feature a pastry-chef-turned-chocolate-maker without including some of his confections. An elevated take on a classic peanut butter cup, this tasty confection is filled with house-made peanut butter and a layer of salted caramel, then coated in Öko-Caribe (DR) 68% dark chocolate. Sink your teeth into a generous coating of dark chocolate. The flavors come in layers — salted caramel first, followed by roasted peanuts, and finishing with pleasantly bitter notes of dark chocolate that offer a counterpoint to the filling's sweetness.
Bryan said, "We made peanut butter cups because I like peanut butter cups. I felt like filling the entire cup with that peanut gianduja would just be a little bit much — a little bit cloying. Adding the caramel brings a little bit of depth of flavor."
