Tastefully Overcaramelized

Theo Chocolate

Abe says

Consider as an aside the food blog, what rightly translates to “food web log”. An awkward construction to be sure, it isn’t helped by the abomination of language that is “blog”, blood ancestor of all manner of foul terminology. And yet, as inspiration the possibilities are endless. A more focused publication, a cooking log, could invoke noisy shoes and go by clog or more correctly, glog. A site such as this is doomed to flogdom, the flogosphere, and the Floggies, if lucky. “Nice to meet you. What do you do?” “Oh you know, I’m a software developer, but I flog on the side.” Why all the logs, guys?

Oh right. The Seattle food bloggers, a label I cannot hear without thinking “Seattle floggers”. We went on our first outing with the group on Tuesday to Theo Chocolate, “the only organic, fair trade bean-to-bar chocolate factory in the United States” according to their web site. Appropriately enough they are located at the street address 3400 Phinney, the name of one of their better-known lines. We met a number of names behind local blogs, all of which are worth a visit: Michael of Herbivoracious, Susmita of The Food We Eat, Paul of The Wine Wall, Sara of Adventures of a Hungry Girl. Keren of Frantic Foodie was the organizer.

Theo was very gracious, fed us chocolate and wine, gave a demo tempering ganache on a marble slab (who needs a thermometer when you have a squeegee?), took us on a brief tour, and did abbreviated talks about chocolate anthropology and also chocolate chemistry, previews of their “Chocolate Academy”. The fact that Theo runs a lab in conjunction with UW was news to me, but their COO apparently has a doctorate in molecular biology and performs all manner of analysis on both beans and the finished product in an effort, I am told, to “better science through chocolate” rather than the other way around.

Pictured above is a ghost chili caramel chocolate — really excellent — complex, smoky, and a little spicy with a long, hot finish. I’d buy a box of those.

On second thought, I hear that “Theo” is short for Theobroma cacao…so perhaps the lab isn’t all that weird?

Ann says

So I have no idea what the hell Abe is saying in that entire first paragraph, but if you can make sense of it, I commend you. School has become horribly predictably awful, and I was exhausted when we showed up at Theo. I was really as happy to be there as I could be, given how I was feeling, and was doubly happy about the wine. I had forgotten that there would be wine. I went for the wine. Did I mention that there was booze?

Theo’s demo was great fun to watch and the steady stream of treats made the evening a lot of fun and completely delicious. I have to say that Dr. Chocolate sort of reminded me of Austin Powers, only a little. He was really cool, and full of good stories about chocolate. Theo has also opened a line in support of Jane Goodall and her work, of which I am a particularly large fan. The picture of Jane Goodall and a baby Chimpanzee on the wrapper of the milk chocolate bar I got was THE CUTEST PICTURE EVAR! So that was the one I took home with me.

At the point in the evening when we were all seated to watch a PowerPoint presentation I think I started having PTSD symptoms related to nursing school courses and began rocking back and forth, as Abe would later tell me, and just generally losing my mind. We went home and I pomptly fell asleep in a chocolate, wine, and school induced coma.