Breakfast by Latino Man

A few weeks ago I threw a cook's tantrum. As much as I love to cook, after a day in the kitchen making chocolates, sometimes I just can't find the energy for making dinner. Our Plan B is usually "domicilos", the Colombian version of home delivery, that comes with a side of polystyrene flavored guilt. So, to alleviate said guilt and, more importantly, avoid another Cupcake Q tantrum, Latino Man has ventured into the kitchen. This morning he extended his already quite solid breakfast making skills, and prepared these pancakes! Impresionante, verdad?

A year in the life of Choco Q, Part 1

A caveat before I begin: this is not a how-to guide on running an artisanal food business, it's simply a story of where I am now, where I was a little over a year ago, and some stuff that happened in between. How many parts will there be? I know you're anxious to find out. So, in the theme of this first post reviewing, analysing, and reporting on my first year as an artisanal food entrepreneur, the answer is: as many as I feel like writing. 

On being my own boss

The advantages are obvious, especially to an employee who might long for them from the confines of their 9 - 6 work life, and they are awesome. Before Christmas I was working like a crazy woman, at the tempering machine at 6am, working until past midnight to make, mould, dip and package my chocolates. Today on the other hand, luxuriating in the post-Christmas calm, I did just enough work to feel like I could say "I did some work today". Otherwise I spent the day reading, baking bread, making granola and doing a bit of yoga (just enough to say "I did some yoga today"). On a normal day, with a reasonable workload, I can take off mid-morning to go for a long run, or a couple of hours in the afternoon to have coffee with some friends. I just make up the hours later, or earlier, or the next day. I also decide what I do each day, how much is spent on repeated tasks vs working on new products, what portion of my time will be engaged in marketing, website and other communications tasks, or if instead I'll spend the day reading and researching. 

Herein also lies the downside of being your own boss. You are employee-you's best ever boss, and comapny-owner-you's worst. Depending on your workload you let yourself procrastinate or you let yourself overwork to exhaustion. You let yourself avoid painful or boring tasks, you never set employee-you deadlines, or if you do, you don't care whether they're met or not. And, instead of kicking yourself out of post-holiday post-wedding or post-slow-period funks, you instead allow employee-you to wallow in them for longer than is healthy for the company's finances. 

Still, the idea of a timetable set by a culture, a government, or a company, where one must be at their desk by a certain hour and one must not leave said desk until a certain hour, regardless of that person's productivity, is of course, absolutely ludicrous to me. I work when I want to work which is, not surprisingly, when I'm most productive. (In place of a salary, this scorn for corporate structures and the poor employees who must work within them is the only compensation we self-employed get for the hours upon hours we waste flicking through Vice's Dos and Don'ts.) 

On pursuing a passion:

It's almost sacrilege for a late-career-changer to say this, but I still fantasise about many other occupations I could have, as though I'm twenty years old and all options still lay open. According the the classic story, I know I'm supposed to be pursuing chocolate because it is what I have always dreamed of, even whilst working in some pretty great jobs in digital media and advertising, but in fact it is one of many passions I could have followed. I went to study at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy specifcially in search of a food-related right turn in my career. In the course of that year, I fell in love honey, sour dough bread, and chocolate, in that order. I chose to follow the chocolate path because, well, chocolate is awesome, but I still imagine myself becoming a beekeeper or opening a bakery. I also imagine working as a Florist, or marketing Aesop products, or testing recipes in America's Test Kitchen, or designing window displays, or working some not-yet-defined job that let's me travel the world eating great food. 

On changing careers:

It is, to put it so very mildly, humbling to start again. Whilst my 12 plus years of work experience have certainly been helpful for my new business, they are no help with the actual task of chocolate making. These years of experience also robbed me of any new-graduate arrogance, because a year ago, with my freshly printed Professional Chocolatier certificate in hand, I knew exactly how much I didn't know. 

If I had the patience to wait for Latino Man to design an infographic, I would show you right now what I have discovered is the learning curve for chocolate making. As I have no such patience, I'll describe it instead. Things start out well. The chocolates may not be quite the professional standard you were aiming for, but close enough. Then something happens. A few weeks in, for unknown reasons, things go wrong. Your previously fine tuffles coatings will start to crack, or the surface of your chocolate bars will swirl, even, horror of horrors, exhibit bloom. There is no experienced and wise boss to ask, so it's to the internet you go. Hours of research in chocolate forums, asking questions, reading questions asked by other newbie chocolatiers, plus many more hours of trial and error and many wasted chocolates will solve the problem. Actually, chocolate mistakes have to be really really bad for chocolate to be wasted, there's always someone willing to eat a slightly blemished, cracked or misshapen product, but it is intensely frustrating nonetheless. 

On the other hand, starting again usually involves pursuing a career which really interests you. It means learning, not incrementally through the ocassional new book, campaign or project, but in big gulps. There are giant piles of books by your bedside, buckets of new information online, countless new chocolate bars to taste, an unlimited reservoir of recipes to test, huge leaps in hands-on experience, and all of it fascinating because it's about your favourite subject, in this case, chocolate.   

 

Happy Birthday Choco Q

Last Sunday Choco Q turned 1! What should rightly follow this announcement is a reflection of the year past, the highs and lows, the achievements and frustrations, and something profound about what I've learned. All that will have to wait however, until Christmas is over and this chocolatier can breathe a little.

In the meantime, my huge thanks go to all of you who've purchased our chocolates, or wished you were in Bogota to do so. Merry Christmas. 

The Cult of Sour Dough

It's not entirely true to say I've never worked from home before. I have. But this is the first time I've enjoyed it.

I like to separate my spaces. Excercise happens outside, in a dance studio, or at the gym. Work happens in the office. Cooking, reading, long breakfasts and other relaxing activities happen at home. I wouldn't actually call chocolate making relaxing, it's hard physical labour, but it's also fun, and therefore doesn't seem to infect my relaxation space with non-relaxing tasks.

To make up for the lack of colleagues and the convivial atmosphere of an office (I've been lucky enough to work almost entirely in convivial offices), I listen to podcasts. The wonderful medium of radio, and its modern iteration, make me feel like the most interesting conversations with the most interesting people are happening in my loungeroom. Each week I chat with my good friend from Sydney about music, and listen to all the new tracks he's garnered in the last week. I join my favourite breakfast radio broadcasters for a few hours, albeit late in the afternoon in Bogotá. Frequently I discuss big ideas, let Angie motivate me to get running, or just listen to some great stories. And of course I talk about food.

In the course of this conversation, I discovered that I'm part of a cult. I didn't realise I had joined any movement, but I listened with such fascination to every scientific detail of this podcast, that I was convinced. I am a fully inducted member of the cult of sour dough.

As a show of faith, I baked this: 

I'm not one for the hard sell, and I feel strongly that we all have the right to our beliefs, so let me just suggest, gently, and with a smile, that you might like to join us. Every day, several times for some, we worship wild yeast, by consuming slightly sour, open crumb, crusty, freshly-baked bread.    

Meet Lisa, the oven

If it's too early in the morning for a bit of woo-woo new-agey-ness, then I recommend you stop reading, because I'm about to tell you that the universe made me buy this oven...

and then bake these cookies... 

Here's how. 

Chapter 1: First glance
Our lovely neighbours in Las Torres del Parque, are also our neighbours at the Usaquén market where we sell Choco Q chocolates. Diego and Andrea are the owners of the La Castaña cafe, and they make seriously tasty baked empanadas. (Because they're baked, I can pretend that they're not bad for me. Please don't mention the butter content of the pastry, let me keep my fantasy.) Diego spent two years in Paris restaurant kitchens and one day, in one of our market conversations, he was lamenting the lack of good french-style bread in Bogotá. So I gave Andrea and Diego one of my homemade loaves, and since then Andrea has been trying to convince me to sell them. On one such occasion, I used my oven as an excuse. It is as old as our apartment and very temperamental. It has broken as often as we've paid rent, and costs about as much to run. Andrea, not to be deterred by a small matter of equipment, pointed at their cafe oven, an industrial convection appliance made by Unox, called Lisa. 

Chapter 2: The catalyst
Bogotanos are awfully proper, especially when it comes to the small courtesies. For example, when someone stands at the front of a bus and begins their sales spiel for the packets of nuts, highlighter pens, or story they're selling, their salutations are always answered with a resounding bus-wide "buenos días" or "buenas tardes". No matter how much the commuters would prefer to ignore the vendor, their response is automatic, having been drilled deep into their psyche as the polite thing to do. This required courtesy crosses socio-economic boundaries, and overrules caffeine withdrawal, tiredness, crappy days or too much social stimulation. Everyone, everywhere in this city, is unfailingly polite. Except the electricity company. There is only one, and they are jerks.

Last month they cut our power. Apparently our automatic bill payment, which has worked seamlessly for the last 8 months, failed. There was no late payment notice, no courtesy call to say "by the way, you haven't paid us". They just sent a guy to our apartment building while we were out, and cut the power. Twenty-four hours later, after some frantic running about the city to find a bank that would accept a late payment, and some frantic calls to Codensa asking them kindly to restore power, we had electricity again. I desperately needed to bake some bread-dough that had been languishing in the non-functioning fridge for too long, so I turned on the oven, and immediately heard a loud bang.  After the smoke cleared, I determined that the elements were blown, and for the ninth time since moving into our apartment, the oven was broken. 

Chapter 3: Second impressions
I had been waging a passive-aggressive war with our unseen landlady who refused our request, when we first moved in, to replace the oven. Despite the time delay, extra hassle and the unfortunate need to have the real estate agency's dodgy handyman in our apartment, every time the oven broke I insisted that the landlady pay the paltry amount required to send someone around fix it. This mini-explosion however, was my Waterloo. It was too much, I was too tired to continue the fight, the time had come to admit defeat and buy a new oven. In researching counter-top options, I decided, for fantasy's sake, to check out the website of a local restaurant equipment supply company, and discovered the range of Unox industrial beauties. I recognised La Castaña's empanada baker, but the prices were impossible to justify. Smiling sadly, I switched to the Kitchenaid website instead. 

Chapter 4: Thwarting impatience
I would have got on a bus then and there to get myself to the Kitchenaid store in the north of the city (yep, there's a dedicated store here!!!), but it was approaching 5pm, the dreaded hour for anyone living in the centre of Bogotá when roads are switched to a northern direction and travelling south becomes a near impossibility. Whilst counting the hours until the store opened again the next morning I received an email. It listed items from a friend of a friend, who until recently, owned a cafe. And what much-coveted-stainless-steel beauty was on the list? Yep, the Unox Lisa convection oven. 

Chapter 5: Cookie justifications
Using the universe as my irrational rationalisation, I paid a significant-but-not-full price for a second-hand industrial oven, when a consumer grade version would probably have sufficed. To further rationalise this expensive purchase, I have been experimenting with cookie recipes, with the idea that I could add cookies to the Choco Q repertoire. I have in fact sold a few batches in the past, but haven't offered them as a regular item because, until recently, I was working with a seriously unreliable oven.  

I'm still tweaking recipes (aka eating a lot of cookies), but here's the frontrunner so far. They're the perfect balance between cakey and chewy, with bits of caramel goodness amongst the required chocolate chips. 

Chocolate & Caramel Chip Cookies
(adapted from Fields of Cake's national cookie day recipe)  

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 tbs water
• 1/4 cup cold butter cut into cubes
• 3/4 cup cold butter, grated, and stored in the freezer till you need it
• 2 cups brown sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla powder or extract
• 2 cups white flour
• 1 cup wholemeal flour
• 1 tsp baking powder (or 1/4 tsp if you're baking in the thin air of Bogotá)
• 1 cup dark chocolate, chopped
• 1/2 cup of nuts (I used walnuts but macadamias, pecans or hazelnuts would be equally amazing)

Method:
To make the caramel, combine the white sugar and water in a saucepan. Bring to boil over low-medium heat, stirring very occasionally, until it turns a rich caramel colour. Take off the heat and add the butter. Stir vigorously to combine, then set aside for 20 minutes or until it's cooler but not yet set.

This part is best done in a stand-mixer:
Combine the frozen grated butter and the brown sugar and mix until just combined. (If you're still waiting for your caramel to cool, I suggest putting the butter mix in the fridge while you wait.) Add the caramel to your butter mix, turn your mixer to high and breathe deeply. The caramel will harden when it hits the cool butter mix, the butter mix will melt a bit from the warm caramel, the mixer will make loud cracking noises as the caramel breaks up, and the bowl will spit caramel chunks at you if, like me, you made a double batch and the bowl is too full. But it's ok. Everything will be ok.

When the caramel has broken-up sufficiently that your mixer is not longer making horrible noises, add the vanilla (if using extract), scrape caramel from the mixer paddle if need be, and mix a little more. Then add the eggs one at a time and mix until just combined. 

In a separate bowl mix the salt, vanilla (if using powder), baking powder and flour. I use a bit of wholemeal flour just to give the cookies some texture, but you can use all white if you prefer. With the mixer on very low, add the flour a little at a time, and mix until just combined. Add the chocolate chips and nuts and mix through. Be careful not to overmix the flour, or you'll develop too much gluten and the cookies will be tough instead of chewy. 

Using your hands, roll the mixture into large balls, bigger than a golf-ball, and place on a baking tray (you can pack them close together), then chill the cookie-dough-balls in the fridge for at least 20 minutes, or up to 24 hours, before baking. 

Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees celsius, 390 degrees fahrenheit. Line another baking tray with a silicone baking mat or baking paper. Place the cold cookie-dough-balls on the tray, making sure you have plenty of space in between, and place the tray in the middle of the oven. Reduce the temperature to 180 degrees celsius, 360 degrees fahrenheit, and bake for 12 minutes, or until the tops of the cookies are a nice golden brown.