By Amber S, Supplements Buyer & Chocolate Enthusiast
In an unassuming-looking yellow barn on a quiet suburban street in Sudbury, Massachusetts, there is a chocolate factory.
You wouldn't think it to look at the place: a pond dotted with water lilies, barn swallows darting about the eaves -- but through the sliding door, beyond barrels of carefully-marked beans, up a flight of stairs to a bright and airy room that hums with machinery and smells vaguely of honey and damp earth, there is the wondrous Goodnow Farms, one of the most award-winning chocolate-makers in the United States.
It is to Goodnow Farms that my colleagues and I have traveled from our store in Cambridge to witness the magic of chocolate-making from Goodnow's owners themselves. Tom and Monica founded the company with the goal of making the highest-quality single-origin chocolate. What does that mean, exactly? Well, cacao beans, I learned, have different flavor profiles depending on the bean variety and the region they're grown in. Much like tea or wine grapes, the terroir of cacao beans imparts a unique flavor. Most commercially-available chocolate sources their cacao beans from many different places, some as far apart as Africa and South America, and then cover the muddled flavors with lots of sugar and deodorized cacao butter. The result is sweet and delicious, but lacking in the deep complexity of single-origin chocolate.
Chocolate isn't just candy, says Tom -- it's a food. Goodnow's cacao beans come from a selection of farms in Mexico, Central America, and South America, and Tom travels there frequently to check in with the crops. Once the beans are picked, fermented, and dried, they're shipped to Massachusetts where the next part of their adventure occurs.
In the light-filled upstairs space, the cacao beans are gently roasted, then the hulls removed and separated. (The resulting hulls make excellent compost for local farms.) At this stage, the pencil-eraser-sized pieces of bean become recognizable as cacao nibs. Then the beans are ground slowly over a period of days, a processed we witnessed in several different stages. Cacao is a bit like peanut butter, Tom tells us: when you grind the beans, they release their oils and fats. At first, the paste is thick, dark, and grainy, and intensely flavored -- our team tasted notes as varied as blue cheese, raisins, and bell peppers in different cacao varieties. And it isn't sweet, necessarily, nor is it savory - it has a pungent, tannic fruitiness that seems to defy classification.
Once the beans are ground, they're flavored and sweetened, a process which has to be adjusted for each variety. Some of Goodnow's flavors include Caramelized Onion (using onions from Wolfe Farms in New York, a flavor which sounds contradictory but left our entire team open-mouthed in awe of how well it worked) and Putnam Rye Whiskey (which soaks the cacao beans in whiskey from Boston Harbor Distillery, and to me tasted of winter mornings and made my mouth tingle agreeably). Goodnow cares passionately about the sourcing of their ingredients, using local products whenever possible (their Spiced Apple Cider chocolate uses apples from their very own trees)!
After the chocolate is conched to the proper consistency, it's tempered - a process that uses strategic heating and cooling to produce consistently-sized fat molecules, which improves the smoothness and texture of the bar. (People unnecessarily demonize fat, chimes in Monica, but fat is flavor.) Then it's poured into molds, chilled, unmolded, and packaged in Goodnow's signature shiny gold wrappers.
The whole experience was incredible - Tom and Monica are clearly passionate about their craft, and it shows in the exceptional quality of their products. I personally had never been that much a fan of dark chocolate, citing a lifelong aversion to bitter foods (I still think arugula is a joke the rest of the world is playing on me), but our trip to Goodnow showed me that dark chocolate - good dark chocolate--isn't defined by bitterness alone. The complexity of single-origin chocolates incorporates a true sense of character and place, and single-origin chocolates are as diverse as the nations in which the cacao beans are grown. Goodnow's integrity and commitment to producing high-quality chocolate, combined with the slightly madcap whimsy of some of their flavor choices, produce on the whole an utterly unforgettable experience.
Being a kid in a chocolate factory must be fun. But, I'm beginning to realize, being an adult may actually be more fun.
Eat your heart out, Charlie Bucket.