This post originally appeared on my site Chocolate Noise! Subscribe to the series here, and preorder my book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, coming out September 19, 2017!
I never wanted to start a blog about chocolate. That’s my biggest secret, so let’s just get that out of the way at the beginning.
When I came up with the idea of a site about bean-to-bar chocolate in 2015, I imagined it as a 12-part series of long-form stories about the people and craft behind the chocolate. A longtime food writer who was well-versed in the art of the listicle, I didn’t want to add to the noise but rather cut through it, to tell stories about the things that matter. That’s why I call Chocolate Noise an experience or website, not a blog (and get made fun of endlessly by my family for those lofty words).
Of course, I’m also a walking sweet tooth, a chocoholic in the truest sense of the word: I even wrote a poem about chocolate cake in the eighth grade. My mom loves to recount that family vacation where I refused to speak for a whole day but rather scowled and grimaced (I was a teenager, what can I say) — until we walked into a chocolate shop and I grinned and gushed about every truffle and bar, then hushed as I ate them all.
Michael Laiskonis' recipe for grown-up peanut butter and jelly truffles, using single-origin Madagascar, in my book
After I took my first bite of single-origin Madagascar and realized how fruity and bright chocolate can be, it wasn’t enough for me to privately research origins and learn the landscape of cacao’s terroir: I wanted to write about it, to help all of us understand chocolate a little more.
Take this map, which appeared in the first stories on my site, back in 2015:
And how it’s been translated into my book:
Illustration from my book
Speaking of books, the original idea for Chocolate Noise was a book. Over coffee with my friend and photographer Jody Horton back in 2014, he asked me if I’d ever thought about writing one. “Dreamed of it,” I’d said. Way before the website, it made sense that my book would be about my true passion in life, chocolate, and in particular this crazy new movement called bean to bar. We started scheming.
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