A Scoopful of Medicine

It is not ice cream weather. It is not even close to ice cream weather. It is curl up in bed with a cup of soup and the entire season of Girls weather. It is listen to Belle and Sebastian while making challah bread weather. It is rub George behind his little kitty ears while listening to Opera 101 on tape weather. It is accepting that I am an old lady at heart and drinking my extremely milky coffee weather. And it is eating a piece of extremely dark chocolate kind of weather.

In way, it's fortunate that Portland has so many rainy days, because chocolate in the summertime is, for me, problematic. First, there's the external temperature. Under the sweltering sun, a bar of the stuff oozes all over the place and I revert suddenly to a five-year-old with no hand-mouth coordination and a smeary (although smiling) face. Then, there's my internal temperature. When it's that hot I'm usually downing an iced drink of some sort, so my mouth is nowhere near 98.6. Instead of merrily melting in my mouth, I bite into a bar of chocolate and I'm left with a mouthful of cacao shrapnel.


This dilemma is partially solved with the intervention of truffles, which owe their silky smooth softness to a heart of cream--although I'm more of a fool for caramel innards than ganache. I haven't tried making chocolates yet, which is an endeavor I'll be undertaking later in the summer. I've hesitated up until now because I have absurdly high standards for presentation, and there are a lot of things that could go wrong with the making of truffles or caramels or any kind of chocolate confection. There are complicated words and explanations for all the ways it could go wrong which sound panicky (seizing!) but essentially all add up to ugly chocolates. And when there are beauties like this in the world, the competition is truly stiff.

clockwise from upper left: honey saffron, ghost chile, and lavender

In March, I was lucky enough to win a lottery for an all-expenses-paid trip up to Seattle, the only city with possibly more rainfall than Portland. And a great deal many more things besides, some of which include: deliciously stinky blue cheese from Beechers, a gorgeous art museum, a crumpet shop on Pike Place, a cowgirl-themed vintage store, a miniscule fragment of the Berlin Wall (of which, funnily enough, we have a larger piece in my living room at home), a speakeasy disguised as a stocking company, more Starbucks cafés per square mile than fast food joints, 'El Diablo' or the best spicy chocolate dessert I've ever had, a bar that served exclusively Belgian ales, and the Theo chocolate factory. It was one of the best two-and-a-half day trips I've had to anywhere, because I had an amazing itinerary drawn up for me by a couple that I met, fittingly, in a Belgian bar (they, too, serve exclusively Belgian ales), and had good company in which to knock off every item of the list and watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to boot.

Bean-to-bar chocolate making is truly amazing, especially considering that their entire factory could fit into my college auditorium. The tour went through every step of the process, which I documented with due diligence. It's astounding to me the amount of work that goes into getting the raw cacao beans into a beautifully wrapped bar or truffle, and even more astounding to consider how cacao beans came to be eaten in the first place.

Who thought it was a good idea to crack one of these open and eat the stuff inside? Cacao pods look like waxy orange footballs, and the seeds inside are ensconced in this white pulp that I hear tastes like lychee and nothing like chocolate. My thinking is that someone a couple thousand years ago sucked all of the white stuff (known as baba de cacao, which apparently does not translate to English) off the seeds, curled up next to a fire, and found a mound of roasted beans when she woke up the next morning. Or they were burned up along with some trees accidentally and the delicious roasted smells compelled a curious Mayan to take a sniff and then a bite. I guess. I have no idea, clearly I am a failed hypothesizer.


I went around St Patrick's day, so of course in the adjoining chocolate shop they had some seasonal specials on offer. Surprisingly, although I fully endorse the consumption of both booze and chocolate, I don't especially like the combination in truffle form. But I was amused nonetheless.

It was lovely trip, and that was a lovely digression from what I intended to write, which keeps happening. I guess it is also share anecdotes about my travels weather, too.

Anyway, for those days in the distant future when the sun shines, there's a way to get a pure kick of cacao without feeling like a chocolate-smeared five-year-old. This chocolate sorbet, which comes from ice cream genius David Lebovitz, is like liquid chocolate--no dairy, no eggs, no anything getting in the way of pure cacao bliss. You could heat up the stuff and drink it warm (I might have done this). You could freeze it in an ice cream maker and mix it with a couple shots of espresso for a mocha shake. You could eat it straight from the ice cream scoop, but then you would probably end up with chocolate smeared all over your face anyway.

But it would be so, so worth it.

Chocolate Sorbet
adapted from David Lebovitz
makes about one quart

You could use any kind of chocolate here, but I used the discovery of 'rare Dutch red' Guittard cocoa powder at the grocery store to justify pairing it with 'rare delicious yum' Guittard 72% chocolate drops. What can I say? I like to match.

2 1/4 cups (555 ml) water
1 cup (200 g) sugar
3/4 cups (75 g) unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
a pinch of salt
6 ounces (170 g) bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

In a large saucepan, place the sugar, cocoa powder, and salt. Add 375 mL (1.5 cups) of the water and bring to a boil, whisking constantly. Allow to boil for 45 seconds, whisking all the while, and then remove from heat. Stir in the chopped chocolate until it melts, then add the vanilla and the remaining 180 mL (3/4 cup) of water. (Now, at this point Lebovitz recommends transferring the mixture to a blender and whizzing it for 15 seconds, but I don't see the point of this since there's nothing in here that could be lumpy, because the chocolate is guaranteed to melt completely at that temperature. Also, when I tried, I got hot chocolate all over the place, but possibly this is because there is no top to my blender and I use a tupperware lid. Should you feel like cleaning another inconveniently shaped dish, please, by all means, use a blender.)

Try to restrain yourself from drinking the chocolate mixture straight from the bowl, although you should definitely taste it a few times to make sure it's, uh, chocolatey enough. Because there isn't a tiny rainforest of cacao beans in there already. Chill the mixture thoroughly, and then freeze it in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions. If it's a little too thick to pour (it solidified into a kind of mousse), whisk it vigorously to thin it out. And then lick the whisk while you wait for perfectly smooth, impossibly chocolatey sorbet to emerge.