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From furniture making to delicious artisan chocolate.
Craftsmanship and the art of making a product to the highest standards are universal. Dick Taylor‘s craft chocolate exemplifies this perfectly. Founded by Adam Dick and Dustin Taylor, who previously made furniture and wooden boats, this California-based brand shows how passion and dedication to push things to the next level can provide amazing results. Whether it’s an expertly crafted piece of furniture or a piece of fine chocolate.
Apart from this quest for excellence, the brand also applies a “no compromises” approach in its manufacturing process. It uses organic products as well as few ingredients. This allows the subtle flavors and nuances of the cocoa to shine through. The slow process, which lasts for a few weeks, starts with the bean. The company sources only the best cocoa beans from various places around the world, including Madagascar, Guatemala, Vietnam, or Brazil. Then, the beans undergo a roasting process. Dick Taylor Chocolate uses a Royal #5 Coffee Roaster to roast the beans to perfection and reveal their flavor profiles. Beans from different countries go through different roasting times, with the brand also sometimes blending roast profiles to create a brand-new flavor. After roasting, vacuum pressure removes the husks from the cocoa nibs. The former go into garden mulch, while the latter transform into chocolate.
Grinding the nibs releases the cocoa butter, which then mixes with sugar before going through a three-roll mill. Next, the conching stage aerates and stirs the product, allowing the flavors to develop over a period of 24-72 hours. Finally, after another few weeks of letting the flavor profile mature further, the company melts, tempers, and molds the craft chocolate into glossy, silky bars. Hand-foiling and wrapping the bars into in-house made packaging completes the long process.
The collection includes single origin bars made with just organic cocoa and organic cane sugar, as well as maple coconut, caramelized almond, or sea salt bars. Award winners include Black Fig and the brand’s only blend bar, the Northerner Bar. The former won 1st place at the Northwest Chocolate Festival, while the latter recently received a Good Food Award. An intricate fleur-de-lis pattern makes the bars look almost too pretty to eat. All of them come in beautiful packaging that boasts nautical or boat themed illustrations. Photographs© Dick Taylor Chocolate.
