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Sunday, March 17, 2013

DAILY NEWS NYDailyNews.com

Daniel Sklaar, the owner of Fine & Raw, in Bushwick, checks out some cocoa beans.

PHOTOS BY LINDSAY MEEKS/DAILY NEWS

CUCKOO
FOR COCOA
BY DOMINIQUE LEMOINE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Fine & Raws chocolate factory goes from bean to bar

vanilla, raspberries, raw sugar or sea salt are added. The inal product is a creamy, indulgent chocolate that has been minimally processed. Not only does it taste good, it still has all of its enzymes and nutrients. The full line of Fine & Raw chocolates includes the Mesquite, a textured chocolate with a smoky touch and a nut butter inish, the Lucuma Vanilla, which Sklaar describes as a crme brle, bread pudding foodgasm over dark chocolate, and Raspberry and Blueberry, which Sklaar insists should be eaten with a glass of wine. Fine & Raws mission is to save the world through silliness and chocolate and the new Brooklyn lab readily embraces that spirit as a sign in the labs kitchen reads: All work and no play is missing the point completely.
Fine & Raw, 288 Seigel St., Brooklyn, (718) 366-3633. Watch the video on nydailynews.com/ life-style/eats!

F
EATS

ine & Raws new chocolate laboratory in Bushwick is the modernday version of Willy Wonkas factory. Pits full of cocoa beans from all over the world sit on the loor, jury-rigged machines stir melted chocolate, and scraps of gold wrapping paper rest on a picnic table. The idea behind chocolate-making is that chocolate is all about chemistry. The lavor in chocolate can be tweaked and evoked through really good chemistry, says owner Daniel Sklaar. One of the good things of being a small company is we have the time and the space to do these things. Well get creative in the kitchen and then go to the Brooklyn Flea that weekend and sell our experiments and see what everyone thinks about them. The lab opened its doors just four

Chocolate is mixed in a vat at Fine & Raw.

months ago, but people have been sampling Fine & Raw sweets since 2007, when Sklaar started to tinker with chocolate-making after working all day for a lower East Side catering company. This is just our irst public face, he says. Its about crafting more connectedness with the chocolate by having a space that is open for people to come and see exactly how our chocolate is made. Fine & Raw is a bean-to-bar manufacturer, which means Sklaar and his team are involved in every single step of the chocolate-making process. Fine & Raw

buys cocoa beans from small sustainable farmers in countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast, Bolivia, Madagascar, Colombia and Venezuela to make sure theyre free of toxins, chemicals and pollutants. Ive been down to Costa Rica and I hung out with a family there who runs a chocolate plantation, Sklaar says. You wake up at 5 in the morning, get on your donkey, go an hour up into the jungle, get your machete and start swinging away at the cocoa trees until about noon when its 120 degrees in the shade. You load everything back up on your donkey and then you trek back into the haciendas. Once in Brooklyn, the beans are handsorted and cracked open. After the shell is separated, the inside of the bean is dehydrated. This step, Sklaar explains, tweaks and teases out all those characteristics of the chocolate that everyone knows and loves. The dry interior is then thrown into a two-roll mill and later into a stone grinder, where other ingredients such as