“Salted Plum?!”
It has been an unusually busy summer for me doing many chocolate demos. I thought people wouldn’t be so interested in looking at chocolate given it is 90 degrees outside. But, they did stop by while staring at one very specific chocolate bar - Salted Plum.
I enjoy making chocolate, and what would be more enjoyable is to see people’s satisfying expression after tasting the chocolate.
“Oh my… how did you make it?”
I appreciate people who would stop by to listen to the making of the chocolate, but I would never blame those who just grabbed some bars and hurried to the cheese section.
Before I answer the “How”, I usually start with the “Why”.
Cacao is a fruit, a tropical fruit.
We build fun inclusions into our bean to bar chocolate at KESSHŌ. It is like writing a symphony, and the cacao beans that go into the chocolate are our co-composer. Cacao beans from various tropical regions carry different fruity notes, which inspired me and my team to brainstorm what fruit flavors might go well with each of the different beans.
The Semuliki Forest cacao beans carry a beautiful berry note. We wrote down a list of flavors that came across our minds while eating the lightly roasted beans. Plum, raspberry, cranberry are among the top ones. Thus we landed on raspberry first and made the very popular raspberry bar by adding raspberry powder into the chocolate using a two-wave melanging process.
One day we accidentally sprinkled some Himalayan pink salt on the raspberry bar, and that flavor combination reminded me of the juicy salted plum I used to cook rice in Japan.
From there, we started the salted plum chocolate making journey. We know how we want it to taste like - refreshing, tangy, bold but balanced, a breeze under the Texan heat.
It took us 6 months to get it right.
Adjusting the roasting, testing different length of time for melanging to keep the right level of acidity, deciding on the perfect timing to include the salted plum powder, tasting it over 6 weeks time to test if the plum flavor would fade away… It was a huge process.
Yes, that's how much it takes to make the salted plum bar. And we were not surprised by its AoC awards and Chocolate alliance awards, as we did put a lot of hard work into it.
KESSHŌ means crystal, and it also means fruit from hard work, like this piece of salted plum chocolate bar.
Enjoy it! And remember it tastes especially good, even if it’s 100 degrees outside. 😂