July 30, 2019 by Tien Chiu

…but you can’t take the chocolatier out of the girl!

You may recall that I retired last year as a semi-pro chocolatier, after 30 years in the biz, on the grounds that things had gotten a wee bit excessive and a woman with Type 2 diabetes really shouldn’t be making chocolates anyway.

Apparently I forgot who I was dealing with.

(You’d think that, after 49 years of living with myself, I’d have learned, but apparently not. Sheesh.)

It all started so innocently. I was trying to find a low-sugar chocolate that I actually liked, using the obvious method of ordering one of every possible type of 80+% cacao-solids chocolate from Chocosphere and then sampling little bits of each bar. (Fortunately, my esteemed spouse, while significantly fussier than before meeting me, is still willing to eat most of my rejects.) I found one I liked – which promptly went out of stock, with no projected resupply date. It was also annoyingly expensive.

(A momentary rant: People who brag at you about the cacao-solids percentage of their preferred chocolate bar generally haven’t the slightest clue what that means. In a dark chocolate, the cacao-solids percentage tells you how much sugar is in the bar. That is ALL it tells you. Dark chocolate is made of cocoa butter, cocoa powder, sugar, and a tiny bit of lecithin, usually soy lecithin, that helps the emulsion stay together. Cocoa butter and cocoa powder are both considered cocoa solids. Lecithin is typically well under 1% of the bar. Therefore, bragging “My favorite chocolate is 66% cocoa solids” is exactly the same as bragging “My favorite chocolate is 34% sugar.” Exactly.

Percentage of cocoa solids tells you nothing about the actual measures of quality – the flavor of the chocolate, the amount of cocoa butter relative to cocoa powder, the intensity of flavor of the cocoa powder, the variety of cacao tree and the region in which it was grown, the darkness to which the cacao beans are roasted, or any of a slew of things that are way more important than the amount of sugar in the bar. So please. Stop it with the cacao percentages. Talk about something that matters.)

My favorite brand, Valrhona, did sell a low-sugar (85%) chocolate bar, but it was their Abinao flavor, which I find unpleasantly astringent and overly tart. Annoyingly, they had my favorite flavor, Alpaco, in a 66% cacao solids and an unsweetened chocolate form, but did they have it in 83%?? Noooo….if I wanted something like that, I was just going to have to make my own.

Well, okay. If that’s how you want to be about it…I can recognize a gauntlet when it’s tossed in my face. I had given away all my chocolatiering equipment when I “retired,” but fortunately, I still had a few tricks up my chocolatier sleeve, and one of them is a Cacao Barry product called Mycryo. Mycryo is a powdered, highly-crystallized cocoa butter that is designed to seed melted chocolate with the stable beta crystals that result in beautiful, glossy tempered chocolate. Without a tempering machine. (That’s how we semi-pros do it: We know how to cheat!)

So I ordered 1 kilo of unsweetened and 1 kilo of 66% Alpaco from Chocosphere. Ah, who am I kidding? I ordered three kilos of each. What on earth can you do with only two kilos of chocolate?? That’s less than five pounds! Ridiculously small quantities. Sheesh.

Then I ran a small test batch, sort of a proof of concept, to see if my idea would work. I melted one kilo of unsweetened, and about a quarter-kilo of 66%, to 110 F or so, then dumped in 500g of the (unmelted, still-tempered) 66%, stirred around until it reached 94F, then dumped in 20g of the Mycro as in the directions, added a trifle more of the 66%, and waited until it reached working temperature, about 91F. Now I had this lovely bowl:

bowl of tempered chocolate — 4.5 pounds of tempered chocolate

I had bought a few polycarbonate chocolate bar molds, but they were patently not up to handling 2 kg worth of chocolate. After filling all four of these, I still had about 3/4 of the chocolate left:

chocolate poured into bar molds — Chocolate in bar molds
(lower left: dried sour cherries and hazelnuts added after filling the mold)

So I started pouring pools of melted chocolate into a sheet pan and mixing in chopped-up tasty bits: dried figs, dried sour cherries, peanuts, hazelnuts, and macadamia nuts. I even added some peanut butter to a batch to make peanut gianduja. (Like Reese’s peanut butter cups, only much, much better!)

Here’s one of the puddles of chocolate (cherry-hazelnut, I think):

Now I have about 6 pounds of fairly low-sugar (85% cocoa-solids) chocolate in eight or nine different mixes with macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, peanuts, peanut butter, figs, and dried sour cherries. It’s a good thing I’m not a chocolate junkie – I’m perfectly capable of eating just 2-3 pieces a day, which is well within the bounds of a reasonable diet, even for someone with Type 2 diabetes. So I’ve got plenty of variety to nibble on, and fortunately, I also have a spouse who does not have Type 2 diabetes and will happily vacuum up the rest long before it goes stale, giving me an excellent excuse for making more.

…and they (and their cats) lived happily ever after. 🙂

November 17, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Presenting the 2018 fall collection

Alas, this is the last collection….the Chocolate Couture House of Tien has now officially closed. My friend Chris Cianci has inherited my equipment, however, and is gleefully planning to continue the tradition. In fact, he did much of the prep work this year, and since I threw out my lower back on the second day of Chocopalooza this year, he and the rest of my intrepid team of volunteers wound up doing most of the work, period. I cooked most of the centers (the flavor-critical parts); they did all the cutting and dipping. And they did a splendid job of it. I can retire from chocolatiering with a clear conscience, knowing the tradition is in good hands.

Here’s the Chocopalooza closing photo with me and Chris. I presented him with a heat-sensitive Star Wars mug when we were done, and poured a liberal dose of hot chocolate into it to make the light sabers come alive.

Use the Force well, young Jedi.

October 13, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Chocolates for Charity is now closed

All 40 boxes of chocolates have been claimed! Thank you so much for your support over the years.

October 12, 2018 by Tien Chiu

Chocolates for Charity 2018 – final bow!

All the boxes are now claimed! Chocolates for Charity is closed. Thanks for your support over the years.

Yep, it’s that time of year again…with a twist!

The twist is that I’m getting ready to retire from chocolatiering. This year marks 30 years since I started cooking up chocolate bonbons in the kitchen of my college dorm. Since an Imperial ton is only 2,240 pounds (and a metric ton slightly less than that), I think I can safely say that I have made a ton of bonbons in the course of my gloriously excessive career as an amateur chocolatier.

Chocolates for Charity, likewise, has been running since 2003. Your generous sweet teeth have raised over $50,000 over the last 15 years for the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the American Textile History Museum, the Susan G Komen Foundation, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Thank you.

This year, Chris (who’s been one of my chocolate helpers for some years now) and I are teaming up to do Chocolates for Charity. Chris is pretty expert by now, and is thinking about possibly-maybe-perhaps continuing the tradition next year, so he and I are working together and we’re going to do the chocolatiering at his place. We’re splitting the planning and the work 50-50, so he can get an idea of what’s involved, and then he’ll decide whether he wants to carry the tradition forward. (I hope he does! It’s a marvelous tradition and I would hate to see it die out.)

Anyway….this is a long way of saying “Get your chocolates while you can!”

This year’s beneficiary is, again, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Chocolates this year are $120/box, of which $90 will be tax-deductible. I have 30 boxes available.

(All the boxes have been claimed.)

A few other tidbits:

The chocolates are perishable, as good chocolates are wont to be. Eat them within a week or else put them in the fridge. If you put them in the fridge, my advice is to let the chocolates come to room temperature before eating them; you’ll get better flavor that way. (of course, I have never been disciplined enough to follow this advice, but maybe you have more willpower than I do!)
You can see the chocolates (and flavor lists) for the last few years here:

Tien's chocolates for 2016 — Tien’s chocolates for 2016

A bit about my chocolatiering:

I’ve been chocolatiering for almost 30 years now, making about 90-120 pounds of bonbons every November for friends, family, and Chocolates for Charity donors. I spent one winter training with Richard Donnelly of Donnelly Chocolates (who frequently appears in Top 10 lists of American artisan chocolatiers – the most recent appearance was in National Geographic’s Top 10), so I’m pretty good at chocolatiering now. I’d put my work on par with some of the best artisan chocolatiers – though I don’t have the equipment to do some of the really fancy stuff, you won’t find better chocolates elsewhere. I also do a lot of exotic flavors that you won’t find elsewhere.

I have 30 boxes available this year. I’ll update this post when all the boxes are claimed. (Don’t wait – they’re usually gone within hours!)

December 4, 2017 by Tien Chiu

Presenting the 2017 fall collection

38 flavors in 2017! The new ones are:

Earl Grey tea fudge
maple bourbon caramel
orange caramel
gingerbread orange caramel
Prune, port, cinnamon and honey caramel
Blackberry yuzu
Peanut butter
Sorrento lemon peel

Many thanks to Susan, Edie, and Chris, who helped make the chocolates; my friends Carolyn, Brian, Chris, Edie, Jeremy, Pam, Nyondo, and Danika, who helped pack the chocolates; and to my friend Lieven, who did the photography!