Edible: Handcrafted Chocolate A Real Treat At Brooklyn Shop
To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.
Then come back here and refresh the page.
Mast Brothers Chocolates in Brooklyn makes its own handcrafted chocolate from carefully selected beans. Rachel Wharton of Edible Manhattan magazine filed the following report.Edible’s made the trip to Williamsburg, Brooklyn to visit one of the few places in the city making handcrafted chocolate from scratch.
We're not talking about just bonbons, but bean to bar. Five years ago, Brooklyn's Mast Brothers Chocolates was the first to start by buying cacao direct from the source. In fact, in the current issue of Edible Brooklyn, a photographer tailed the founders on a boat trip to the Dominican Republic to buy beans. They're turning those into their Conacado chocolate bar, which are made by hand on the premises in a five-step process.
“Roasting, winnowing, grinding, tempering, wrapping. That's kind of the five steps,” says Derek Herbster, a chocolate-maker at Mast Brothers Chocolates. “Eating is the sixth step.”
Mast Brothers rarely creates blends, instead relying on the flavors of beans themselves to flavor dark chocolates that are made with at least 70 percent cacao and a little bit of cane sugar.
“This Dominican Republic tastes different from this Peruvian because the terroir is different, because it's different regions, whereas other chocolate companies are sort of just making chocolate, we're trying to showcase the fact that chocolate has many different tastes, you know, depending on how you make it,” says Herbster.
The company also just created a test kitchen, hiring Finnish pastry chef Vesa Parviainen to tinker with cookies, truffles and cakes. Beyond those sweets, Mast is offering tours next door, where they've expanded their factory by nearly 3,000 beautiful square feet. It features floor to ceiling windows, where you can watch Mast staffers wrap hand-molded bars in custom papers and gold foil.
“We're like the Brooklyn Willy Wonka, you know?” says Herbster.
Published every other month, Edible Manhattan magazine celebrates Gotham's food culture season by season. To learn more, go to ediblemanhattan.com, follow us on Facebook or on Twitter.