Molly D.'s Kitchen in Seattle: Local Chocolatiers

Like many Seattleites I try to buy local and organic, and if you’re visiting you can find amazing apples from Central Washington, blackberries that grow like weeds, and shellfish pulled from local waters.

Okay, I guess you can’t possibly buy locally-grown chocolate, but you can do the next best thing and support our economy. Seattle alone has a wealth of chocolate manufacturers, each of which has found a niche in a pretty crowded market:

Oh! Chocolate has three locations (plus one in Georgia?!) and makes crazy good truffles, creams, caramels, and assorted dipped and seasonal treats like sugar plums and peppermint-white-chocolate-coated shortbread bites. I’ve been to two of the locations and the people working there were chatty and sweet, and they always give you a free truffle or caramel to try along with your order.

Theo Chocolate is quintessentially Seattle: organic, fair-trade, with many vegan offerings and its factory and showroom in funky Fremont. You can walk in and try pieces of almost all of its bars, or call ahead and reserve a spot on the factory tour, which I have yet to take but have heard is great. Many of the single-source Origin bars, simply-flavored Classic Combination bars, and funky 3400 Phinney bars are now available nationally, so you might be able to pick up Bread and Chocolate or Dark Chocolate with Orange where you are. Fig, Fennel, and Almond has its fans though I’ve never warmed to it, but for me a little of the Coconut Curry goes a long way, and the Vanilla Milk Chocolate bar is smooth and creamy. In-store and online you can get all sorts of confections like scotch caramels, walnut flaxseed crunch truffles, and Big Daddies in peanut butter or marshmallow. Theo is one of my top 10 Seattle food finds.

Seuss Chocolates & Pastries is the new kid on the block, making truffles and German pastries in an open kitchen in a cute area of Madison park. It’s clearly a labor of love for partners Dennis and David, who even donated their proceeds from heart-shaped Equality chocolates toward supporting Washington’s (now-successful) domestic partnership bill. I’ve bought chocolates for them as gifts but haven’t tried them yet myself, but I liked their focus on classic European chocolates and appreciated seeing slices of German stollen in their pastry case, so I hope they stick around.

Fran’s Chocolates has three locations, none of which I’ve visited myself, but I’ve seen her bars and salted caramels in grocery stores all around the area and have tried her dense, stubby nut-and-caramel filled Gold Bars in almond and macadamia. She seems to get good national press as a successful high-end chocolatier, and I think I’ll make a greater effort to try her wares.

Dilettante wants to satisfy all of your chocolate needs. Not only can you buy or order chocolates and bars, you can also get a whole range of hot chocolates and coffee drinks at its five mocha cafes, and the Mocha Martini Bar on Broadway has all of the above plus cakes, pastries, sundaes, chocolate martinis, and even a few savory items to soak up the sugar and alcohol. The chocolates are good, but Dilettante is really about the experience. I went to the martini bar for the first time recently, and I can vouch for its simple Mexicano cocoa as a warming, not-too-sweet cup of comfort on a frosty night.

Seattle Chocolate seems awfully corporate: available in all the grocery stores and the airport souvenir shops, no individual locations, readily-packaged items without adventurous flavors. I will, however, admit that I’ve enjoyed my share of its Truffle Bars, which have a texture like Lindt’s Lindor Truffles in bar form. You know they’re bad for you, and the flavors are a bit cloying, but they’re also addictive and you’ll keep eating pieces of Coconut Macaroon or Extreme Dark until the bar is gone.

  

Chocolati makes tasty chocolates, but my interaction with the company has primarily been through a couple of its four Chocolati Cafés. They’re a bit homier than Dilettante’s, more like independent coffee shops than Starbucks, and they make thick hot chocolates and mocha drinks that are a nice alternative to Seattle’s ubiquitous coffees.

A small shop I have yet to visit is Boehms, east of Seattle in Issaquah. The website touts a goofy-sounding Edelweiss Chalet, Alpine Chapel, and fountains and some old-school items like pecan roll and chocolate-covered licorice. I’m intrigued enough to stop by the next time I’m out that way.

If all this isn’t enough for you, take the Tour de Chocolat. It starts at Chocolate Box, a chocolate shop near Pike Place Market that serves confections along with selling a variety of upscale American and imported bars, then continues on to a tour of Theo, and one each of the Oh! Chocolate and Fran’s Chocolate shops. I haven’t been myself and am not sure how well it’s worth the $69 cost, but you do get to take home some treats and if you’re in Seattle without stamina for a self-directed tour, perhaps a guided one is the way to go.

So…how is this about cooking? Only tangentially, I suppose, but my love for food and my love for cooking are inextricably intertwined. If yours are too, come to Seattle for the food, chocolate included!

Molly D.'s Kitchen in Seattle: Local Chocolatiers

Molly D.'s Kitchen in Seattle: An Introduction, and Oxtail Tacos

Introduction to My Kitchen

Hi from Seattle! I was all set to write my recipe for today, but as I thought about it I realized my cooking style needs a bit of an introduction:

I'm a lazy cook. I don’t want to plan my grocery shopping way ahead so that I can follow a recipe, and I don’t want to wash a mountain of bowls and measuring implements when I’m done.

I have a diverse background of food influences and I like trying new foods. My refrigerator door is full of Asian condiments, I have over 20 types of sweetener, and I’ll buy unfamiliar items because they sound interesting. But a home kitchen can only stock so much, and many items only stay fresh for so long, so I don’t count on having on hand standard recipe items like parsley and chicken breast.

I love understanding how techniques and ingredients work and what they do for a dish--what to put together and how to do it. In most cases I’m happier doing something on my own than following a recipe.

What this all adds up to is that my cooking tends to be thrown together based on what I have and what I feel like eating. Sometimes what I make works and sometimes it doesn’t, and I hope that as I develop my cooking sense, I’ll make fewer mistakes and more great meals! Today's post is one experiment that worked.

Oxtail Tacos

This afternoon I took the bus to Pike Place Market, one of my favorite places to find unexpected ingredients, and spent several hours wandering through the maze of little shops. By the time my feet hurt, my bag was full of chocolate bars, fresh corn tortillas, little bags of ground ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, a palmier, a jar of brined lemons, Turkish delight, ground chipotle and pasilla peppers, piloncillo, and a new-to-me hot sauce.

When I got home I was starving, and I figured I should start in on the huge stack of tortillas. I decided to combine them with the oxtails I’d been thawing in the fridge, and while I’d never cooked oxtails before, I had been told to go with braising, which was also perfect for chilly late fall. I know relatively little about Mexican cooking and even less about Latin America’s wide variety of peppers, so the pasilla was also an experiment. As usual, I put what I had on hand into the braising liquid. The combination and cooking method might not be authentic, but I chose flavors that would complement each other and taste good reduced into a rich, savory sauce.

Here’s the basic recipe; measurements are guesstimates.

Ingredients

3 oxtails

1 leek, cut into big chunks

2 or 3 cloves garlic, sliced

1/4 c rice vinegar

1 T ground pasilla pepper

1 T ground chipotle pepper

1 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. salt

Corn tortillas

Directions

1. Stand oxtails on their ends in a medium-sized pot/saucepan with a lid and put all other ingredients except tortillas into the spaces around them.
2. Pour water into pot until it reaches halfway up the sides of the oxtails.
3. Place on heat and bring to boil, then turn heat down to low and cover pot.
4. Come back every so often to make sure water hasn’t all boiled out and to turn the oxtails over once or twice during cooking.
5. After two or three hours (this recipe involves minimal work but a lot of waiting), the meat should be tender enough that you can push it off the bones into the reduced liquid.
6. Spoon chunks of meat into tortilla. Dip each bite into a vinegary, spicy hot sauce to cut the richness and add heat. So good.

 Serves two.

Notes on the Ingredients

• Vinegar: There wasn’t enough flavor initially, so, inspired by adobo, I added the vinegar. I’m sure it would be fine with a different type of vinegar or without any at all, but I wanted tang without extra flavors, and rice vinegar was the mildest I had in my pantry.
• Pepper: At first I used only the pasilla, but I found it too mild so I added the chipotle for heat and smokiness. I’m sure other pepper varieties or Latin-American-inspired spices would taste great, just different.
• Leeks: I had leeks on hand, but onions would probably serve just as well.
• Cinnamon: I had just bought the cinnamon and remembered it from other Mexican dishes so I thought I’d throw it in, though I can’t tell if the amount I used made any difference.
• Corn tortillas: I love flour tortillas, but I suspect they’d be a bit bland and doughy next to the deeply flavored oxtails. Also, I understand that there are several ways to soften tortillas, and I went with steaming because it was convenient. We ate our tacos over the still-simmering pot of oxtails, so I softened each tortilla one at a time by laying it over the little tripod of oxtail bones and covering the pot. Depending how much steam there was, the tortilla was tender but not yet gummy after anywhere between 30 seconds and a couple minutes. (This is also why there are no photos of the finished, plated dish--there were no plates!)

Notes on the Final Result:

• The oxtails turned out great. The braising liquid reduced into an incredibly rich and savory sauce for the chunks of meat.
• The best surprise was that the leeks totally collapsed into the richness of the sauce. I’ve never been a huge fan of leeks, but each time I picked one out of the sauce it felt like a treat.
• The fat and long simmer really tamed the heat of the pepper, so the final product was way less spicy than when I tasted it earlier in the cooking process.
• This recipe serves two, but it doesn’t make a lot of meat. Because it’s so rich you only need a couple tablespoons of meat per tortilla.

Molly D.'s Kitchen in Seattle: An Introduction, and Oxtail Tacos