Ten Minutes with Jessica Spaulding: On Chocolate

Chocolate is more than just a sweet treat. It’s also a form of art. Ed Ruscha, for example, whose work is currently on view in the exhibition ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, uses liquified chocolate as an ink for staining paper and covering the walls of an entire room. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Swiss artist Dieter Roth created a series of chocolate multiples—small-scale, three-dimensional works of art produced in large editions—and his P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust]) used chocolate and birdseed to cast a self-portrait depicting the artist as an old man. Unlike a traditional marble bust intended to endure through the ages, Roth wanted his bust to be mounted on a post in the open air, where birds could nibble on it until nothing remained.

Inspired by these inventive uses of chocolate, we interviewed Jessica Spaulding, local chocolatier and cofounder of Harlem Chocolate Factory. For Spaulding, chocolate offers endless opportunity. “I think that being a chocolatier is that space where you get to get into your Willy Wonka greatness and just let your imagination run wild,” she says. For this month’s Ten Minutes podcast, we dig into the complex process that takes beans to bars, and the real-world impact chocolate has on the people who make it.

Dieter Roth. P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust]). 1968

To hear more about the connection between chocolate, art, and society, click on the SoundCloud audio below.

See below for a transcript of the SoundCloud audio.

Chocolatier Jessica Spaulding: You don’t want to think about the ills of something while you’re eating a piece of chocolate. And you don’t want to think about the massive industry that has been developed around chocolate that puts a very specific set of people at a full and complete disadvantage in their own countries. But the fact is there’s so much work that went into every single process to do this. If we bring that acknowledgement into what we’re eating on a regular basis, we can try to have a little bit more respect for this ingredient that, unfortunately, is getting mass produced.

Hey, I’m Jessica Spaulding. I’m the founder and CEO of Harlem Chocolate Factory.

I founded Harlem Chocolate Factory mainly because I wanted to make my mark on chocolate. I grew up going to chocolate shows and being in rooms filled with chocolates from all over the world. There would be these fashion shows where these women had these elaborate gowns made out of chocolate with chocolate corsets and chocolate hairdos. I mean, it was just so...imaginative. It opens your mind to the world of possibilities, and so I think that being a chocolatier is that space where you get into your Willy Wonka greatness and just let your imagination run wild and try to find a way to make the science work behind it.

My ambition to work with chocolate grew out of this kind of desire to eat it. I grew up in a really strict health-food-only house, but I had so many different after-school activities that I was involved in, like cooking. And when I realized that a part of cooking—you could just focus on desserts, you didn’t have to focus on the rest of the meal—my interest grew.

In college, that was where I learned my foundation of working with chocolate and my love for it, because it was this one thing that incorporated everything that I was good at. It was science, it was art, it was taste, it was cooking, chemistry. It was all these things at one time that—everybody kept telling me I needed to choose from one. Chocolate was the one thing where I didn’t have to make a choice and I could just be all the different parts of who I was. And that’s what I did.

I think chocolate is an important food because, whether it’s white chocolate, whether it’s milk chocolate, whether it’s dark chocolate, whether it’s a confection made with chocolate, it’s really the food of the gods. It is so many unique flavors that can’t truly be replicated anywhere else.

Chocolate and art, they’re so intrinsically tied to one another, because there’s an art to just the production of a piece.

So chocolate is made by cocoa pods. They’re filled with these seeds. We refer to them as beans. Those beans are removed from the pod and fermented and dried in the sun. Then they come over to a chocolate maker, who gets a very specific roast depending on what the circumstances of the seed were—how much water content, how much sun it received. From that roast, the bean is broken down and now you have these crunched-up cocoa nibs.

Those cocoa nibs are then ground for a very long time. That grinding process is where you start removing some of that bitterness.

Cocoa butter is added, which is a derivative of the cocoa nib process, but you need a very specific, controlled amount when you’re making chocolate for people to indulge in. You add in that cocoa butter, the sugar, the milk fats if you’re making milk chocolate. Once that is completed, then it’s aged. The aging is where you get a lot of the flavor profile developed.

This very complex, mechanical, scientific process has to happen just to get a product that I can now receive as a chocolatier and make something out of it.

Volume two is tempering.

Tempering is the process of creating a stable crystal structure so that it is edible and manageable. We’re dealing with a fluid that is not like anything else, so it’s not like once frozen, it’ll stay. There are six different crystal forms of cocoa butter, and you’re trying to basically create a level-five crystal throughout your chocolate.

It’s a series of heating chocolate, cooling it, agitating it to create and disperse those crystal structures throughout your chocolate, so that when you pick it up it doesn’t melt in two seconds or it’s not flimsy or not even setting up.

So that’s chocolate making, which is outrageously obscene as a process, and why I think people truly need to understand there’s no way on the planet that a chocolate bar should ever be two dollars.

It’s impossible to cover all the different processes that go into producing chocolate with two dollars. If we really think about what two dollars is, and we think about every single one of those processes, that grinding and the adding in of the cocoa butter, that conching where you’re taking out a lot of that bitterness, it’s just basically the chocolate spinning on these stone wheels for hours. You need that time to produce the most balanced flavor, so you don’t have people walking around saying, “Oh, I hate dark chocolate. It’s so bitter.” No, that just needed like 10 more hours on a machine. But because they were trying to get it to you for $1.25, they had to take it off in two hours.

The chocolate industry is largely self-regulated. Quite literally, these massive corporations are allowed to police themselves on how they treat people, and they’re allowed to circumvent slavery. True and total slavery exists and it is very prominent in this industry. It’s the only way that you can justify that $1.25 and that $2.

When you go in and you start looking at the profit margins, you realize how much has to be free, from resources on the actual ingredients side to the resources in human labor. It is impossible to reach those price points without forcing it or taking it from someone. As a people, we are over-consuming sugar in a way that is so unhealthy for both ourselves and the planet. That push to feed us is literally destroying people’s lives.

When you really understand how much horror there is in the industry, it becomes very difficult. Especially me, as a Black woman, how do I put myself in an industry that still has my people enslaved in other areas?

Chocolate in general, to 80% of it on this earth, comes from the continent of Africa. And there is a very specific marketing campaign that continues to just associate refinement and decadence and the beauty of chocolate with Europe, when that is not what’s happening. There is a whole group of people who, through colonialism and all these very specific and tragic means, have been left out of the chocolatier process.

People say, “My favorite chocolate is Belgian chocolate,” and I’m like, your favorite chocolate is Ghanaian chocolate, because that’s the chocolate that they’re using, or it’s the Ivory Coast, that’s the chocolate that you like.

We can’t continue to label chocolate as these small countries that produce it on its last leg. It’s time for us to reorient ourselves and give the West Africans the credit for doing that and keeping the industry alive, because there ain’t a single cocoa plant growing in Europe.

You enjoy chocolate in an artistic way, and it’s supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to be this experience that can get us away from this kind of mass consumption. But If you took the time to really enjoy each piece and see it for the art that’s involved, and respect the fact that people sacrifice things to get that to you, we can get a lot more out of the earth.

Jessica Spaulding grew up in an anti-sugar home, but there was one exception to this rule: CHOCOLATE. Not just any chocolate, high-quality chocolate. Her mother knew the higher the quality of the chocolate, the lower the sugar and the better the flavor. They would attend every chocolate show and learn about chocolate from around the world but could never find anything that reflected her culture. So she tempered her first batch of chocolate at 10 years old and dreamed of owning a chocolate factory. Although being a chocolatier wasn’t a supported career path, she never gave up on her dream. Merging her passion for chocolate with her love of Harlem is an experience she wants to share with everyone.

This episode was produced and edited by Arlette Hernandez, with mixing and sound design by Brandi Howell and music by Chad Crouch.

MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.