Chocolateria has entered Chicago through the local coffee company Dark Matter. On the menu? Conventional cafe items, such as espresso and coffee, plus chocolate bars and Mexican drinking chocolate, happen to be made with cocoa beans from Mexico.
Monica Ortiz Lozano, co-founder of La Rifa Chocolateria, said: “Today, we are doing some chocolate making process.” “At Sleep Walk, we are working with Mexican cocoa companies.”
Aaron Campos, Coffee Supervisor at Dark Matter Coffee, said: “Real good coffee and real good chocolate have many overlapping flavors. You can really choose from cocoa beans to coffee beans.”
Unlike the other seven locations, this location is in collaboration with La Rifa Chocolateria in Mexico.
Campos said: “First, they invited us to visit the producers in Chiapas, Mexico.” “Learn about processing and chocolate production. We were shocked by the work they could do here, and we were inspired to bring many of these ideas with us. To Chicago.”
Lozano and Daniel Reza, the co-founders of La Rifa, have been training Chicago Sleep Walk employees how to transform cocoa.
Lozano said: “We roasted the cocoa beans, then shelled and removed the skin of the cocoa nibs.” “This will help when grinding cocoa powder in traditional stone mills. These stone mills are a large tradition we brought from Mexico. In the mill, the friction between the stones grinds the cocoa. Then we will get a real liquid paste, because cocoa contains a lot of cocoa butter. This will make our paste really liquid instead of cocoa powder . Once we prepare the cocoa paste, we add sugar and then grind it again to make fine chocolate.”
Cocoa beans are produced by two farmers in the Mexican states of Tabasco and Chiapas, Monica Jimenez and Margarito Mendoza. Since cocoa beans grow in different fruits, flowers and trees, Sleep Walk can provide seven different chocolate flavors.
Lozano said: “After grinding and condensing the chocolate, we will check the temperature.” “At night, we will crystallize the temperature correctly, so we will get shiny chocolate bars, which will be Crunchy. This is how we subsequently molded chocolate bars and then packaged them and got this amazing first collection.”
Using the same procedure, the cocoa paste is made into tablets, which are then mixed with natural vanilla to make the so-called Mexican drinking chocolate. That’s right: the only ingredients are cocoa and vanilla, zero additives. But this is not all. Dark Matter has established partnerships with local bakeries (Azucar Rococo, Do-Rite Donuts, El Nopal Bakery 26th Street and West Town Bakery) to use chocolate as a coating for pastries and syrup for coffee drinks.
They also collaborated with local artists to design wrapping paper for their chocolate bars. These artists include Isamar Medina, Chris Orta, Ezra Talamantes, Ivan Vazquez, Czr Prz, Zeye One and Matr and Kozmo.
For Dark Matter and La Rifa, this kind of collaboration between artists, the community and Mexico is imperative.
Lozano said: “I think this is a good way to reconnect with our cultural roots and build new relationships here.”
If you want to try a cup of Mexican-drinking chocolate yourself, you can go to Sleep Walk, a local chocolate specialty store in Chicago, Pilsen, 1844 Blue Island Avenue.
Post time: Jan-07-2021