The Chocolate Project, Bean-to-Bar & Dark Chocolate Truffles with Ruth Kennison

On this episode of Taste Buds with Deb, host Debra Eckerling speaks with chocolatier and chocolate educator Ruth Kennison of The Chocolate Project.   Honey represents a sweet Jewish New Year! Why not kick off the calendar year by indulging in chocolate. Just make sure it’s the good kind.   “When you're using really good chocolate, it just elevates everything,” explains Kennison, who turned a life-long love of chocolate into her fourth career.    “I thought I'd never had any artistic bone in my body; I was an organizer and a production assistant and all sorts of things,” she says. “And I realized, this form of art combines food, chocolate, and art.”   After her pastry certification and the decision to focus on chocolate, Kennison took a trip to Paris, which led to an origin trip to Mexico. There, Kennison met farmers, saw cacao trees and learned how chocolate was processed from bean to bar.    “Chocolate comes from a fruit [that] grows only 10 to 20 degrees above and below the equator … so it grows in West Africa, Asia, Central America, South America and Mexico,” she explains. “When you open it, [the] white stuff is fruit and it tastes like lychee, and then inside of it are the little cocoa beans that need to be fermented to be made into chocolate.”   The craft chocolate and bean-to-bar movement have made good chocolate more accessible than ever.    “Bean-to-bar makers [are] roasting the beans very low and slow, so you're getting the pure natural flavors of the bean, similar to wine,” she says. “And when that batch of cacao goes away, you'll never have that exact bar again.”   Once you have quality chocolate, there are plenty of things you can make. Kennison likes to use all parts of the cacao, which includes the cocoa nibs. For instance, Kennison loves vanilla soft serve ice cream with homemade caramel sauce, cocoa nibs, and sea salt. She also makes double chocolate chip cookies, and dark chocolate truffles, which you can adapt by adding different flavors.    “It can be a coffee chocolate truffle by steeping coffee in your cream,” she explains. “I just made a London fog truffle with Earl gray and vanilla.”   Ruth Kennison talks about her chocolate-centric career journey, the Jewish-chocolate connection, and the basics of the bean-to-bar movement. She also shares tips on how to identify quality chocolate, as well as some of her favorite chocolate recipes, including dark chocolate truffles, which you can find at JewishJournal.com/podcasts.   Go to Chocolate-project.com to learn more about Ruth Kennison and her in-person and virtual chocolate classes and events, including ones at The Gourmandise School in Santa Monica. Follow @ChocProject on Instagram and Facebook.    For more from Taste Buds, subscribe on iTunes and YouTube, and follow @TheDEBMethod on social media.