Is chocolate is better when the cacao beans travel by sail? We'll find out soon.
A seafaring tale with hints of smuggling, intrigue, stormy seas and a booty of sustainably-grown cacao beans? Yes please!
For the first time since 1939, a sailing vessel bearing a commercial cargo came to port in New York City. The Black Seal, a 70-foot schooner, docked alongside an Ecuadorean container ship at the Red Hook Waterfront last week, after four week voyage to the Caribbean and back.
The cargo? Twenty tons of meticulously-sourced Dominican cacao.
The client? Williamsburg’s Mast Brothers Chocolate.
The Wall Street Journal has the whole story. It’s a good one. Think negotiating with befuddled customs agents…navigating one of the busiest drug-smuggling routes in the world…weathering days-long gales, and trying to unload sacks of beans at a port designed to unload shipping containers from giant freighters…
The conundrum is clear. New York is a coastal city, surrounded by seas rich with life and towns where fishermen have been harvesting the ocean’s bounty for centuries. Yet it’s next to impossible to buy fresh fish, caught locally, anywhere, even at many docks themselves, where fishermen have exclusive deals with distributors who pump the [...]
“On Evan’s very first brew day here, he got heatstroke.” -Craig Frymark Simply put, local upstart Barrier Brewing is killing it. The year-old, two-man operation has already made a name for itself by brewing an impressive variety of notably well-crafted beers on a tiny single-barrel brewing system, out of a small garage-like space in Oceanside, New York. Evan [...]
Christopher Nicholson’s day job is interesting enough. His daily commute takes him from his Greenpoint home to the Red Hook harborfront, where he’s a winemaker at the Red Hook Winery , shepherding Long Island and Finger Lakes grapes through the long and complex journey from vine to barrel to bottle. But his other work may be even [...]
When Annie Novak of Greenpoint’s 
“We use local, organic ingredients as often as possible” For today’s discerning diners, that once-reassuring line on a menu doesn’t cut it anymore. It seems like it’s almost de rigeur for new-school Brooklyn restaurants to reserve a spot on their menus to proudly name the farms from which they source their meats, produce, and cheese. You’ve [...]
Most of us don’t contemplate much beyond, “Cappuccino or Latte?” when it comes to coffee. But coffee can be complicated. A particularly complex supply chain makes it easy for us to to skip the questions we’ve begun asking more frequently about our food: Who grew this? Where? How? The Crop to Cup Coffee Company was [...]
Rumors have been swirling over the past year about Bacon Marmalade, an elusive and highly sought-after invention supposedly created by a chef in Greenpoint. Wide-eyed devotees of the mysterious marmalade talk about its almost magical, mystical properties when added to a sandwich, stirred into pan with greens or seafood, or used as a marinade on [...]