Why does burlingame smell like chocolate

Eureka Works chocolate will be sold at Williams-Sonoma online on Nov. Domingo Ghirardelli opens D. Etienne Guittard arrives in San Francisco, realizes selling supplies is a better bet than looking for gold and returns to France to get chocolate-making equipment. The original factory is destroyed in the earthquake and fire.

Under Etienne's son, Horace C. Guittard, the company moves briefly to Commercial Street, then to Main Street; its main focus is now chocolate. The factory is forced out of the waterfront through eminent domain to make way for the Embarcadero Freeway. Now under Horace A. Horace A. John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg found Scharffen Berger chocolate in Berkeley; at the time, there were just 11 other bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the United States.

Spurred by the success of Scharffen Berger with dark chocolate, Gary releases the first single-origin chocolate in the U. Guittard fights big candy companies' lobbying to allow vegetable oil of any amount, rather than cocoa butter, to be used in products labeled chocolate. Tara Duggan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Eater SF - Commercial harvesting of mushrooms is now illegal in burn zones of National Forests, but that hasn't stopped for-profit shroom hunters from picking on public lands — they've just gone underground.

As you might expect, the mushroom black market is a shady place. NPR - And finally, a look back at history, at what has got to be 1 on the list of worst jobs in the world. Starting in , members of the U. This brave group of men was responsible for helping to create the Food and Drug Administration and ingredient lists on food labels. Atlas Obscura The Umami Reader : Mining the internet for stuff about food worth reading and watching. Conbini View All. Brad travels with Guittard Chocolate to visit a cacao farm in Ecuador where he learns how farmers harvest and ferment cacao beans.

First Family of Chocolate. Profile by Sophia Markoulakis of the Guittard family Gary, Amy and Clark and the company as it celebrates its th year. Fact Sheet. Guittard Backgrounder. Gary Guittard Biography. Gary Guittard Biography Short. Amy Guittard Biography. Chef Donald Wressell Biography. Guittard Launches Makers Reserve for the Professional. Baking Bars Press Release.

Organic Wafers Press Release. Chocolate Bars Press Release. The machinery for roasting, grinding, refining is massive and much of it is more than 60 years old, shipped in from Switzerland and Germany. The company is even older, celebrating its th year—still manufacturing in the Bay Area, still privately owned.

Ghirardelli Chocolate Company is now owned by the U. Guittard sits in an economic sweet spot between big companies and little ones, supplying chocolate for everyone from See's, Williams-Sonoma and Shake Shack to Recchiuti Confections and Charles Chocolates. The company has expanded to a new facility in Fairfield, but much of the processing of the chocolate still happens in Burlingame.

Gary's daughter, Amy Guittard, says there's a mind-bending range of variation in chocolate, depending on what variables you play with and how. The nib, for instance, is more or less 50 percent fat and 50 percent solid. Once those two elements have been separated from each other in a hydraulic press, you can adjust those percentages, depending on your intended application.

Gary Guittard also loves to nerd out on the specifics. He can tell you where cocoa pods grow best, which would be "10 to 15 degrees on either side of the equator. The company gets the cocoa beans after they've been fermented and dried by farmers. We might want [beans] a little under-fermented, depending on the bean type, or a little over-fermented.

Or we might want them dried quickly or more slowly.