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Welcome to Bean to Barstool Bite Sized, where we spend about 5 minutes on a specific topic in craft beer, craft chocolate, or artisan drinks. Today we're talking with Liang Wang of Kessho Chocolate in Austin, Texas. Liang talks about Kessho’s line of tea-infused chocolate bars. Enjoy!
You can listen to the entire episode this clip is from here.
Hey everyone, welcome to Bean to Barstool Bite-sized, where we spend about five minutes with some of our favorite people from Kraft Beer and Kraft Chocolate. Today we hear from Liang Wang of Casho Chocolate in Austin, Texas. In this clip, Liang talks about Casho's line of tea-infused chocolate bars. Enjoy!
SPEAKER_01
Our very first tea chocolate bar is actually the Boba tea bar. It's a milk, 44% milk chocolate using Cayapas River Ecuadoran cacao. So it's actually also um an interesting accident because we when I tasted the samples of the Callapas River cacao, it had a it doesn't have a really strong astringency. Although I know like for National Um cacao, it usually it often has some some level of astringency with the bean, um, which is not a defect but a flavor profile. Like, but when we actually received a big batch of the uh Ecuadorian cacao, we realize uh that astringency is much stronger than the sample. Um no matter how long we roast it or like we extend the lounging time, um, that astringency will not go away. And I've paid for everything and I need to use those beans. So I thought, well, what other ingredient that has astringency and it's tastes natural, and that's tea. And so I used uh a very good like black tea from southern China because tea is somehow like cacao. Like if the astringency is not so strong, like people really enjoy it, and that's can tend to be like more expensive. So a very low astringency tea, black tea, actually really balanced out the cacao. So we we made it into, we first just call it a milk tea chocolate. And we also like it's a collaborative creation process. We sent it to one of our who is also a retailer of us right now, uh Cody, uh we sent it to him and he tasted that bar. He was like, you should call it boba tea. It really reminds me of boba. Um, because we used a lot of dark molasses sugar rather than cane sugar in that bar. It's actually very challenging because dark molasses sugar's moisture level is pretty high. So uh tempering that bar is never easy. So we we decided to take Cody's advice and name it boba tea. And so boba tea, for the past two years, boba tea have been our top two sellers as well, because I think that tea and cacao, like the cacao's flavor profile just like enhanced the tea notes and also like the dark molasses flavor notes, just and the earthiness of the cacao also resonates really really well. So that's our first tea bar. And then we decided to make a hoji cha bar because personally I really like drinking hoji cha. Like I have to admit, I'm not a big matcha fan because I'm yeah, I like my personality is is somehow against like pop culture, like whatever that's really popular. I tend not to like it so much. So um I always like drinking hoji cha. And even if when I go go out to demo, I told people this is hoji cha, and there's people like, oh let me try it. And then it's like, this is not hochata. Um yeah, it's uh it's hojicha, not hochata. So hoji cha is roasted Japanese green tea, it has um a very beautiful like dark note, almost like coffee. Um, so uh for this, for our uh white chocolate bar, we use deodorized cacao butter and we make our own white chocolate base because when we make a tea bar, we want to emphasize the like the Japanese tea notes because the the better the Japanese tea is, usually the flavor note is more like subtle. So uh we choose to go through the deodorized cacao butter route. And so after hoji cha, which got us many, may probably the most international awards, uh, we decided to make a matcha bar because there were just too many people who asked for matcha. But that was easy because we sourced the hoji cha from Uji, and I I know those people so well, so they can easily make they they know what kind of matcha I'm looking for because they have like 40 different kinds of matcha. So we tested out from maybe five different types, and then we finalized on one matcha that we are still using now. And then after matcha, we decided to do a ginmai cha, which is Mark's favorite. Um, I know like Genmai Cha is not so well known in the States, uh, but also I really like the Gin Mai Cha's warming uh note, it has like the green tea and toasted rice. And interestingly, like people who have never known heard of Jimmai Cha before and taste that chocolate bar, they would recognize it as pizza pistacho and popcorn. Um, so I think good flavors are universal. Like people may have different brain associations, but it touched the soft spot in their brain and they decided that oh, I really like this bar. Then they will be like, so what is skimming? Yeah. So again, I think tea and cacao are associated like so well with one another. We are still in uh in the process of making more tea chocolate bars. So hopefully in the yeah, next year we will have more interesting tea, tea flavored, um, dark or milk chocolate.
SPEAKER_00
You can find links to my entire episode with Liang Wang as well as the Casheau Chocolate website in the show notes. The music today was by my dear friend Anna P. S. My name is David Nelson. Thanks for listening to Beat to Barstool Bite-Sized.
