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Love At Mast: Murray's Debuts Chocolate-Infused Cheese For Valentine's Day
















"they're much more affordable than diamonds."

BIENVENUE DANS LE NEO-BROOKLYN

By Claire Levenson, Photos by Gentl & Hyers

Chocolate No Sangue

By Ana Strumpf

The Mast Brothers Add 3,000 Square Feet, a Test Kitchen, Tours and a Pastry Chef

By Rachel Wharton

The topic of our weekly NY1 show is just what you need after yesterday’s binge: dark chocolate. We took a trip to Mast Brothers Chocolates in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the siblings behind the city’s first true bean-to-bar operation have just expanded their factory by 3,000 square feet and hired Finnish pastry chef Vesa Parviainen to run their new test kitchen.

Parviainen’s now responsible for turning their intensely flavored single origin chocolates–they’re all at least 70 percent cacao—into a range of sweets that reflect the terroir of the brothers’ respective bars. (Our favorite last week? A shortbread wafer sandwich held together by a ganache made from their super smoky Papua New Guinea bar.

The segment was of course inspired by the cover story in the current issue of our sister magazine Edible Brooklyn, where a photographer tailed the brothers Mast on a boat trip to buy beans from a cooperative in the Dominican Republic. You can see those beans being made into Conacado bars at the lovely shop in our NY1 piece (which airs today and again on Sunday; you can also watch it online here) or in person if you take the new tour of the expanded factory. Just don’t try to go today; they’re closed today for the Thanksgiving holiday. Hey, even Williamsburg Willy Wonkas need a break every now and again.

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The Mast Brothers Live Up To Their Name


By Gabrielle Langholtz

Brooklyn's most celebrated chocolatiers set sail. It’s only five years since brothers Rick and Michael Mast began making their life-changing chocolate in a Williamsburg apartment but in that time they’ve become the exemplars of the area’s artisan era. From their DIY process (they were the first bean-to-bar outfit in New York) to their sustainable sourcing standards (they buy direct from small organic cacao farmers whom they regard as fam- ily) to the extraordinary quality of their product (bought by the likes of Dan Barber and Thomas Keller) to their facial hair (which would make President Lincoln envious), the brothers are emblem- atic of the Brooklyn food phenomenon.

Given their postmodern reappropriation of preindustrial processes, we shouldn’t have been surprised when the brothers decided to think outside the shipping container. In an effort to “be oil- free,” they turned to wind power—not by selecting the turbine option on their electricity bill, but by retrofitting a 70-foot cargo ship into a three-masted shipping schooner called the Black Seal, docking off the Dominican Republic and loading up with nearly 20 tons of organic cocoa beans.

Baffled customs agents, accustomed to narcotics-related chicanery, had a few questions, but eventually Captain Eric Loftfield won approval to point the little ship’s prow north toward Brooklyn. after two weeks out on the atlantic, the crew docked in Red Hook and unloaded 400 bags of cocoa, marking the first time such a ship had arrived in a New York port since 1939.

The brothers are working their way through the magic beans, about a year’s supply, and say they’ll soon be back at sea. Within three years they plan to use only wind and sail to transport all their beans, literally shipping boatloads from Central and South america with less energy than it takes to drive a case of turnips down from the Catskills.

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Mast Brothers Chocolate Sets Sail on a Chocolate Making Adventure

By Susie Wyshak

A short walk from the L train Bedford Street stop in Brooklyn’s strikingly hip Williamsburg area, you arrive at Mast Brothers‘ small chocolate making “factory.” Meeting their growers and giving tours of their bean-to-bar operation jazzes these two brothers: Rick, a chef and Michael, a film maker.

I had no idea what to expect, and this visit proved how delightful it is when an experience exceeds anything you could have imagined:

1) Rather than drum roasters, they use small convection ovens and roast the organic beans on trays the size of a home cookie sheet. “We can do true roasting profiles and have so much more control over a drum roaster. Everyone here has a master palate. We know it’s ready by taste.”bea

2) An aerospace engineer friend designed and patented a winnowing machine that uses air to remove hulls and grind the beans into nibs. (This clever device has no hallmarks of Rube Goldberg.)

3) A domestic company builds their chocolate-making machines, powered by granite wheels. Their basic chocolate consists simply of cacao beans and organic ugar. Other inclusions like almonds making mast brothers chocolatecome from producers they know personally. The granite wheels macerate and smooth the roasted beans and sugar for several days. With a twist of a knob, they increase pressure to make the chocolate smoother and smoother. When the chocolate is ready–all determined by taste–It sits for 30 days in metal bins to “age,” which is a new-school chocolate-making method popularized by fellow chocolate maker Steve DeVries.

4) Each bar is hand wrapped, with friends coming in during the busy season to lend a hand. In the air-conditioned bar wrapping room, which I imagine makes this the coveted job during summer, photos of the superstar fast wrappers plaster the wall. First gold foil wraps around the freshly molded chocolate bars, then a fancy gift-paper like wrapper, designed by Mast Brothers and printed by Prestone Press in Long Island City. They keep a keg filled with local beer on hand for the chocolate makers (which are all of the employees) to enjoy. “It’s the buddy system,” they explain when I asked if the brewery supplies beer is in trade for chocolate.

5) Next, The Secret Room. Just kidding. They specifically point out they are a completely open door operation with nothing to hide. Although the Oompa Loompas were disguised as hip tattooed Brooklynites.




How to Import Cocoa Beans and Travel to Another Century in 14 Days

Everything Mast Brothers uses is organic and direct trade, purchased directly from producers. The only “certifications” they embrace and need are direct connections to growers. “We consider our growers family. We will also be the first buyers from a new Belize co-operative that our friends started,” says Rick.

They point to a stack of burlap sacks filled with cocoa beans, preparing to transport me to the 19th century. “We chartered a 70-foot schooner to pick 20 metric tons of beans up from the Dominican Republic,” Rick says. He explains the impetus for sailing is that there is nothing local about cocoa. “We figure why not limit our participation in the industrialization of food. The same people who grew the cacao from the La Red co-operative delivered the shipment to the boat.” They thanked their growers with an excellent price and ample beer.

It took 14 days to get the bean-filled schooner back to Brooklyn, with only wind powering the boat. “We learned a lot just bringing it into the Brooklyn port. The city hadn’t played host to a schooner in decades. They were like ‘Why would you do that?’” Once it sunk in, the city agreed it was quite an awesome endeavor. At the port, they inspected the beans and found no problems–making Mast Brothers the first since 1939 to sail cargo into New York City! A few blocks later, the beans landed at Mast Brothers HQ. They aren’t sure if it cost more to transport the beans this way. Hey, lots of people might pay to take such an adventure. (Here’s more about the trip)

In the next couple of months, visitors and locals can enjoy an expanded chocolate making facility with a community center open to passersby to see first-hand how good chocolate is made. Farmer visits, chocolate history talks, and music complete the picture of a community space for the brothers. “Nothing substitutes for people coming in, meeting us, and seeing our place. We want to have a place where people walking by eating ice cream can pop in and discover how chocolate is made.” Good business is FUN.

It’s worth a trip off the beaten path to taste their chocolate where it’s made. “We make every wholesale order on demand. Nothing is sitting in a warehouse.” Visit 105 North 3rd Street (the Bedford L stop) and travel to another time and place to discover Mast Brothers chocolate bars, chips, tablets, cacao nibs, and soon, confections.

What’s next? After I told a beloved candy maker all about the Mast Brothers, she immediately felt a connection. I won’t give it away to them or anyone, but I see great things to come in East Coast confection collaborations through yet another synchronous food connection. Good food is good life!

Fête Accompli | T Magazine Toasts Edible Selby

By Jane Herman




Last night at Isa, the new built-by-hand Williamsburg, Brooklyn, restaurant owned by Taavo Somer of Freemans Sporting Club fame, a “feast of friends,” as Somer called it, gathered to celebrate the photographer and T Magazine contributor Todd Selby. In the kitchen, some of Selby’s most beloved chef-subjects — Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson of Tartine in San Francisco, Martin Berg of Mathias Dahlgren in Stockholm, Russell Moore of Camino restaurant in Oakland, CA, and Ignacio Mattos, who will cook at Isa when its doors open later this month — collaborated on a diverse menu of stunning appetizer-size dishes. Guests enjoyed flatbreads lathered with whipped pork lardo, ricotta baked in fig leaves and dressed with an herby cucumber-garlic sauce, toasted king trumpet mushrooms, pork belly served with roasted beets and watercress, and special Mast Brothers chocolate bars wrapped in quirky, Selby-made paper. Aspiring to make Isa, which means “father” in Estonian, a “melting pot of different foods and cultures,” Mattos couldn’t have picked a more fitting christening for his kitchen. Cheers!

Cocoa Arrives, By Sail

By Andrew Grossman

On the Red Hook waterfront next to a container ship carrying 20,000 tons of Ecuadorian bananas, a group of stevedores, sailors and makers of artisanal chocolate spent Tuesday morning unloading 20 tons of cocoa beans out of a 70-foot sailing schooner.

It was the first time a sailing ship had unloaded commercial cargo in New York since 1939, according to one city official.

Two years ago a pair of bearded brothers decided to try importing cocoa for their Williamsburg chocolate factory—which focuses on simple, ecologically friendly sweets—by sail. They hoped it would save energy, help lure environmentally conscious buyers, and, maybe eventually, cost less. Their ship finally came in from the Dominican Republic on Monday night.

"We tend to think of everything as simple as possible," said one of the brothers, Rick Mast. "Why can't you sail it?"

The brothers wanted to get to work unloading right away Monday, but that turned out not to be simple. The piers in Red Hook aren't set up for sailboats, so the deck of the ship was too low for stevedores to safely haul the 150-pound bags of cocoa beans onto dry land. The four-legged rolling behemoths that unload shipping containers, meanwhile, were too large to use. A small crane had to be driven down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway from Long Island City.

That was how it went for much of the Black Seal's four-week voyage to the Caribbean and back to New York. While sailing ships carrying goods were responsible for much of New York's early development, doing trade that way these days is complicated.

The first problem was finding a cargo ship with sails. Rick and Michael Mast, co-founders of Mast Brothers Chocolate, eventually found the three-masted Black Seal, which Captain Eric Loftfield had spent 25 years building in his Cape Cod lawn as a hobby. Mr. Loftfield spends much of his time piloting ships between Washington and Alaska.

Then they had to figure out where to dock it and unload it. There they had the help of Andrew Genn, the vice president of the New York City Economic Development Corp.'s maritime division. He helped them figure out how to dock the ship at the Red Hook Marine Terminal, in which the city owns a stake.

Once the ship got to New York Harbor, it was slowed down by customs agents who are better acquainted with the mechanics of checking the cargo of giant container ships than small sailboats carrying 20 tons of organic cocoa.

Things were even harder in the Dominican Republic, where officials in the tourist town of Puerto Plata were befuddled by Americans trying to sail away with a cargo hold full of beans.

Rich Falotico, the Mast Brothers' cocoa importer, flew down to help negotiate. He and a representative for the Dominican farmers had to explain to the people running the port, the military and drug-enforcement officers what they were trying to do and that yes, they knew this sort of thing was easier on a big ship with hundreds of metal containers.

"It's a drug route and we've got a sailboat," Mr. Falotico said Tuesday morning on the dock in Red Hook. "It's like: 'What the hell are you guys doing?' "

Eventually the Black Seal departed and made its two-week voyage up the Atlantic Coast to Brooklyn.

Mast Brothers' will turn its cocoa beans into chocolate over the next year. They'll sell it to big-name chefs like Thomas Keller and Dan Barber and in grocery stores like Dean & DeLuca. Mr. Mast estimates that the Black Seal's shipment of cocoa will end up costing 25% to 30% more than usual. But he hopes to repeat the trip again and expects costs to decline as the company make its shipping operation more efficient.