Mast Brothers chocolate?

by philg

I tried Mast Brothers chocolate once and concluded that a Lindt or Nestle (branded Cailler these days) bar from a gas station in Switzerland was vastly superior at roughly 1/10th the price. My Facebook friends have been posting stories about this company, the best of which seems to be from The Guardian:

despite their enormous price tag, the only great thing about these chocolate bars is their wrappers

All the Mast bars were far too chalky and bitter. The almond one tasted like bark. Or, I guess, the shells of cacao beans. The not-quite-finely-ground-enough shells of cacao beans? Is that what kept catching in my throat as I swallowed? Whatever it was, it kinda hurt.

Best of all, though? Honestly? Good ol’ Hershey’s.

A little too sweet, maybe? Sure. Especially compared to its company. A little plasticky tasting? Chemical-y? Also, guilty. But it was silky and soothing, a balm for a throat scraped raw by jagged shards of cacao bean shells. Whatever non-organic, non-bean-to-bar, probably poisonous ingredient those corporate monsters at Hershey’s HQ are putting into their chocolate that the artisans are not – “emulsifier”, I suppose – it turns to liquid deliciousness in a way that that the stuff of the artisans simply does not.

(The Guardian writer didn’t include any Swiss chocolate in his comparison.)

Readers: Who has tried Mast Brothers and wants to defend it?

16 thoughts on “Mast Brothers chocolate?”

  1. I’ve never tried mast brothers. I hear they are pretty bad.

    But there are many really excellent bean to bar manufacturers out there if you can find them. Patric, Rogue, Soma, Askinoise, and more. All great. (Then again, there are also other bad artisan manufacturers. A not too bad rule of thumb is this: the fancier the package the worse the product.)

  2. Readers: Who has tried Mast Brothers and wants to defend it?

    I will! Sort of. The articles say MB melted chocolate in 2008 – 2009. I first tried their chocolate much later, in 2012 or thereabouts. Some of the single-origin bars, particularly the one that comes in yellow packaging (I think it’s from Guatemala) are quite good. Their in Williamsburg offers samples, and some of their chocolate is really, really good. Other bars are forgettable.

    They do have a coarser consistency than, say, Amano chocolate. Some may call it chalky, though I don’t perceive the flavor that way. Whether you like that is variable. There’s a movement for stone-ground chocolate from companies like Taza, all of which is very coarse.

  3. Taza? I don’t like to say anything bad about our local artisans, but the last time I tried it I thought that I had picked up a Hershey bar that a child had allowed to melt into a sandbox.

  4. Hershey’s?!? Must be the most disgusting chocolates I’ve ever tried. The milk chocolate in particular had an after taste of vomit. Can’t figure out what made me try it again a few years after the first horrible disappointment.

  5. The vomitorious taste in Hershey’s is sour milk. Milton Hershey journeyed to Switzerland to learn the secret of making milk chocolate (cocoa butter = oil, milk= water, oil and water don’t mix) but the cagey Swiss wouldn’t tell him (the secret is using powdered milk). So he returned home to Pennsylvania and developed his own recipe using curdled (sour) milk that had been drained of its whey. Now the secret is no longer a secret but you can’t change the taste of an iconic brand.

    Apparently in the early days the Mast Brothers were buying commercial chocolate and remelting it into their bars. It was better then. Making high quality chocolate is essentially an industrial process which is not easily (or economically) done on a small scale. The whole idea of doing bean to bar in a small shop is sort of stupid but plays into modern consumers hatred for anything industrial. You want to buy your chocolate not from some soulless corporate giant but from a couple of Amish looking guys who dress like the are buddies with Orville and Wilbur. Even if it sucks.

    We have gone full circle – I have a tin of Lazzaroni biscuits whose label has not changed in a century. Pictured on the label is their factory – a giant building with belching smokestacks. They were very proud that their product was made in a real sanitary factory and not in the back of some vermin infested shop in Greenpoint by dirted bearded hipster.

  6. I won’t, but I will recommend Wilbur Buds as a superior alternative to Hershey Kisses. Sad to hear they are closing their Lititz PA factory in 2016. I used to live there and for a short while had my children convinced ooompa loompas made the candy.

  7. Having eaten a huge amount of Valrhona, I may be qualified to comment.
    Most Valrhona is quite good. But above 70%? 80%? you’re not eating it for pleasure, but to show off
    http://www.valrhona-chocolate.com/shop/tasting-bars-all-products-viewall.php

    Just like with Imperial IPAs
    http://www.brewersfriend.com/2009/01/24/beer-styles-ibu-chart-graph-bitterness-range/
    – drinking some of the really bitter Mikkeler IPAs are just like like licking a blackboard and chasing the awful taste down with a helping of clipped off toenails.

    The Mast Brothers may have chosen the darkest Valrhona and burnt it a little bit more.

    As for Hersheys, they’re no match for Cadburys. Charlie and I agree on that
    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jan/25/cadbury-dairy-milk-kraft-takeover
    http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Bite/2015/0112/Britain-in-crisis-as-Cadbury-changes-Creme-Egg-recipe-video

  8. Dark chocolate anyone? They are far tastier and better for you then any brand. I will take any dark chocolate at around 70 percent cacao. Over that is too bitter, or less is too sugary.

  9. Some say Cadbury > Hershey. That depends on where the Cadbury bar is made.

    If you buy a Cadbury chocolate bar in the US, chances are you’re getting a bar made under license in the US by Hershey. It’s nothing whatever like the “real” product sold in Britain. Doesn’t taste the same. Doesn’t melt in your hand the same. It’s a shame they’re allowed to put a Cadbury wrapper on the very un-Cadbury-like licensed product.

    If you’re in the US and want real Cadbury chocolate, you’ll probably have to buy it from an overseas mail-order vendor who sells the real stuff made across the pond.

  11. Let ordinary commercial chocolate melt, then put it in the freezer. It will come out very smooth and taste great.

  12. bjk – you should patent this process and license it to the major manufacturers – to think that they could have been selling great tasting chocolate all along if they did this one simple step!

    Chocolate chemistry is actually very complicated. Cocoa butter can crystallize into 6 different forms or “polymorphs” , each with a different melting point, depending upon how you melt and resolidify it but only one of them (Form V) has a desirable smooth mouthfeel. After sitting at room temperature for several months, Form V will convert to Form VI (the white “bloom” you see on old chocolate) so by remelting it (if you happen to do it at the right temperature, which is no sure thing) you convert the Form VI back to Form V.

  13. If you are interested Russian chocolate, try Бабаевский “Babaevsky” original or 75%. or Красный Октябрь “Red October” 80% Highly recommended….

  14. Some people have trouble with drugs and/or alcohol. I don’t have any problems with those, but I am hopelessly addicted to chocolate. The people I worked with a while back knew this so when I left, they gave me a $50 gift cert. at one of the highend yuppy chocolate stores in Berkeley. I decided to buy 10 x $5 bars, thinking that this would give me a good sampling of the good stuff (this was !20 years ago). To make a long story short, I didn’t think any of them were better than your M&Ms, Hersey bars, or any of the honky stuff I was buying. May I should have bough 5 x $10 but I would have had trouble respecting myself if I bought even 1 $10 chocolate bar.

  16. Apparently Mast Brothers is a fraud:
    http://dallasfood.org/

    “Rick and Michael Mast were the Milli Vanilli of chocolate. They costumed themselves with quaint clothing and showy beards. (In the fall of 2008, Michael Mast even dyed his hair and beard red to better match his brother in photographs.) They talked the talk of authenticity and “reconnecting” the public to lost foodways. By May of 2008, they publicly proclaimed themselves the “Leaders of the Chocolate Revolution.” They won over celebrity chefs, then piggybacked on their credibility. Packaging trumped product. They crafted their public image magnificently. To this day, you can’t read an article about the Masts that doesn’t effuse about the beards and the paper. (When they calculate optimal media-ripeness, count on the beards to be shaven, generating more Mast mania!)

    Though an appealing façade, the early Mast Brothers was a Potemkin chocolate factory, churning out remolded, repackaged industrial couverture. With lies that foundational, a cloud of doubt descends on every claim. After the sweeping deception that the Masts made the chocolate that they sold under their family name, even the confessions of using Valrhona must be independently verified. While we can confirm that they remelted some Valrhona, that doesn’t mean they didn’t also use Belcolade (with which Rick Mast became familiar in the weeks he spent “apprenticing” in Jacque Torres’s shop), Callebaut, or other then-common and affordable couvertures. Who really made the chocolate that Dan and David Barber tasted when the brothers visited Blue Hill at Stone Barns in early 2008? Were the many retailers who carried Mast Brothers bars complicit in the charade or were they as clueless as their customers?”

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