The Van Leeuwen Artisan Bakery has recreated the classic Australian Lamington, especially for our friends over at Toby’s Estate Coffee Roasters.
A favorite of resident VL Aussie, Laura and perfected by Head Pastry Chef, Chelsea Wilkes. The Van Leeuwen Lamington is a cube of light sponge cake, with a layer of tangy raspberry jam, dipped in 99% Michel Cluzel chocolate icing and rolled in shredded coconut.
Get em’ while they last!
NO LIGHTS, NO LYCRA BROOKLYN
What do we do when we’re not making and eating ice cream? On Tuesday nights we DANCE in the DARK!
No Lights No Lycra is a weekly dance jam in the dark started in Melbourne, Australia by unruly dance students Alice Glenn and Heidi Barrett in 2009. NLNL has since spread to Sydney, London, Paris, Berlin and Edinburgh, and was brought to Greenpoint, Brooklyn by Van Leeuwen’s own Laura O’Neill.
There is no light, no lycra, no teacher, no steps to learn, no technique, just free movement. NLNL is a space where you can completely let go, shake out the stresses of the week, and lose yourself in the music and the physicality of your body. NLNL is a fun, non-pretentious place to completely be yourself.
WHERE: 129 Russell St, Greenpoint Brooklyn (in the church basement)
WHEN: Every Tuesday from 8:15pm-9:45pm ish
WHO: ALL WELCOME!
HOW MUCH: $5 please
* no drugs or alcohol please
With that, I give you some happy couple reviews :
“When we decided to get married in my native New Jersey suburb, it was important to us that our wedding was fun, relaxed, and a reflection of us. This had to include a staple of our life in the city - the Van Leeuween ice cream truck- which we visit (on University) a few times a week!
VL was the hit of the party- the only time our guests left the dance floor was to wait in line at the truck!”
-KC and Bill Artemenko
“Thank you again for the amazing service and help that Van Leeuwen provided at our wedding. It was truly amazing. The Van Leeuwen truck was a huge hit with our family and friends, they literally swarmed to it the second the truck got there. They loved it all! I personally could not think of a more fitting way to end our wedding night than with a nice affogato from Van Leeuwen in hand.“
-Michael Sang Chung
“When we decided our farm wedding would be catered by food trucks, one truck that immediately made the list was the Van Leeuwen Ice Cream truck. We were already huge fans of their delicious ice cream and when we found out they also served Intelligentsia Coffee, we could not be more thrilled. We also love Van Leeuwen’s philosophy of making unadulterated, natural ice cream along with their use of environmentally friendly products — perfect for our earth and farm friendly big day!”– Stephanie and Norman Yung, married under the old white oak tree at Benner’s Farm, 1 October 2011
As the proud resident Italian-American at VL headquarters, I almost fell to the floor with the first tasting of Chelsea’s new homemade fresh mozzarella balls.
Watching the process from start to delicious finish was a treat and made me wish my grandfather Vincenzo was still alive to call up and gloat to. “Poppy we make our own cheese here! Come to Brooklyn today for lunch and taste!!!”
How does she do it, you ask? Start with a giant hunk of Maplebrook Mountain Mozzarella Cheese Curd, cut in cubes, bathe in boiling water, stretch and mold without losing precious butterfat, gleefully sing Disney songs (substituting in mozzarelli for Cinderelli), and tie off balls of milky cheesy goodness into the cooler bathwater awaiting you on the counter. SO SIMPLE, RIGHT?!!
Lucky for me, I was the only one in the office today, so I got to taste test 4 pieces sliced fresh after a cool down and topped off with some fleur de sel and olive oil. BLOW MY MIND, WHY DON’T CHA?
Starting TODAY* this heavenly cheese will be made available DAILY* in our stores and on the truck atop Chelsea’s outstanding homemade olive oil bread. Toppings will vary by day and season and will include (but are not limited to): savory jams, vegetables like tomatoes, roasted curry sweet potatoes, caramelized onions, dandelion green salad and SO MUCH MORE!*
(*’s denote EXCITEMENT!)
CHOC-ELITE
by Pete Van Leeuwen
If you are addicted to good chocolate, or merely just obsessed with it, I can assure you there has never in history been a better time for you to be alive than now. And if you’re lucky enough to be a New Yorker, it doesn’t matter much what neighborhood or borough you live in, you are never far from a bar of some of the world’s greatest chocolate.
Gone are the days, when Scharfenberger was the only edible chocolate one could find outside of the few decent small chocolatiers’ shops.
Hello 2012! We are now living in a time and place where one can quite easily find chocolate of the highest quality within several blocks. Chocolate good enough to make your knees buckle promises a religious experience of consumption, readily available to anyone with an extra 8 bucks in their pocket, seems a bargain. Certainly if one considers the fact that the 2 or 3 ounces of the godly delight they’re obtaining may comfortably usher their souls through a couple of days. It may sound like we’re talking about illegal drugs or controlled substances here.
But, illegal? No.
Controlled? Not by the wrong people.
Drug? Well, I suppose so.
Cacao beans, like coffee beans, do contain caffeine, a historically desirable drug for humans. Also found in cacao is a similar chemical called Theobromine, which is a bitter alkaloid also found in the leaves of the tea plant, and the kola (or cola nut). Cacao is also loaded with flavonoids, specifically epicatechin, which is thought to have very beneficial effects on cardiovascular health. Just ask Jeanne Calment. Oh wait, you can’t. She finally died. Jeanne was a French supercentenarian who had the longest confirmed human life span in history, living to the age of 122 years and 164 days. That’s more years than Jimi, Janis, Otis Redding and Kurt Cobain lived combined, in fact add a Bieber and we’re there. Gross, did he really just get mentioned among all these graceful talents? Anyway, Jeanne still fenced in her 80’s and rode her bicycle at age 100 catching eyes all about town (she was quite the looker, see photo above). Everything about her life has been studied and dissected by scientists. She prided herself on her diet, which included generous douses of olive oil on anything and everything, and get ready for it folks….. ONE KILO OF DARK CHOCOLATE A WEEK!!!
Ah yes. See? Guilt free, excessive chocolate consumption from here on out, people. That’s assuming you want to live a healthy long life like Jeanne. If you’re no good at math or conversions, you’ll want to be enjoying 5oz of chocolate a day, or in other words 2 bars.
So who is making the best chocolate? It would be impossible to say. We at Van Leeuwen have fallen in love with a few different chocolate makers. Michel Cluizel has been producing among the world’s best chocolate in Normandy, France, since 1948. For several decades they have seemingly nailed the art of consistency while simultaneously pushing their tried and true plantations to produce progressively superior beans from year to year. Our favorite chocolate of Cluizel’s is undoubtedly their signature 99% Infini Noir. It is what we use in our traditional chocolate ice cream, our gianduja ice cream as well as in our incredible hot fudge sauce and hot chocolate. It often also finds it’s way into our brownies. The 99% is so good that 1oz bars are available and they are amazingly interesting to nibble on and surprisingly popular for a bar so low in sugar percentage. Our other favorite from Michel Cluizel is the Los Ancones single plantation bar. From Saint Domingue in the Dominican Republic, it stands up as one the greatest and most consistent single plantation chocolates on earth. The photos above are of that specific plantation.
Shawn Askinosie, of Askinosie Chocolate has single-handedly put the mid-west on the Cocoa Trail (if there is a such thing). He gave up his life as a criminal defense lawyer several years ago and has since been making some of the most interesting single origin bars we’ve ever tasted. He works directly with the farmers and frequently visits each of the farms before and during the fermentation process in order to manipulate and hone the future flavors the beans will yield. He works closely with his family and his local community and has even gone so far as to start a “Chocolate University” that sees underprivileged inner city youth go learn abroad about everything from bean to bar for 6 months. From his converted factory in downtown Springfield, Missouri, Shawn brings the brilliance of great cacao to life. Think Dr. Frankenstein. Our favorites from Askinosie are the San Jose Del Tambo 70% bar from Ecuador and their wildly different yet explosively tasty single origin nibs from Davao, Phillipines. We also use their 72% Tanzanian chocolate chips in our mint chip ice cream.
And then, of course, our Brooklyn soul brothers just across the park, The Mast Brothers. Rick and Michael Mast along with Arto Barragan and team, are practically magicians. You’d have to be blind in order to resist buying one of each bar displayed before you. The packaging is so beautiful that it almost doesn’t matter what’s inside. But it turns out what’s inside, mind-bogglingly somehow exceeds all possible expectations, no matter how high. Like a woman who’s way too hot to be smart and cool, but is much smarter and cooler than you. That’s as close as I can come.
Their integrity is unmatched and their vision is focused and thoughtful. Like the other greats mentioned, they too work directly with their farmers to cultivate not just quality cacao but quality relationships. They receive the fermented, dried beans in massive burlap bags to their factory on North 3rd Street in Williamsburg and do everything from roasting all the way up the line to hand wrapping each bar, all under the same roof. If you believe in heaven and want to know what it smells like, go tour their factory (you can get tickets, for free, on eventbrite for tours held on Thursdays and Saturdays). Our favorite Mast Brothers bars are the 74% Almond Sea Salt, the 74% Serrano Pepper bar and of course the 73% Brooklyn Blend. The trilogy should keep you happy and healthy for a couple days.
So, now for the educational portion of this post.
Though I am not a chocolatier, nor are any of us at Van Leeuwen, I was lucky enough to tour a plantation in the Dominican Republic a couple years back and learn a lot about the bean to bar process. My brother Ben explained in his last post a lot about the actual growing of cacao and the cultivation of the plantations themselves, and so I will pick up where he left off, after a quick re-cap.
So, Ben talked about specifically the Los Ancones plantation in DR and everything that happens there. The growing of the cacao pods, the harvesting and careful selection of these pods, the extraction and de-husking of the beans, and then arguably the most delicate step at the plantation, the fermentation and careful attendance of this process. He went on to explain the next step of sun drying the pungent, fermented beans and then the packing and shipping of them. Which brings us to the factory.
In the case of the Michel Cluizel factory in Normandy, the beans arrive in big burlap bags and are placed in a temperature-controlled room. The dried beans are then inspected and tasted raw to make sure they are what they are meant to be. From there the roaster is set to a temperature depending on the bean’s origin and then the beans are poured into the hopper. As the roasting commences the beans are tasted periodically to determine at what point to pull them. When the flavor is just right, the beans are immediately put onto cooling racks where they almost instantly drop to a temperature that will halt the possibility of them over-roasting.
Once the beans have cooled they get put into the “winnower”. A winnower is what separates the nib from the hull and is an absolutely essential piece of equipment. At Los Ancones, Ben and I tried doing it by hand, which proved to be extremely inefficient if barely possible. The winnower is a rather simple fan/vacuum based contraption that strains and separates the two parts from each other. I have seen very rudimentary versions of them that are still functional despite their simplicity. The nib is the good stuff, the hull is essentially the shell. The nib is roughly the size of a small almond and during fermentation looks like lean red meat, and after drying and roasting looks more like a brittle chocolaty morsel of hope… or my dog Chili’s broken off toe nails. Quite romantic.
The next step is making the liquor. The liquor is actually just the nibs ground into a paste. Again, we tried this by hand at the plantation with a giant mortar and pestle. Eventually it started turning into a buttery conglomerated paste. At the Cluizel factory they use a giant mixer with an attachment that basically crushes the nibs. Shawn Askinosie uses an 80 year old German mixer called a Melanguer to crush his nibs into a submissive liquor. The liquor isn’t as viscous as you may imagine it after the first step and so as a paste, it is put into a dissolver tank, which melts it a bit making it viscous enough to pump into a holding tank.
The last step in transforming these one time pulpy white pods into velvety dark delicious chocolate bars involves making cocoa butter. This is a particularly essential step to all 3 of our favorite chocolate makers, and here’s why. 99% of all chocolate on the market has soy lecithin in it. This is a cheap and unnecessary way to emulsify and stabilize chocolate. The Mast Brothers, Shawn Askinosie and Michel Cluizel ALL find soy lecithin to be unnecessary. Maybe they’d even go so far as to say they think it compromises the integrity and nature of their very chocolate they work so hard to produce. Who knows. I certainly would think so. But it would be a hard fact to ignore that the 3 greatest chocolate makers I know of, all leave this “staple” ingredient out.
Anyway, on with it. From the holding tank the liquor is put into an agitator. This essentially keeps the liquor evenly balanced as it gets pumped into the cocoa butter press. The press is a machine that operates at an extremely high pressure, and literally squeezes the butter right out of the liquor. Most chocolate makers buy cheap, crappy cocoa butter from industrial makers like Cargill or ADM.
The butter is kept separate and the liquor then goes into the universal refiner where the pure cane sugar is added. The cocoa butter is added back in at this point returning the inherent creaminess to the chocolate. With open arms she welcomes back her kin. All grown up now, nearly ready for the real world!
From here, the chocolate goes into the molding area, and, through a series of temperature changes, all the while the chocolate is constantly churning as it slowly tempers. From 120 F to down around 90 F and then into a holding tank as it churns awaiting the molds.
Tempering is a very precise and delicate process that will make or break all the hard work leading up to the moment of pouring into the molds. From what I understand, it is not an exact science but instead one that floats and sways ever so slightly, depending on weather related variables that are often difficult to control even with so called “temperature controlled rooms.” It makes the beautiful and consistent products that these folks turn out all the more impressive.
Rick Mast put it best when he said:
“When it comes to making great chocolate, you need two main things. You need the best ingredients in the world, and you need great execution.”
I think it is safe to say that Michel Cluizel, Shawn Askinosie, and the Mast Brothers are all living by that relatively simple standard, and at the same time pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished within those parameters. Hats off to undoubtedly the most talented and uncompromised of all the chocolate makers we know.
Everyone at Van Leeuwen takes solace in chomping at the bit for producers like these and appreciate the opportunity to work with them to incorporate such superior ingredients into all of our ice creams, pastries and (coffee too).
We wave our kerchiefs at Ming, one of our beloved East Village sailors, as she prepares to embark on a journey out west.
Her favorite part about working for Van Leeuwen Ice Cream was being able to feel proud about everything we serve, getting along very well with all of her fellow coworkers and all of the other cast of characters that mosey through the store that make cafes worth spending time at. She had a habit of sniffing at the ice cream instead of incessantly tasting them as a flavor identification method.
Keep your eye out for her name in Oakland!
Serving up some delicious egg nog ice cream and a variety of goodie bags at Brooklyn Night Bazaar tonight!
Fresh out of the oven Pistachio Cardamom cookies available at all our store fronts and trucks! Enjoy!
Peak of season strawberry puree, milk, cream, eggs and a little sugar is all it takes to capture everyone’s favorite fleeting summer flavor in ice cream. Nothing unusual or unexpected - only the essentials. All our ice cream flavors follow the same model: pure ingredients…pure flavor.
Try the perfect strawberry ice cream and much more at all of our stores and trucks…
