Embers Chocolate’s Innovative Spirit-Infused Chocolate Bars
“I think about chocolate like a painter would think about a canvas,” says Tandy Peterson, founder and chocolate maker at Embers Chocolate in Arizona. While Embers releases a wide range of bars, Tandy has a particular passion for working with various spirits in her bars, and she’s developed some innovative methods of infusing the flavors of those drinks into her chocolate. While many makers—Tandy included—steep cacao nibs in spirits, then dry them out and continue with the chocolate-making process, Tandy has also found success soaking sugar, milk powder, and inclusions themselves in spirits to layer in different expressions of flavor.
“[Spirit] flavors can be really dominant when you're infusing into the nibs and the sugars,” she says. “You're going to get a lot of background note that's going to meld really well with the chocolate, so it creates your base paint, so to speak. Then when you're infusing it into ingredients that go on the back of the bar—a nut or a cacao nib or a fruit or something like that—those spirits are going to be a little bit more prominent because they're not refined as long.”
One great example is a butterscotch bar she made recently using caramelize white chocolate and Glenfiddich Scotch-infused milk powder and sugar. She mixed the sugar and milk powder together, soaked the mixture in the Scotch, and then put it into the oven and let it dry out completely. This resulted in what she describes as “little caramelized rocks,” which she then put into a Robot Coupe to break back down into a powder that could be added to the cocoa butter to be refined further. She’s done a “flight” tasting of bars with Glenfiddich as well, making batches with their 12-year sherry cask, 14-year, and 15-year Scotches.
Tandy enjoys working with spirits that have a smoky profile, like Scotch and mezcal. It’s baked into her DNA as a chef—she’s passionate about cooking over fire, and it’s reflected in her company’s name: Embers. She says she likes working with smoky spirits because their flavors stand out more from the bar.
“A lot of scotches and mezcals have those kind of smoky notes to them, which are not really present in cacao, so it's easier to identify when you find them,” she says.
One of her most popular bars however brings in a bit of smoldering heat without a smoky spirit. Whiskey & Spice is a 60% dark milk bar that takes its heat from chiltepin chilis, which are common in Arizona. Tandy says they offer a floral and tropical heat, and once you get past that, a smoldering flavor that mimics the heat you might feel from drinking whiskey. She then makes brown butter pecans she soaks in Garrison Brothers whiskey before letting it dry at or near room temperature. Combined with a fudgy Ugandan cacao base made with some whiskey-soaked nibs, the finished bar presents a unique union of spirit and heat.
Regardless of the spirit she’s working with, Tandy falls back on her culinary training when she’s evaluating how to layer flavor and texture into her spirits-infused bars.
“I approach infusing alcohol and chocolate as I would a chef building a specific dish,” she says. “I think about the actual ingredient and what it tastes like fresh or raw or what it tastes like caramelized, because you really need to add that spirit at different points depending on the flavor profile you want.”
As an example, she says if she wanted a roasted pineapple flavor with a spirit, she wouldn’t infuse the pineapple prior to caramelizing it, because it would change the character of the spirit she wants to highlight. She wants her ingredients—whether cacao or spirit or inclusion—to shine, and for the finished flavor to be both surprising and comforting for the taster.
“I’m putting a little bit of my memory into each bar and trying to evoke memories that tie into your history,” she says. “I’m really just trying to tell a story through a symphony of flavors.”