Homemade Chipotle Burrito Bowls and Guittard Chocolate

We’re working on making our own homemade version of Chipotle’s burrito bowl so we can throw them together fairly quickly (make the salsa in advance, pre-measure the ingredient portions, and all you have to do is a handful of steps in less than 20-30 minutes whenever you want to mass produce them).  The final product turned out to be amazing, though I think the corn salsa recipe is slightly off (the person from whom I borrowed it uses too much lime and it lacks sweetness; I can fix that in another try or two) but what I am most excited about is …

… this!  Any of you who have studied the chocolate industry know why I was so shocked to see this in my local market I came close to screaming with joy.  I have no idea why, or how, they are in the Kansas City area but I am going to find a way to use them in a recipe.  If you have never heard of them, you aren’t alone as they remain hidden in plain site.  Guittard is chocolate royalty.  They are one of the few honest-to-God chocolate makers in the United States, taking raw cocoa beans and turning it into finished chocolate.  They are the wholesale supplier of chocolate to See’s Candies, Williams-Sonoma, Baskin-Robbins, and Kellogg’s, among other firms.  They are still family owned, five generations later, with the shares in private hands out in San Francisco, where the company has been located for the past 145 years after the founder moved to the United States from Lyon, France.  I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.  They weren’t even with the other candy, but instead hidden across the store in a little baking section that we happened to pass on our way to find something else.

I need to find a good use for the bags, but I already have tonight scheduled in for either a plum glazed cheesecake or a white chocolate peanut butter cream pie. At some point, I’ll try and come back and post the Chipotle recipes as their own stand-alone articles, and I might try to photograph whichever dessert I make tonight.  I would use them in a chocolate cheesecake recipe that caught my attention but that calls for a very specific cacao level from Scharffen Berger, one of the handful of other true chocolate manufactures in this country, with an equally as interesting story.  One of the company co-founders was a physician who was diagnosed with cancer and given a 50% chance to live another 10 years.  He sold his practice, began reading about chocolate making, got an internship at Bernachon in Lyon, France, and opened up the business, which was later sold to Hershey.  He died a few years ago but you can read this obituary here.  The man went out doing what he loved, changing his entire life in an instant and creating what has consistently ranked among the highest quality chocolate produced anywhere in the world.