Amazingly Delicious Zzang!® Bars Get Even Better Still!
Rare cacao from Ecuador further elevates the classic candy bars
Historian Timothy Snyder said in an interview conducted five years ago next month that “local reporting is hugely, hugely important for democracy.” The following story is indeed very local—and delicious to boot!
While The Wall Street Journal reports regularly on consolidations and buyouts, the big news around here is about getting better, not bigger—in this case, with a compelling cacao-quality upgrade. The headline might be something like this: “What has long been a fantastic favorite in the ZCoB just got even better!” This past week, we made the move to upgrade the already excellent chocolate we use to enrobe our Zzang!® bars—and other bars—to a very special, super delicious bean-to-bar chocolate from the folks at a small craft company called Conexión in Ecuador.
Conexión Chocolate is the flavor- and tradition-focused passion project of a remarkable Ecuadorian woman named Jenny Samaniego. After a number of years of working with finished chocolate in the US, she made the decision that, for her, success meant returning to her homeland of Ecuador. There, she could help farmers learn more about modern growing and fermenting techniques—and then take the literal fruits of their labor and turn them into exceptional bean-to-bar chocolate for the world to enjoy!
After five or six years of preparation, the first Conexión bars came to market in 2017, and they have since won nearly three dozen awards around the world. Now, nine years later, they’ve arrived at Zingerman’s Southside, about a 100-yard walk from the Bakehouse. Conexión’s retail bars are on the shelves in the Candy Store (inside the Coffee Company, on Plaza Drive), and we’re buying their chocolate in bulk to use for our bars, chocolate-covered peanut brittle, and other handmade confections. Everything about Conexión is downright upright—excellence in eating and in ecological work as well, all ensconced in Ecuadorian history and culture.
Conexión’s chocolate is made with hard-to-find, complexly wonderful Arriba Nacional cacao. It’s a rare bean, indigenous to Ecuador, that is highly prized by craft chocolate makers everywhere. As with so many ancient heirlooms—the Carolina Gold rice at the Roadhouse is another example—the production of Arriba Nacional declined precipitously during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Though other strains were less flavorful, they were more dependable and delivered higher yields. Still, Jenny Samaniego and Conexión stick to the authentic Arriba Nacional. Yes, yields are lower and crops are less consistent, but the flavor is super fine, and the work to honor and protect this piece of local agricultural history has very high value, too! As the crew at Conexión says, “True mastery doesn’t lie in ignoring nature’s cycles, but in learning how to interpret them.”
Speaking of positive cycles, last month, longtime Candy Manufactory Production Manager Jamie LeBeauf was formally approved by our Partners Group as a Managing Partner. It was a big day for Jamie, her family, and the whole ZCoB, and we are clearly better as an organization because of her thoughtful, skilled presence. (And I’ll proudly add that 10 of our 19 managing partners are now women!) Jamie’s first big formal move as partner? To push the quality of our cacao to new heights by buying bean-to-bar chocolate from an entrepreneurial, woman-owned counterpart in Ecuador. And you and I are the beneficiaries of her culinary beneficence! Of the new chocolate, Matt Caputo of A Priori, the premier artisan chocolate distributor in the country, shares:
When a gourmet product includes chocolate, the cacao behind it is almost always sourced from places still shaped by exploitative labor and environmental harm. It breaks my heart to see well-meaning consumers supporting a local chocolatier without knowing that. As a distributor, we’ve pushed candy companies to do better, and usually the best we get is a step toward tolerable. Conexión isn’t a step. It’s the other end of the spectrum entirely. It’s no surprise Zingerman’s made this choice, but it gives me real hope for humanity.
Thinking back to the late 2000s, I can still remember the day when it became clear to me that the Candy Manufactory’s Zzang! bars were one of the tastiest and most flavorfully distinctive products we make in the ZCoB. It started with an email from a customer from LA who was in town for a week and spent a fair bit of time at the Deli and the Roadhouse. She bought a bag of the small Zzang! bars at the Deli the day she left for home. Two days later, she wrote to tell me they were one of the best things she’d ever eaten, and she had to have more. That week, she ordered a bunch from Mail Order as a treat for herself.
A few nights later, we had a guest at the Roadhouse—also from LA, coincidentally—who loved everything in the ZCoB … but his favorite thing? Zzang! bars. Getting the idea here?
Finally, a French chocolate maker we work with was visiting to do a tasting and class at the Deli. This is a guy with two decades’ experience in the chocolate and candy business who doesn’t hand out compliments lightly. What did he keep talking about the whole time he was here? Yep—Zzang! bars. He took 12 with him to bring back home!
From the time Charlie Frank began making them in the pastry kitchen at the Bakehouse nearly 20 years ago now, the Candy Manufactory’s handcrafted candy bars have been almost universally appreciated by anyone with even a slight bit of a sweet tooth. If you don’t already know (which is possible, I guess …), the Zzang! is made with really good butter-toasted peanuts in a homemade honey and peanut butter nougat, with muscovado brown sugar caramel, all dipped in very dark chocolate from Ecuador. They really are pretty incredible to eat.
The Zzang! bar is, like the ZCoB itself, far greater than just the sum of its individual parts. While the new Conexión chocolate made with Arriba Nacional cacao will be the first thing you see and taste when you bite into one, the beauty of this bar, to me, is the complexity of its flavors—the way each ingredient seems to unlock something else. (Oh yeah—just like the ZCoB.) The layers of complexity open up as you eat, and you continue to taste different things as you chew. You start with chocolate, then you get caramel, then you taste the sea salt; the crunch of the peanuts kicks in, backed up by the depth of the honey and peanut butter, before you return to the dark chocolate.
Allison Schraf, longtime retail manager at the Candy Store, says,
A major change like this takes a lot of careful thought and effort. We took months of tasting and testing to choose which combination of chocolates made from various cultivars and varieties would harmonize best with the amazing array of flavors and textures of the bar centers. It was a great honor (and pleasure!) to be a part of that tasting team, and I am excited to share this improvement with our guests!
There are six Zingerman’s Candy bars in the line right now (and by the way, you can also find them at the Deli):
- The original Zzang!—honey–peanut butter nougat, Virginia Runner peanuts, and muscovado brown sugar caramel enrobed in Conexión dark chocolate
- The Ca$hew Cow™—crushed cashew brittle with house-made roasted cashew butter and crisped rice, coated in Conexión dark chocolate
- The Wowza™—raspberry jam, dark chocolate–raspberry ganache, and a whipped raspberry nougat, all dipped in Conexión dark chocolate
- The What the Fudge?™—milk chocolate fudge, muscovado brown sugar caramel, and malted milk cream in dark chocolate from Conexión
- The Peanut Butter Crush™—shaved-up bits of dark, butter-toasted peanut brittle encased in Conexión dark chocolate, along with peanut butter and crisped rice
- The Milk Chocolate Karamel Krunch™—muscovado brown sugar caramel and crisped rice dipped in milk chocolate
Beth Kimmerle, author of Candy: The Sweet History, wrote me to say, “[These bars] remind me of the 1930s bars that were hand-made, slab style, with candy love. Although I never tasted a bar from that era, this is what I believe they would be.” And you’ve probably heard me share this one, but a local candy lover once said to me that the Zzang! is “what a Snickers bar aspires to but will never be.”
P.S. I’ll write more about them down the road, but we also have half a dozen delicious chocolate bars from Conexión on the shelves at the Candy Manufactory. Each is made with cacao beans from a different region of the country, which, as they describe it, gives us “sensory blueprints of Ecuador’s diverse terroirs.”
