The Art and Alchemy of Inclusions
By Lauren Burgess
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Almost all of our chocolate bars start with just two things: organic cacao and organic cane sugar. Sometimes we leave it at that, and sometimes we start adding what we call “inclusions” – things like fruit, spices, coffee, teas, salt, or even flowers that turn it into a completely different bar.
One question we hear is: How do you come up with your recipes? How do you decide what goes into your bars?
We get this question almost every week, and it’s always a fun one – partly because we’re proud of what we make, but also because there isn’t just one simple answer. It’s a mix of curiosity, experience, instinct, constraints, and definitely some trial and error. We’re not necessarily trying to make the most “out there” or one-of-a-kind chocolate bar every time, but we do think the originality of our flavors comes from a few key things working together.
What we don't include
The first is what we don’t put in our chocolate. Our chocolate has always been nut- and dairy-free, which automatically takes a lot of the “standard” inclusions off the table – no almonds, peanuts, hazelnuts, none of that. And since we also don’t use dairy, we haven’t worked with milk chocolate either, so everything stays rooted in dark chocolate and those deeper cacao flavors.
We also look closely at ingredient lists for anything we are considering adding. Extra fillers, preservatives, ingredients that aren’t “real food” – we try to avoid bringing any of those into the chocolate. If it’s not something we’re excited to eat on its own, it’s probably not going into a bar.
And then there’s the base chocolate itself. Our 72% classic dark chocolate – the one we build all our inclusions on (and our drinking chocolate, too) – only has two ingredients. With an ingredient list that short, there’s nowhere to hide flavor-wise, so anything we add has to both pull its weight, and feel like it belongs.
Asking "what if?"
From there, it really comes down to experimentation and a pretty constant “what if?” mindset.
One of my jobs is to develop our inclusions. I've often claimed that if I had a superpower, it would be taking a bunch of extremely random things from the fridge and pantry and turning them into a surprisingly good meal. I seem to have a bit of a knack for trying things and seeing what happens, and that carries into how we approach chocolate.
A lot of that instinct is born of experience, coming from years of working in food. From a pizza and sandwich shop in high school, to half a decade at Famous Dave’s (RIP to that North 7th “log cabin” location), to working as the baker at the iconic Western Café, I've worked pretty much every back-of-house role there is and front of house too, learning how to talk to people about food as well as prep and cook it.
There was even a point where culinary school felt like the next step, but I've always leaned a little too improvisational for other folks’ “strict recipes”... a pinch of this, a little of that, and what happens if we just try adding this? What came out of the willingness to adventure with ingredients and techniques, was an intuitive sense for flavors and a lot of confidence in trying something without needing a perfect plan first.
That shows up directly in how we develop our bars.
Most often, I will get an idea, temper up a small batch of classic dark, and make somewhere between five and ten “mini bars,” each one just slightly different – small shifts in ratios, a tweak in ingredients, or a change in how something is prepared. Then we taste them side by side, go back and forth, compare, revisit, and figure out what we want to share with folks – versus what was just a fun idea.
Some of our finished bars look simple on paper, but involve ingredients that are very much not off-the-shelf.
Take our “Apricot Bloom.” It’s just five ingredients – cacao, sugar, apricot, cardamom, and marigold (calendula) petals. The apricots we use are preserved whole, which means they need to be sliced down into small enough pieces to work in a bar, and because they’re sticky and dense, they don’t exactly slice or sprinkle without a bit of a fight. The cardamom has its own process, too.
We use whole green cardamom pods, crack them open first with a mortar and pestle, then open each pod the rest of the way by hand to gently extract every single seed. Those seeds get lightly toasted in a skillet for a few minutes – which helps mellow out some of the sharper, slightly bitter notes – then ground fresh before being added to the chocolate just as it’s coming into temper. The toasting is one of those small steps that ends up making a noticeable difference.
And then there are the candied oranges, which honestly deserve their own blog post. I've always loved chocolate and orange together, which goes all the way back to those Orange Milano cookies from Pepperidge Farm. The chocolate-dipped oranges we’ve done around the holidays the past couple of years fly off the shelves, and using the same candied orange recipe but chopping them into smaller pieces to go into bars, lets us “stretch” the ratios a bit so every batch of candied oranges – a true labor of love – goes further. We start with fresh oranges that I slice by hand, then simmer on the stovetop in a simple syrup of organic cane sugar and water while the whole shop fills with a bright, fragrant citrus smell. After that they go into the dehydrator overnight so they’ll keep well when they’re added to the chocolate bars.
We’ve also been really fortunate to work with some incredible local collaborators. Treeline Coffee in our Coffee Crunch bars. Steep Mountain Teahouse – we’ve used their chai in our Chai Ginger bars and have played around with both a milk oolong and a black tea for some smaller batch “tea & honey” style bars. Nic from Grotto Meats smoked cacao nibs for us that went into both one-of-a-kind club bars and seasonal bars with dried tart cherries.
Those smoked nib bars bring a really unique flavor that works especially well on a charcuterie board. We’ve also used honey and bee pollen from Logan's cousins' honey company in Pennsylvania, candying nibs and finishing bars with a sprinkle on top. We’ve even gotten to use beautifully-colored Zinnia petals grown by our friends at Rathvinden Farms.
And then there’s the part that’s a little harder to define, which is how we think about flavor balance.
Our base chocolate for inclusions is a 72% dark chocolate, so the cacao flavor is already rich and present. Chocolate itself has natural acidity since it comes from a fruit, and the cocoa butter naturally present (most beans are about 50% cocoa butter by weight) influences how flavors move and linger, as well as how the chocolate metals, so there’s already a lot going on before anything gets added. We’re always thinking about how to work with those unique factors instead of fighting with them or covering them up.
Sometimes that means letting fruit notes come through more clearly, sometimes it’s about texture – the crunch of nibs, the chewiness of dried berries, or even the light, almost airy feel of flower petals. Salt can shift everything and pull different notes forward, and some ingredients bring a little bitterness or tannin that actually helps round things out. It ends up feeling a bit like building a flavor constellation, where some things stand out more than others, but everything is still connected. And at the same time, taste is so subjective that what feels perfectly balanced to one person might land completely differently for someone else. We don’t aim for overly sweet – we want things to feel full, layered, and interesting enough that you want another bite.
At the end of the day, a lot of this just comes back to curiosity and a willingness to keep trying new things.
The Chocolate Club has been a huge part of that from the very beginning, because before we were in stores or on shelves or selling online, we were making chocolate for a monthly club – meaning, coming up with something new every single month – which has pushed us to keep experimenting and keep creating. At this point, just over two years in, we’ve made and shared more than two dozen different inclusion bars, and we’re still adding to that list every month, let alone every season.
Some show up as a one-time experience, and some stick around and earn their place in our regular rotation. But all of it starts in the same place – with an idea, a batch of chocolate, and that simple question in the back of our minds:
what happens if we try this?
