A Starry Night in the Land of Trees: Map Chocolate’s Starry Night Bar
By David Nilsen
One silent, frigid night a couple winters back, my wife and I drove to a nearby nature preserve and walked into the dark woods, the forest floor sleeping beneath its sacred covering of snow, the air haunted and holy beneath the moonlight and pinpricks of stars. You can hear snow on the ground in a forest at night, I swear it.
We traversed the small forest and stepped out onto the open prairie and lied down on the frozen crust of snow. The sky was so clear it seemed scraped raw, and we traced the paths of satellites high above Ohio’s winter through a cold much, much deeper. Nights like this have become pole stars of their own, guiding me through the night sky of my life from childhood to young adulthood to middle age. Different forests. Different nights. Different qualities to the snow and the cold. That same aching, lonely wonder.
When I first tasted Map’s Starry Night years ago, I felt transported, images and sensory impressions filling out in my mind. Knit gloves crunchy with snow. Moonlight through tree trunks on the sugared crust of white on the forest floor. The impossibly lonely howl of truck tires on a distant country highway when everything else is still. I tasted the bar, and I was in that forest, wandering through moonlit, snow-blanketed trees as I have done so many times in my life, as a child, a teenager, an adult.
Mackenzie Rivers of Map Chocolate is known not only for the vibrant and resonant flavor evocations of her bars, but for the storytelling spirit with which she presents them. Her Starry Night bar is a 60% dark milk chocolate made with pine bud syrup, Douglas fir tips, and Norwegian sea salt.
I’ve become friends with Mackenzie since first tasting this bar several years ago. Flavor speaks to both of us in similar ways, tugging at the sleeves of our memories and asking to be picked up and ruffled and held. I spoke with Mackenzie recently about Starry Night, and she recalled her own winter nights beneath the trees and stars, and recounted how they led to the creation of this bar.
The Story of Starry Night
“Years ago I was a river guide in the Grand Canyon, and I spent the winters in Idaho,” she explains. “I would work during the day and cross-country ski at night. I love skiing at night. The snow casts a certain reflection, so you can see where you're going. You're on a groomed trail through the woods, but you're not really seeing anything and it's super quiet. You're not having to think about sound, but you're just engulfed in aroma and smell and you can smell the trees, which is just so beautiful. I loved it. When I made the Starry Night bar, it was my memories of that smell put into bar form.”
Shortly after launching Map Chocolate in 2015, Mackenzie found out about a Pine Bud Syrup made from Mugolio Pines in Italy. It was being produced by Eleonora Cunaccia, a pioneering forager who had a permit to forage the pine buds in the spring. It sparked an idea.
“She would pick the pine buds off and then put them in these big urns, which would get filled with rainwater,” says Mackenzie. “They would soak all summer, and then in the fall she would distill it into a syrup. The bottles are tiny, and at the time—as a person who started my business with $50—to spend $30 on a bottle of this syrup was a huge risk.”
She took that risk and ordered a bottle, but it wasn’t until she received it she realized a problem with her plan.
“I heard the word syrup and I wasn't thinking water-based,” she confesses. Liquids can’t be used during the chocolate-making process because they will cause the chocolate to seize, ruining its texture. “I got the bottle and the smell was incredible, and I was like, oh my gosh, how am I going to get this in the chocolate?”
Another chocolate maker recommended soaking the cacao nibs in the syrup to infuse them. The idea was sound, but there wasn’t much of the syrup to go around. She could only afford to soak a few of the nibs for a batch in the pricey syrup, but the intensity of the flavor actually made that a better option anyway. After drying them out, she could proceed with the chocolate-making process, blending in the pine-infused nibs as a small percentage of the total cacao in the bar.
After working with pine, she decided to layer in more elements of her own story into Starry Night.
“I live in Oregon now, the land of trees,” she observes. “I realized I'm living in a land of Douglas firs, so I started drying out Douglas fir tips in the spring. I love the flavor of them, so I would dry them and then grind them up and added it to the chocolate, and it added this extra hit of aroma.”
Sea salt serves as an accent to the foresty flavors of the bar, contrasting the subtle sweetness of the chocolate itself and snapping the other flavors into focus. Mackenzie started out using Icelandic sea salt, but later switched to Norwegian sea salt.
“I haven't found any other salt like this,” she says. “It has a very light brightness and briniess to it. I'm picturing Pacific Northwest snow falling on cedars. With the giant evergreens we have here, the bar sort of went west from Idaho.”
My heart tugs always toward snow, toward the north, toward pine and cold and that burn in the fingertips just before you come back inside from a wild, frigid night. This chocolate incarnated the feeling of those nights, those forests, the Icelandic sea I stood beside just a few years ago on a wicked winter day.
I don’t know how else to say it but that Map’s Starry Night bar tastes like those scenes, some tiny part of the soul of the winter forest buried in the heart of this chocolate.