Yearwood - SWEET + SALTY: the art of vegan chocolates, truffles, caramels, and more from lagustas... luscious

Earl Grey and Preserved Orange Bars ()

Have you ever wondered why chocolate costs two dollars? It starts as a bean, right? A bean that gets extracted from a pod and then fermented somewhere near the equator and then processed into, say, a Whatchamacallit or a Toffifay or a Dove bar and sold near the POS system at a deli on the Upper West Side or a 7-Eleven in Alhambra or Tokyo? Why is it so cheap? Why is it so sweet? Does it hurt your teeth?

Have you ever been to Confectionery!, a, well, ahem, confectionery shop in the East Village of Manhattan? Have you noticed that it always smells really good? Like good flowers and chocolate fumes and some kind of weird nonhippie incense that must cost a bundle to source? If someone were to wander into this shop at 440 East Ninth Street, would they be able to get a chocolate bar for two bucks?

Have you ever been to a superfancy restaurant? The kind that cost five hundred bucks for dinner and culminate in a flurry of chocolate bonbons of all different colors, angular and bulbous shapes and flavors that typically creep into an amorphous blob of cocoa-adjacent after three bites? Do you even want to shotgun a bunch of thinly coated ganache after a grand buffet of lobster, truffles, and foie gras?

Now, the chocolate confections at Confectionery!, are they on par with the toniest of black-tie, hospitality-included, Michelin plaquedecorated restaurants? Would you think I am nuts if I tell you they are better? That the flavors are more focused and crystallized? That the shells are more lithe? That despite the fact that the ganache filling of, say, one of Lagustas tahini meltaways is completely void of dairy, vegan as all get out, it rivals and tackles the creaminess of a heavy creamaddicted chocolatier in Dallas or midtown? And these candies, while being outrageously interesting and craveable, and made entirely with coconut milk as the dairy, dont taste a drop like coconut? How is that possible? Is Lagusta an alchemist, holed up in the woods of New Paltz, and shuttling down bonbons to sell to the socialites and aging hard-core kids of New York City who may or may not even be vegan themselves? Are the candies just that good?

Why does Lagustas chocolate cost a little more (sometimes a lot more) than those 100 Grands and Reeses at eye level at a Wegmans checkout? Is it because she sources ethically sound chocolate base material, stuff that isnt ambiguously draped in slavery and oppression? In 2019, is it still revolutionary to say you dont have to fuck people over to survive? Is a ten-dollar chocolate bar a luxury item? Or the right price for the right thing when made right?

Somewhere within the self-congratulatory world of high-end food cookery, is there a lobotomizing machine that the sous chefs and pastry assistants and chefs de cuisine must hook up with probes to their skulls to make sure that exactly 0.0 percent thought is put into using raw materials that do not shred the environment and the folks and animals that live in it?

Do you want to learn how Lagusta Yearwood pulls this shit off? Lets read, man.

BrooksHeadley owner/operator

Superiority Burger

Coconut-Rum Truffles ()

As a kid, I wanted the weird candies no one likes: those buttercream mints that melt cloyingly in your mouth, watermelon bubble gum, anything with sour flavors. Chocolate seemed stupid. Id eat a Snickers for the caramel and nougat, or a Butterfinger for the peanut butter, but mostly I wanted the clean hit of pure sugar.

Technically, we didnt eat sugar in our household, because my mom was a hippie who embraced every countercultural value she could get her hands on. I grew up in Phoenix because my parents Volkswagen van broke down on the drive to California. Most Phoenicians have similar origin stories. My parents joined a community of burnouts who couldnt quite get it together to make it to the hippie promised land, but my mother wasnt a burnout (my dad is another story). She was a journalist who worked as a theater critic most of my childhood. She could never bring herself to enforce any rules or disciplineit didnt square with her antiauthoritarian nature. Plus, she was busy working. So, we ate our sweets in semisecret.