Visiting Mast in Mount Kisco, New York
I always enjoy visiting local shops whenever I can - it's inspiring to learn about other businesses and their specialties.
If you’re ever in or around Northern Westchester, New York, I encourage you to make a stop at Mast. The cafe, market, and open kitchen is nestled in the quaint historic village of Mount Kisco, not far from my Bedford farm. Co-founded by brothers, Rick and Michael Mast, the company's small team works hard to create delicious, organic chocolate using simple, sustainable ingredients, ethical sourcing, and traditional stone-milling methods. The Mast Market also offers a variety of other wonderful items including house roasted coffees, stone milled heritage flours, homemade jams, house churned butters, and locally sourced dairy products - yes, this is where I get my farm fresh milk every week. During a regular visit yesterday, we took a little more time to see how the chocolate is made - "bean to bar."
Enjoy these photos.
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- Mast is located in the heart of Mount Kisco in a 10-thousand square foot facility. The light and airy interior houses a sit-down cafe, a large retail space, an open kitchen, and its own packaging and shipping center. This is a flour mill where the grains are stone-milled into flour and sold in the Mast Market.
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- This is the front of the space, simply designed in warm whitewashed ash and pine.
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- Mast offers a variety of flours, grains, coffees, jams, preserves, tea, sugar, salt, oils, vinegars, nuts, dairy products, and bread – all locally sourced or made in-house. Items marked with the “giving heart” show which products will be matched with a donation to a local food pantry as a way to give back to the community.
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- The shelves also contain charming accessories such as hats, mugs, travel tea cups, and other items.
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- Off to one side and through glass doors, one could smell the delicious cocoa beans and all the chocolate being made right here at Mast. The cocoa bean is the primary ingredient in chocolate. Cocoa beans, or cacao beans, come from the Theobroma cacao tree – a fruit tree, whose name means “food of the gods”. The cacao beans, which are technically seeds, grow inside pods surrounded by a white fleshy pulp known as baba.
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- Mast uses beans from Kokoa Kamili , an organic cocoa organization based out of Tanzania in East Africa, which purchases ‘wet’ cocoa straight out of the farmers’ pods, and then ferments and dries it before shipping.
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- At Mast, the cocoa beans are first inspected by hand and then lightly roasted in small batches before being put through a winnower. This machine essentially removes the outer shell from the cocoa beans.
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- The machine cracks the cocoa beans into pieces of cocoa meat and shell. Then the pieces are sent cascading down a series of screens. As they fall through chutes under the screens, a vacuum system sucks away all the shell and dust material.
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- The separated pieces fall through the vacuum system’s tubes and down a stainless steel ramp.
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- Finally, the pieces of cocoa bean meat or “nibs,” fall through the chutes into a collection bin and are ready for grinding.
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- Here are the chocolate millers. a series of these mills line three sides of a room.
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- From the top, one can still see the nibs in the mill – this is the early phase of the process.
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- And here is the chocolate once it is smooth and silky. Grinding is the process by which cocoa nibs are ground into “cocoa liquor.” The grinding process generates heat and the dry granular consistency of the cocoa nib is then turned into a liquid as the high amount of nib fat melts. The cocoa liquor is mixed with all organic ingredients – for milk chocolate, cane sugar, milk, cocoa butter, and vanilla.
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- Once made, the chocolate is poured into bar shaped moulds, cooled, set, and chilled.
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- Here is the finished product – delicious, pure chocolate.
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- In another section of the space is the packaging area. This machine processes the foil wrappers.
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- And then the chocolate is hand-packaged into decorative individual boxes.
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- Hundreds and hundreds of bars are packed each day.
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- The chocolate and other products are stored in an adjacent room until they are shipped.
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- Out in the market, all the different chocolate flavors are displayed on a long table. Flavors include dark chocolate, milk chocolate, almond butter chocolate, sea salt chocolate, oat milk chocolate, hazelnut chocolate, tea chocolate, raspberry, lavender, mint, coffee, and olive oil chocolates.
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- Among the most popular chocolate flavors is the classic dark chocolate made with organic cocoa beans, organic cane sugar, and organic vanilla – with 80-percent cocoa content.
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- On another table, a range of 12 organic, ethically sourced, and handcrafted chocolates featuring artwork from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. These chocolates were made in support of the Museum’s 150th anniversary.
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- And here’s owner, Rick Mast – of course, we were all masked and safely distanced. It was a lovely tour. If you’re ever in the area, stop in to Mast… and indulge. You’ll love it.
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