So there’s this particularly good chocolate maker in San Francisco that’s been trying to fill in the gap from where Scharffenberger left off after it was sold to Hershey’s at the passing of one of the founders.

It turns out the co-owner of Dandelion Chocolate wrote a book. I thought it was going to be all about the creation of his company.

So, being a fan and it being Christmas, I ordered a copy for my sweetheart, having no idea that it was a how-to with the guy open-sourcing to the world what he’d learned and how to do it.

Note that clicking on that title is surely how The Big River in South America dangled a ‘people were also interested in…’ page at me awhile later, even though at the time I had no idea whatsoever how I’d landed there.

Because, as it turns out, within those pages the author highly recommended the Premier Melanger for the hobbyist or start-up.

We had never heard of such a thing. A countertop cocoa bean grinder and concher? Who knew?

We had been hoarding Discover points on Amazon for some time for some future Big Unexpected Thing, or Thing We Will Wish We Had Saved Up For whatever that thing might turn out to be, and when I saw this and showed it to him we both agreed that that Thing was right there in front of us. Because how could you do better than this in the search for something to surprise, delight, to last a very long time to come while never letting go of being a total blast to play with?

Per the instructions, we put two cups of sunflower oil in it last night after it arrived (it was the anticipated big box that came after Ann’s big box) and let it run for an hour and then hand washed it. (No dishwashers on this thing.) You can’t start a batch immediately after: a single drop of unseen water will change the crystalline structure and cause the chocolate to seize into an unmeltable lump. We had to wait.

Yes I definitely think this is going to be fun.

A name. It needs a name. Choc Chop? Criollo de Couer? Elle El Bean?