Chocolate tour
Dec. 3rd, 2007 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidThis weekend Taza chocolate had an open house (along with Albertine Press), so I toured their facility, which is in the same building that Arisia has storage in (less than a mile from my house!).
It smells wonderful, btw, a lovely chocolate scent permeating the air. I remember feeling the same way about Hersheytown, a million years ago when I visited as a kid, though I'm certain that this chocolate smell is much more highbrow :-).
They have two rooms. In the first, they have burlap sacks with 150 pounds of raw cocoa beans in them, bought from fair trade cooperatives directly (which is why they don't have the Fair Trade logo on their packaging). Raw, in this case, means that the pods were cut from the trees (they grow on the trunks and mature branches, not at the ends of branches like fruit I'm used to), cut open, and the beans and pulp left to ferment for six days, after which the beans were sun dried to a maximum of 8% water content.
The first step is to roast the beans. They don't yet have a roaster (though one is in transit), so this has meant going down to JP Licks in JP to borrow their coffee roaster. The next step is to put them through the winnower. It's a huge machine. Once beans are put in the hopper, they're carried up in little batches (sort of like those kinesthetic sculptures at the Science Museum with balls following all sorts of tracks), then dropped into the first area where they're roughly crushed. The chaff (the outer covering of the bean) is blown/shaken away, and the nibs fall into a big open box underneath (the machine can have a variety of different sizes of nibs, but they don't seem to use that capability yet). I hadn't known that there are such specialized machines: this one is designed only for cocoa beans.
At this point, the nibs are brought to the second room, ready to be turned into chocolate. When the Taza people thought about how to differentiate themselves, they decided on making stone-ground chocolate, the traditional Central American way. So the nibs are fed into one of two molinos, which have one stationary and one rotating millstone, each hand carved with a pattern to facilitate the chocolate grinding and moving out from between the stones (the pattern has to be recut every couple of months). The chocolate sludge (or whatever it is at this point) goes through the molinos multiple times, with the millstones ever closer together, until they are merely millimeters apart. This almost-chocolate is possible because of the high cocoa butter content of the beans, which help form a new substance, rather than finer and finer chocolate grit. Also, depending on the kind of chocolate wanted, they may add a bit more cocoa butter, organic sugar, cinnamon (whole sticks; it gets ground up), and/or vanilla beans (ditto).
Once it's all ground, it goes into the tempering machine, which keeps it warm at different temperatures to make sure it won't 'bloom' later (I should find a better explanation of the tempering process). Then the chocolate is blorped into polycarbonate forms (bars, disks) to cool into the proper shape. They done have a temperature-controlled conveyor-belt system (it's much more low-tech than that), so the chocolate just sits out until cool. Being so low tech, and in an older industrial sort of space, they have a level to check that racks are actually even.
The most labor intensive part of the process (now that they have the winnowing machine, which was the most recent acquisition) is wrapping it, which is done by hand, putting on the silver paper, then their spcialized wrapper, sealed with a sticker. And then it's ready to go.
It's really cool that this exists, and so near me!
(Side note: the guy giving the tour founded Zipcar before this.)
P.S. No Oompa-Loompas were seen on this tour, nor did anyone fall into a chocolate river or turn into a blueberry (which is particularly good because they don't have fruit chocolates).
It smells wonderful, btw, a lovely chocolate scent permeating the air. I remember feeling the same way about Hersheytown, a million years ago when I visited as a kid, though I'm certain that this chocolate smell is much more highbrow :-).
They have two rooms. In the first, they have burlap sacks with 150 pounds of raw cocoa beans in them, bought from fair trade cooperatives directly (which is why they don't have the Fair Trade logo on their packaging). Raw, in this case, means that the pods were cut from the trees (they grow on the trunks and mature branches, not at the ends of branches like fruit I'm used to), cut open, and the beans and pulp left to ferment for six days, after which the beans were sun dried to a maximum of 8% water content.
The first step is to roast the beans. They don't yet have a roaster (though one is in transit), so this has meant going down to JP Licks in JP to borrow their coffee roaster. The next step is to put them through the winnower. It's a huge machine. Once beans are put in the hopper, they're carried up in little batches (sort of like those kinesthetic sculptures at the Science Museum with balls following all sorts of tracks), then dropped into the first area where they're roughly crushed. The chaff (the outer covering of the bean) is blown/shaken away, and the nibs fall into a big open box underneath (the machine can have a variety of different sizes of nibs, but they don't seem to use that capability yet). I hadn't known that there are such specialized machines: this one is designed only for cocoa beans.
At this point, the nibs are brought to the second room, ready to be turned into chocolate. When the Taza people thought about how to differentiate themselves, they decided on making stone-ground chocolate, the traditional Central American way. So the nibs are fed into one of two molinos, which have one stationary and one rotating millstone, each hand carved with a pattern to facilitate the chocolate grinding and moving out from between the stones (the pattern has to be recut every couple of months). The chocolate sludge (or whatever it is at this point) goes through the molinos multiple times, with the millstones ever closer together, until they are merely millimeters apart. This almost-chocolate is possible because of the high cocoa butter content of the beans, which help form a new substance, rather than finer and finer chocolate grit. Also, depending on the kind of chocolate wanted, they may add a bit more cocoa butter, organic sugar, cinnamon (whole sticks; it gets ground up), and/or vanilla beans (ditto).
Once it's all ground, it goes into the tempering machine, which keeps it warm at different temperatures to make sure it won't 'bloom' later (I should find a better explanation of the tempering process). Then the chocolate is blorped into polycarbonate forms (bars, disks) to cool into the proper shape. They done have a temperature-controlled conveyor-belt system (it's much more low-tech than that), so the chocolate just sits out until cool. Being so low tech, and in an older industrial sort of space, they have a level to check that racks are actually even.
The most labor intensive part of the process (now that they have the winnowing machine, which was the most recent acquisition) is wrapping it, which is done by hand, putting on the silver paper, then their spcialized wrapper, sealed with a sticker. And then it's ready to go.
It's really cool that this exists, and so near me!
(Side note: the guy giving the tour founded Zipcar before this.)
P.S. No Oompa-Loompas were seen on this tour, nor did anyone fall into a chocolate river or turn into a blueberry (which is particularly good because they don't have fruit chocolates).
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 10:24 pm (UTC)(but he has dancing shoes! so sleek :)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 03:44 am (UTC)(Yay for dancing shoes!)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 11:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 03:44 am (UTC)Women not men
Date: 2007-12-04 01:46 am (UTC)Actually, two women founded Zipcar.
Mary
---
http://www.pantoum.org
Re: Women not men
Date: 2007-12-04 03:28 am (UTC)Re: Women not men
Date: 2007-12-04 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 02:37 am (UTC)Chocolate liquor!
that place is awesome.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 02:38 am (UTC)They do all the packaging by hand? I hadn't realized they were that small an outfit.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-16 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 03:18 am (UTC)I recently found a couple of nifty chocolate tempering references:
http://www.tricor-systems.com/articles/chocolate-temper.htm
and
http://www.pmca.com/frame_search.asp search for the word tempering
Lots of nifty stuff at the PMCA, but they charge $15 per article.
-Jon
aside
Date: 2007-12-04 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 06:09 pm (UTC)What a neat experience. Thank you for sharing it, for describing the steps of the process so well.
Are there any kashrut issues for Taza products?
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 06:33 pm (UTC)Taza does not have kashrut certification from any organization.
That said, what I saw looked like there would be no issues. The roasting is done in a roaster dedicated to chocolate and coffee (and is currently done at JP Licks, which has certification), the other equipment is dedicated to chocolate only, and the ingredients are unlikely to have issues. Of course, this is all in my opinion, and I did not have the chance to ask a lot of questions about sources for the cocoa butter (sugar, vanilla beans, and cinnamon sticks are less likely to have issues, in my admittedly limited understanding). Of course, this is all my opinion, worth little more than you've paid for it... :-)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 07:20 pm (UTC)Your assessment seems fair.
I consider your observations and opinions valuable.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 07:25 pm (UTC):-)