One of the questions we are most frequently asked at the factory is why the big blocks of chocolate that we store on the shelves in our production area look so strange. Some people even look closely and point out that it looks like our chocolate is growing mold. As a...
A few weeks ago, a number of articles came out in various publications (such as the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and the Atlantic) talking about a potential cacao shortage. Even once the International Cocoa Organization and Barry Callebaut released...
Part 1 : Cocoa Butter Several weeks ago, I gave a tour to a group of chocolate enthusiasts. Our conversation quickly progressed from a general beginners’ overview to an in-depth discussion of our farmers’ fermentation process, terroir, genetics, Dandelion’s roast...
On Tuesday June 3rd we will be hosting a sourcing talk about Papua New Guinea in our cafe at 7pm. Greg D'alesandre will be talking about his recent trip to the country to find new sources of cacao. And speaking of cacao from Papua New Guinea... I've been...
There's no shortage of Wonka-esque molten chocolate flows in the factory: between the four melangers, two temperers, and dozens of pans that ferry the chocolate between them, we have innumerable surfaces with luscious chocolate coatings that we need to scrape clean....
We just started another batch of Venezuelan. Here's what the ground up nibs (aka cocoa liquor) look like before adding the sugar: And here's what the chocolate looks like just after adding the sugar: After a few days, the lumps will be gone and everything will be...
Rather than putting the nibs straight into a melanger (the machine we use to combine the nibs and sugar into chocolate), we use a peanut grinder to turn the nibs into a paste first. We recently upgraded this...
We took Memorial Day to work on a fun project- testing the hot chocolate varieties we hope to have in our cafe. We initially imagined a matrix of hot chocolates built around different variables like milk, water, melted chocolate, cocoa powder, sugar, caramelized...
We finished our bean inspection table that we mentioned a little while ago. We're really happy with how it came out. To make the table, we first talked about the design before sketching some ideas out on paper. Once we had a general design we were happy with, we...