Archive | machines

Chuck Visits the Chocolate Machines at Dandelion Chocolate Japan

December 16, 2019 by Chuck Dewey

Chuck is our Chocolate Production Mechanic who helps to keep the factories running here in SF. His engineering skills are second to none; he’s never met a machine he couldn’t woo into working at its best. In November, 2019 he was asked to bring his knowledge and elbow grease to our factories in Japan, and take in a little bit of the local culture. Below, Chuck shares a few highlights from his trip.

Chieko and Kaija invited me to come inspect and repair the machines they use at Kuramae and Honjo, and I found that Dandelions are the same everywhere you go: hard working, kind to people and to machines, and very welcoming to this old man.

The river between Honjo (on left) and Kuramae

What a clean and beautiful place to have a chocolate factory and café.

Chieko and Kaija (and the DCJ team) take very good care of their chocolate-making machines but, before something serious breaks, they wanted to create a proactive preventive inspection and servicing plan. Luckily for me, I got to visit for about a week and help them implement the plan. One of the Japanese chocolate makers, Ozaki, got the nod from Chieko to add to his duties the care and feeding of the machines. (They don’t eat much.) Ozaki and I worked side-by-side for a careful inspection and preventive maintenance session for each machine. He is ready to do the hands-on work that will keep the DCJ machines in tip-top shape and minimize surprise failures.

Luckily, DCJ chose and installed identical machines to those that we use in California. The machines don’t get worked as long and as hard as they are in the US, and they’re all in great shape. We had some minor touch-ups that got implemented and a few more that Kaija and Ozaki will implement going forward.

Just like all travelers to Japan, I lost a day as we crossed the International Date Line but got it back on the return trip. That really messed with my sense of time.

I arrived on a Saturday and made a valiant effort to gather some energy for my first visit to Dandelion Chocolate Japan at Kuramae on Sunday morning. Kaija and Chieko and the chocolate makers gave me a warm hello.

Dandelion Chocolate factory and café at Kuramae with beautifully weathered wood front; to the right, Dandelion Chocolate ChEx (Chocolate Experiences classroom)

Retail space with traditional Dandelion Chocolate chalkboard (Thank you, Elaine!)

Upstairs guest tables and chairs make a comfortable tasting experience

The Kuramae factory and café are much like the Valencia factory in San Francisco

After a nice greeting with the DCJ team, Kaija laid out the plan for the week and led me on a tour of the welcoming Kuramae factory and the strictly-functional Honjo factory. We discussed all of the equipment and our action items. We would take care of Kuramae first and get some serious plumbing out of the way. While the plumbers worked at Kuramae, we attacked the projects at Honjo. I met Ozaki on Monday and we were side by side for the rest of the work.

On Thursday we went shopping for tools. We traveled by train and found a huge “everything” store that looks like a Home Depot or a Lowes on the ground floor, then continues to many floors of anything you might need to keep your home operating.

Kaija and Ozaki waiting in the train station

Just like everything I saw in Tokyo, the factories are immaculate and extremely orderly.

We had plenty of tasks to fill the week, but worked at a comfortable pace that left time to experience a wide variety of tasty delights. The baristas know how to make great hot chocolate and coffee drinks just like at home.

Cafe latte for an old mechanic

One day the wonderful pastry chefs made udon for the whole staff. I got to join the lunch!

Every meal became a flavorful adventure. One rainy day we even ate an American-style hamburger. It relieved Kaija’s hankering for a taste of home. I have to say, they even did that well.

On Saturday night Kaija and her friend took me to a traditional restaurant that required shoes off at the door and to sit on mats on the floor. The food was amazing! I was surprised that this old man was able to stand back up after dinner.

What a great experience it was visiting Tokyo and our Dandelion Chocolate colleagues in Japan!

Chuck enjoying Japan and some okonomiyaki

A Visit to ÓBOLO Chocolate in Santiago, Chile

October 10, 2018 by Ryan O'Connell

Ryan is a chocolate maker at our 16th Street factory, as well as a frequent traveler and motorcycle enthusiast. Inspired by the Chilean kung fu film Kiltro, he bought a motorcycle to ride to the Atacama desert of northern Chile, ultimately crossing into Argentina to catch the final stages of the world-famous Dakar Rally. While in Santiago, Chile, he had to visit our friends at ÓBOLO Chocolate to taste their amazing 70% Cacao con Nibs bar. This is what he found.

In January of 2018, while in Chile, I had the opportunity to stop by ÓBOLO Chocolate in Santiago’s Barrio Italia neighborhood. This mainly residential area of Santiago, although not as busy as other areas, has a decent level of foot traffic with plenty of cafes, restaurants, shops, and small factories peppered throughout the area. ÓBOLO, located on Avenida Italia, is rather unassuming from the outside; I missed it the first time I passed by. The color of the chocolate brown building foreshadows what can be found inside. Established in 2014, ÓBOLO is Chile’s first bean-to-bar chocolate maker. ÓBOLO makes two-ingredient chocolate bars as well as flavor-infused, dark milk, and inclusion bars.

Walking in, as would be expected, the aroma of chocolate hits you immediately. To the right, bags of Peruvian (Pangoa) cocoa beans. To the left, a product display table with cocoa beans and cocoa powder. Straight ahead, a display case with various chocolate bars and treats like chocolate-dipped candied ginger.

The People

The company has just five employees. Chances are you will be greeted by the owner and founder of ÓBOLO, Mark Gerrits (an expatriate from the United States). Mark was introduced to cacao back in 2001 while living in Ecuador’s Amazon region working with direct trade practices and cocoa producing communities. If Mark is busy in the back, you’ll probably meet one of the other team members – Geraldine Mondaca (a Santiago native and ÓBOLO´s uber-friendly store manager) or Gabriel Marques (the Head Chocolate Maker from Venezuela).

The Equipment

The production equipment at ÓBOLO is robust and pretty standard for a chocolate maker of its size, and also an amazing display of homemade tools that get the job done. They’re roasting cocoa beans with a modified homemade 10kg nut roaster. For a winnower (the machine that removes the cracked papery husk from roasted cocoa beans), they use a machine that was designed and built for them in Perú. They also use a 100lb Diamond grinder to make their chocolate, and their tempering machine was a familiar site. Just like us, they use a Unica machine to temper the chocolate at the right temperature to make a finished bar snappy and shiny. (Here’s more info on how chocolate is made.)

The Challenges

After speaking with the team, they mentioned that the winnowing process was bulletproof. It was also interesting to learn about the biggest challenges in their production. Like any chocolate maker, consistency in tempering is an issue. Some finished bars just look richer, darker, and shinier than others; the root is usually an imbalance in the quality or quantity of ideal crystals. Developing the flavor profile of each harvest year to year is also tricky. The roast and conch of each new batch of beans (the part of production that contributes to flavor development and mouthfeel) can be challenging to get right. Daily and weekly production and logistics flow is also tough for a small maker who is trying to be conscientious of their product. The planning, documenting, and traceability of each bar is something that ÓBOLO works at with gusto.

It can be easy to take for granted how much energy, passion, care, teamwork, and coordination go into making great chocolate at any scale, and I learned a lot by watching a small craft maker. It’s amazing to see how far the bean-to-bar New American Chocolate Movement revolution has reached, and I can’t wait to visit again.

We’re Brewing Cacao Nib Coffee at Our SF Valencia Street Café

June 22, 2018 by Jennifer Roy

Jennifer has handled the public relations for Dandelion since 2013, and she’s an avid drinker of coffee in the cafe. For this piece, she spoke with Voga Coffee’s co-founder and CEO Eli Salomon who, along with Josh Avins, CTO and scientist behind the technology, and Jason Sarley, co-founder and Chief Coffee Officer, are the creators of the Ground Control vacuum coffee machine.

Voga Coffee's Cyclops coffee machine in the Dandelion Chocolate cafe

The Ground Control Cyclops coffee brewer behind the counter at the Valencia Street cafe.

If you’ve been in our café on Valencia Street recently, you’ve probably seen a very futuristic-looking machine topped with hand-blown glass bulbs. It’s a new coffee machine called Ground Control® Cyclops from the innovative folks at Oakland-based Voga Coffee. We’re the first café in the world to have this machine, and it just won the Specialty Coffee Association 2018 Best New Product award. We’re thrilled to be serving both brewed coffee and brewed cacao nib coffee with Ritual’s beans.

Why add another machine in our café, and how did we meet the team from Voga? Eli Salomon of Ground Control was testing the machine near our Alabama Street factory, and he asked if he could experiment with brewing some of our cacao nibs. How could we say no? When we finally got to taste our nibs brewed with delicious Ritual coffee, we had an “aha!” moment where we were blown away by the taste. The cacao nib coffee is smooth, nutty, and full-flavored coffee without any kind of bitter aftertaste. Todd, Dandelion’s co-founder and CEO, exclaimed: “How could we not have a machine that brews the most delicious coffee made with our nibs?”

Keep your eye on the Cyclops when you next visit our Valencia café.

Since launching the brewed coffee and the cacao nib brewed coffee at the end of May, 2018, the feedback has been very positive. People love it! Cacao nib coffee makes you less jittery than regular coffee, and it has a more uplifting buzz. Along with the normal caffeine kick, it must be the theobromine from the nibs that helps give your mood a boost.

How does the Cyclops work? Salomon explains, “Traditionally, it’s been impossible to brew cacao nibs, because their high-fat content clogs brewing filters. When we first spoke with Dandelion, our team suggested the possibility of using Ground Control’s high vacuum brewing process to overcome this hurdle that has plagued the chocolate world for hundreds of years. After Voga ran a few brewing experiments, it became clear that our innovative, patented brewing approach was exactly what was needed to coax the delicate, beautiful flavor of Dandelion’s impeccably sourced single-origin cacao. It was through this effort that the world’s first cacao brewer was discovered.”

He adds, “In addition to brewing a delicious cacao-based beverage, Ground Control’s unique multi-stage brewing method extracts multiple layers of flavor from coffee or cacao, resulting in a delicate, multi-dimensional cup. Drinkers of Ground Control brewed beverages have marveled at their smooth, clean cup profile and the significantly pronounced sweetness that soars from the cup. Ground Control’s unique, carefully controlled process not only eliminates harsh bitterness but also presents delicate, nuanced flavors that would otherwise be obscured.”

Currently, we’re offering a Ritual single-origin brewed coffee from Guatemala as well as the cacao nib coffee with our Camino Verde, Ecuador nibs. We look forward to having you come by to try it. Let us know what you think!

Don’t worry; you still get one of our signature shortbread cookies with every cup.

What’s a Grindometer?

August 7, 2015 by Molly Gore

Along the south wall of our factory on Valencia Street, there are six, spinning steel melangers. This is where the cocoa nibs turn into cocoa liquor, and where the liquor and sugar are refined and conched until they have reached the perfect consistency and flavor to become a chocolate bar. The melangers themselves are actually modified spice grinders from India, comprised of two spinning granite wheels and a granite base. They spin 24 hours a day, crushing nibs and sugar together and oxidizing the mixture which helps release volatile aromatics. Each batch stays in the melanger for three to five days, until we know the chocolate is ready. But how do we know when it’s ready?

Deciding when to “pull a batch” is a matter of personal judgment, but we have a few benchmarks and tools to help us. First, we taste. Is it well-balanced? Delicious? Smooth? Exactly as it should be? If we taste grit—which indicates the particle size is still too large and needs more time under the granite wheels—we know it’s not ready. If the texture is smooth but there are a few off flavors, it needs more time to conch and mellow out. If the texture and flavor are flat, it means it may have been in the melanger too long and refined to a particle size that’s too small. We prefer a particle size between 20 and 30 microns, which makes for a smooth mouthfeel but isn’t too small to keep the flavor from dancing around* in your mouth.

To help us understand what we’re tasting, we used to use something called a micrometer, which measured particle size by pinching a small sample of chocolate. This was a good tool, but it was limited to measuring only the largest particle in any given sample. Even if we measure three times, that’s only three particles.

Enter the grindometer. We learned about grindometers at last year’s Chocolate Maker Unconference, and later decided to purchase a particular model that we learned about from the guys at Hexx Chocolate in Las Vegas. A grindometer is a beautifully simple instrument used to measure particle size in suspensions, usually printing inks and paints. The instrument itself is a stainless steel brick with two almost imperceptibly shallow channels carved across the length of it. The grooves graduate from a depth of 100 micrometers below the surface to 0 micrometers (where it’s flush with the surface). To use it, we drop two small blobs of chocolate onto the top of either channel, and scrape them to the end with a straight steel scraper.

The particles slip under the scraper as the space between the scraper and the steel brick grows smaller, which means we get to see the entire distribution of particle size throughout a single sample of chocolate. Where the shade of the chocolate’s color changes most abruptly, from dark to lighter, indicates the size of the majority of the particles.

When that drop-off happens between 20 and 30 microns, we know the chocolate is somewhere close to its sweet spot, and could be ready to pull.

To see it in action, stop by the factory!

*real scientific term

Meet the Bean Dervish!

July 14, 2015 by Molly Gore

As a small, bean-to-bar chocolate maker, we’re part of a very small industry. Since the beginning, that means we’ve had to build a lot of the machines that we couldn’t find, as well as engineer creative ways of meeting our small batch needs. When Todd and Cam moved from a small garage into a small factory in the Dogpatch, and when we later expanded into our current factory on Valencia Street, a good deal of that machinery came with us. Our PVC-and-vacuum winnower, the vibrating wooden sorter, our bean cracker, and more. As the months roll by, we’ve slowly upgraded when we’ve found better ways of doing things or when the machines were past their prime. Still, if you’ve been through the factory in the last year, you’ll likely have seen some relics chugging away, paying their dues.

Last week, we bid adieu to our oldest piece of still-working equipment: the Crankenstein. Crankenstein was our devoted bean cracker, a set of three rollers that we installed in a table under a hopper. This is where we cracked beans after roasting and before winnowing. Generally, it did well, but it was slow enough to bottleneck our whole process, and we must have spent weeks of our lives standing over it, scraping jammed beans out of the rollers with the end of a ladle. We needed something better.

Mufu approves of the Bean Dervish.

Last year, Mike Orlando, owner of Twenty-Four Blackbirds out of Santa Barbara and creator of some amazing chocolate, showed us a different approach to breaking beans. Working with Mike’s device as the inspiration, our Magic Man of Machines—Snooky Robins—has been putting together a very different kind of cracker. It’s tall, it’s shiny, and it’s called the Bean Dervish.

The machine works much in the same way as a walnut cracker from the 1880s. It works by flinging beans against the sides of a big steel drum, breaking them on impact. The Crankenstein relied on friction to pull beans in between a fixed sized slot, this had numerous problems including reduced speed through wear on the roller, small beans not breaking, and large beans getting stuck. As the Dervish doesn’t rely on friction or a fixed sized slot to break, it works incredibly well and breaks beans (of any size) consistently.

The point of a cracker is to break the beans into sizable chunks that make it easier to winnow the husk from the nib. Due to its force and speed, the Dervish also breaks nibs away from the husk more effectively, which means our yields are improving too.

Oh, and compared to the Crankenstein, the Bean Dervish moves at the speed of light.

Come by during production hours to see it in action! If you think this sounds like a good way to break your beans, Mike is working on building these sort of Breakers and can be contacted at mike@twentyfourblackbirds.com.

Le Grande Experiment: Part 2

May 12, 2015 by Cynthia Jonasson

This is the second in a series of posts about Le Grande Experiment (which translates into no language except the one we’ve made up), a recent adventure wherein we sent teams to Denver and Italy on a vital mission: to hunt down and test the best equipment for scaling up our process. Our current setup works well for our factory space on Valencia Street, but as we grow into our new factory space on Alabama Street, we believe there are better options out there for improving the quality of our chocolate and expanding our capacity to experiment. While we could do the work on the phone, we find the best results come from hitting the road and getting our hands dirty. Here, Cynthia recounts a trip to Denver with Greg to visit Steve DeVries.

When I travel, I love stopping by other chocolate makers to see what they’re up to. Somehow, even though I grew up in Denver, I never thought to visit Steve DeVries’ chocolate factory when I visited home. Steve is a sage researcher who I read about when I first started my chocolate studies a long time ago, so you’ll imagine how excited I was to visit him, learn about his process, and test our own chocolate on his machines while visiting my family for the holidays earlier this year.

The grand goal of Le Grande Experiment is to test refining and conching equipment in order to narrow our focus on the machines we will use in the new factory. At the moment, we use melangers (those spinning silver drums) in the factory to do both jobs—reducing the particle size of the nibs while evaporating undesirable, volatile aromas. De-coupling these jobs into two machines allows us more control over optimizing for flavor and texture. At least, that’s the hope. At Steve’s factory, we got the chance to test out a bunch of different machines, including a winnower that also cracks the beans (we use a separate machine to do that).

Before we went to Denver, we roasted Madagascar beans in our factory on Valencia Street, and shipped them alongside some organic cane sugar in sealed buckets to Steve’s factory. We flew to Denver, and after enjoying a lovely and snow-filled Boxing Day (yes, the Canadian government lets me claim citizenship), we joined Steve to make chocolate while the employees of Ritual Chocolate who normally use his machinery enjoyed some time off.

Part 1: Winnowing

A relic from Dandelion’s early days (and mine)

As you can see from this snapshot of my chocolate maker skills test from when I started at Dandelion, it was once considered highly skilled to winnow a batch of chocolate (30 kgs) in under three hours. Even four and a half hours was considered decent. Now, we winnow in about a third of that time. Back then, we had to continually scoop nibs into our winnower and regulate the flow by adjusting a valve at the bottom of the hopper. It was duck-taped together, the fan at the bottom frequently got backed up with nibs, and we had to make the nibs flow uphill both ways. Well, just kidding about that last part, but there were a lot of obstacles in the way of a good, clean, fast winnow.

Our current winnower

It was a great step forward when we started using our current winnower, with a modified design built by Greg, our Chocolate Sourcerer, and Snooky, now our Magic Man of Machines. The current winnower allowed us to start a batch and walk away, and decreased our winnow time to one and a half hours per batch, most of which was time we could spend doing other things.

The DeVries winnower

When we put all of our whole roasted cocoa beans into Steve DeVries’ winnower, a Lehman (originally owned by Scharffenberger), the winnower actually cracked the beans and very efficiently winnowed the beans and removed their radicals (the hard bit of a bean that would become the tree’s taproot—it looks like a tiny nail and is much harder to refine). And, it did this all in under one and a half hours. It was love! Even better, Steve has graciously decided to “store” his winnower at our new factory space for the next year. This is great news for Dandelion, but just how great? Check out the stats:

PROS: Faster and more efficient, cracks beans, removes radical, has cool-looking conveyor belts, and is safer than our current cracker.

CONS: Not much here. It’s louder than our current winnower (but not by much).

Part 2: Pre-Refining

The peanut grinder

The Hobart Cutter Mixer

Our pre-refining technique has also evolved since I started at Dandelion. Originally, we used a standard peanut grinder to make a paste which we slowly added to our melangers. We now use a Hobart Cutter Mixer which grinds our chocolate to a soupier consistency, but also heats it up a fair amount.

At Steve’s, we used a Molino Victoria to pre-grind. For smaller quantities or for chocolate makers who have a heavier roast than us, this might be a valid option. Our lighter roasts leave too much moisture in the beans which actually makes the paste much thicker. That means our time with the Victoria turned out to be a lot of time, filled with endless passes through the grinder. First we ran the nibs through, turning them into a crumbly paste, then passed the paste through over and over again, eventually with the sugar, until the particles were refined enough to pass through the roll refiner. It took forever (a day and a half), and it looked like this:

The chocolate paste was too thick to stir the sugar in by hand, so we took a break to run to the hardware store to buy a mud mixer attachment for the drill. As you can see, the equipment we use for making chocolate is very rarely meant for making chocolate.

We’re not considering buying the Victoria Molino, but it did give us consistent particle size, as well as lots of time to pick Steve’s brain.

Part 3: Refining

At the early stages of refining, the nib and sugar particles are still large and rough.

After a day or three in a melanger, the chocolate is smooth.

The refining process at Dandelion has been pretty much the same the entire time I’ve been here. We use melangers with big granite wheels and bases to crush the nibs and sugar together. The process also conches the chocolate, allowing aromatics to evaporate off. We’ve tweaked the process a bit over the years and upgraded in size, but still use the same type of refiners that we started with. We started using our first large Cocoatown, which we later affectionately called “Granny,” about two years ago, but she slowly ground herself to death over two years of continuous usage (disproving the theory that hard work never hurt anyone). The melangers do a good job of refining, but we’ve learned that there are areas where we’d like to have more control.

At Dandelion, we test the chocolate to determine the largest particle size in a sample using a micrometer (another technology we are in the midst of upgrading). Once the chocolate has gotten to a particle size of 20-29 microns, we pour the chocolate out of the melanger, cool it, and and store it. This process has generally worked for us, but after doing some more thorough tests we learned that our micron size in one batch covers too wide a range.

A grindometer shows the particle distribution in our chocolate

Steve thinks our chocolate is so viscous because of the sub 1-micron particles. Chocolate is a type of colloid known as a “sol,” and as such has cocoa solids suspended in cocoa butter (which, at this heat, is in its liquid form). The more we break apart large particles to refine them, the higher the total number of solid particles are suspended in the cocoa butter. If there are too many particles to suspend, they don’t have enough cocoa butter to surround them and end up gumming up the chocolate.

The roll refiner

At Steve’s we used a three roll refiner. I was most excited about trying out the roll refiner because I’d heard about other chocolate makers switching over to the roll refiner side. I’d heard that they took forever to use and that some chocolate makers spent twelve hours of active time on one batch just in roll refining! (In contrast, our chocolate spends about three to four days on our melangers, but it’s mostly inactive time for us since we don’t have to be standing next to the machine to ensure that it’s running correctly).

Since our chocolate was still thicker and more viscous than the chocolate that Steve normally passed through his machines, he had to do a lot of adjustments to make the machine function properly. We kept the pre-refined chocolate and sugar mixture in a heated cabinet to keep the cocoa butter melted so it would pass through the machine better, but adjustments were needed to help it work. We kept the middle roller in place and adjusted the rollers on either side either closer or further away, depending on how the chocolate was flowing. Meanwhile, a steady stream of water runs through the rollers to keep them from overheating due to the energy created from reducing particle sizes. As the rollers are used more, they heat up and expand and need to be adjusted.

After completing the first pass, we adjusted and put the chocolate through a second time. All in all, this is what we learned about using a roll refiner:

PROS: Mostly uniform particle size (varies because machine is adjusted by hand), eliminates both the large and small particle sizes that our current melangers create, and it’s a fun machine to operate and watch.

CONS: Takes a long time (possibly because the machine is small), requires active time, requires a lot of adjustments which means it needs a skilled operator. It’s a bit messier than our current machine.

Part 4: Conching

Conching is the process of mixing the particles evenly throughout the mixture and aerating the chocolate so that volatile aromas evaporate off. The process has also stayed relatively the same since I’ve been at Dandelion.

The only major changes we’ve made that I can remember are standardizing the time at which we add sugar to the nibs, and changing the speed at which our melangers turn based on each origin. And once, a long time ago, we held a heat gun to the machine with velcro to help heat off a very astringent and bitter flavor in a Colombian bar. Now we spend more time finding better beans, so we don’t need to do this.

At Steve’s, we were excited to try his Chef D’Ouevre, a longitudinal conche that held 80 lbs of chocolate. It was simple to use; we just poured the buckets of refined chocolate into the longitudinal conche and turned it on.

At first, we ran it with the top lid open (to help the volatile aromas which evaporate off dissipate), then we closed the lid and let it do its thing for about four days. The conche works by moving a roller over the chocolate. The movement creates a “wave” of chocolate because the sides of the conche are rounded which invites air to be mixed into the chocolate. The bottom of the conche is granite and the chocolate is squished between this and a roller which rounds out the particle shapes that start somewhat jagged from the refining process. This whole process creates a smooth chocolate that has a velvety mouthfeel.

Emptying the longitudinal conche

Take 2

PROS: Creates a velvety textured chocolate, easy to clean, can start it and walk away, very cool to watch working, and can be stopped at any point when flavor is best.

CONS: Loud, requires a lot of energy, hard to find since they’re a lost art(?), particles are rounded out on the machine, we could find ourselves loving the taste but keeping the chocolate on to improve texture.

Our Conclusions

First off, Ritual Chocolate and Steve DeVries were wonderful hosts and I enjoyed spending a few days out of my holidays with them. I loved the experience of making chocolate this way and left hoping that we would get a few similar machines.

We will have a post soon with the scientific results of our experiment, but from a technical standpoint, I like that the roll refiner can theoretically decrease our particle size distribution, which means the difference between the largest and smallest particles in a single batch won’t be so big. I’m also enthusiastic about the fact that we might reduce viscosity because the chocolate was sloshing around in the conche and I could never imagine using the word “slosh” with our current melanger which makes chocolate that would be described as “glop”.

The only piece of equipment we used that I would not want to continue using in the same manner is the pre-refiner. We really had to fight to get our cacao through the machine, in part because our we used a lightly roasted bean, but I think I’d want something that was easier to use.

A special thanks to Steve and the folks from Ritual for helping us in our mission to upgrade our process! You’re the best.

Le Grande Experiment: Part 1

February 26, 2015 by Minda Nicolas

This is the first in a series of posts about Le Grande Experiment (which translates into no language except the one we’ve made up), a recent adventure wherein we sent teams to Denver and Italy on a vital mission: to hunt down and test the best equipment for scaling up our process. Our current setup works well for our factory space on Valencia Street, but as we grow into our new factory space on Alabama Street, we believe there are better options out there for improving the quality of our chocolate and expanding our capacity to experiment. While we could do the work on the phone, we find the best results come from hitting the road and getting our hands dirty.

In our factory on Valencia Street, we use melangers—big spinning drums with granite wheels—to both refine and conche our chocolate. Melangers use friction to reduce the nibs and sugar down to a particle size that can’t be detected by the tongue, while creating heat that also conches the chocolate—distributing the particles evenly throughout and allowing for volatile aromas to evaporate off over a few days. The longer a chocolate is in a melanger, the mellower it tends to be.

The melangers we use now do two jobs at once: refining and conching.

Because we currently use one machine to do two jobs, it means that landing on the flavor profile we’re looking for doesn’t always coincide with the moment the nibs reach the right particle size. If we could separate these jobs into two machines instead of one, we could optimize for both flavor and texture, and possibly decrease the viscosity of our chocolate which would make it easier to temper. The machines we had in mind were all the way in Denver and Italy, so we packed our bags, prepped and roasted some beans, and set off to try our luck. We called it Le Grande Experiment.

The first part of Le Grand Experiment found us on a plane to visit Packint Chocolate Equipment in Borgo Priolo, Italy, an hour south of Milan. Packint is owned and operated by a lovely Italian family who already knows a thing or two about bean-to-bar production because they are doing just that on the same machines they are manufacturing and selling. This is important not only because they use the machines on a regular basis and know how to fix them when things go wrong, but it also means that they care deeply about maintaining the unique flavors of the bean throughout the process.

Greg and Snooky with the folks from Packint.

In the two weeks before the trip, we sorted and roasted 240 kilograms of Madagascar beans. To squeeze this in under two weeks was no small task, but luckily for us, Dandelion is full of awesome and dedicated staff. It didn’t take much convincing to get a handful of employees to participate in late-night and weekend prep parties in the bean room, and in no time at all we had everything prepped, roasted, and packed to be sent to Italy and Denver with corresponding amounts of sugar.

After our beans successfully cleared customs, we got to work in Italy opening up all 25 buckets of beans and sugar, and spent the first day cracking and winnowing. The machine at Packint that we used is likely too small for our growing production needs, but we loved how quiet this machine was and how consistently sized the nibs were.

On the second day, we passed the nibs through Packint’s two roll pre-refiner three times, each time decreasing the amount of space between the rollers and refining the nibs into fluffy choco-flakes. This was by far the most interesting and mesmerizing part of the process to watch, and we were especially intrigued by the lack of heat generated by this refining action, since heat is one of the more difficult variables to control using our current machinery.

Packint’s all-in-one cracker and winnower.

Packint's roll refiner turns nibs into fluffy flakes, ready for conching.

Packint’s roll refiner, crushing nibs.

Right now, in our factory at Valencia, we use a Hobart cutter-mixer to pre-refine nibs before loading them into the melanger. The mega blender-type action of the blades inside the cutter-mixer sometimes heats the nibs to temperatures upwards of 175°F, which is very high considering some of our roasts are done at 180°F. It’s hard to know the effect of this added burst of heat, but we like the idea of reducing the number of unknown variables in the process as we plan to make more chocolate.

On the third day, we loaded the ball mill with the fluffy choco-flakes. If you’re like me and have never seen or really heard of a ball mill before, imagine a big (150kg), upright tank filled with a bunch of marble-sized steel balls and an agitator arm in the middle. The arm rotates, forcing the steel balls to spin around the tank and grind the cocoa mass into smaller and smaller particle sizes. We added the sugar about an hour into the process and waited a couple of hours for the particle size to reduce to about 25 microns. Tasting chocolate that was refined but not conched—smooth in texture but terrible in flavor— was an unfamiliar (and somewhat unpleasant) experience!

On the fourth day, the refined chocolate was pumped into a 200kg rotary conche—an enclosed machine that stirs the chocolate while forcing controlled air through the chamber to carry the volatile aromatics away—and stayed there for 48 hours. Conching is a process that aerates and agitates the chocolate, allowing moisture to release and volatiles to burn off. Additionally, after the rotary conche, the particles are rounded out and covered more evenly in cocoa butter, which gives the chocolate a smoother texture and a better mouthfeel.

After the chocolate was finished in the conch, the wonderful staff at Packint put it all right back into the buckets the beans originally arrived in so that we could bring them back home and run even more experiments. We also took samples at various stages of the process to bring home and compare with our own chocolate as well as our results from Denver. Back at the factory, the tests will help us to better understand particle shape and size, and to learn how each set of equipment produces these changes in the chocolate over time. The trip was extremely worthwhile and educational for us. Having the opportunity to test out machines before potentially buying them is indeed a luxury, but it also helps us make more informed decisions about making more chocolate using completely different machines! Stay tuned for the next installment of this series, in which we travel to Denver and play on more machines with chocolate doyen, Steve DeVries.

Lessons on Tempering

September 22, 2014 by Pearl

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 profiles, and tempering.

Tempering is a tricky subject. When I began working at Dandelion Chocolate, tempering was the most intimidating step of the process for me. What exactly is tempering? My cookie cutter answer usually goes something like this:

Tempering is a process in which we raise and lower the temperature of chocolate to allow crystals to form. Certain crystals form a structure that results in a shelf stable chocolate with a shiny sheen, nice snap, and smooth texture. Crystals in this stage are known as Form V crystals, and they provide the foundation for well-tempered chocolate bars.

Credit: Laurie Frankel

Usually, people are satisfied with this answer. It’s short, simple, and glosses over some complicated details; not so for this tour group. At the end of the tour and another round of insightful questions and comments, one woman asked, “What and how exactly is the crystal structure formed in a well-tempered chocolate bar?”

I looked at her blankly because I didn’t know the answer, and I wasn’t entirely sure what she was asking. Did she want me to draw the crystal structure showing the carbon bonds that symbolize chocolate? Was she asking what kind of crystals are required? Her question and my inability to answer it at the time prompted me to do some digging. The following is what I have interpreted from various textbooks (yes, textbooks!) on chocolate.

The first step to understanding tempering is to understand the cocoa bean. Cocoa beans are made up of about 50% cocoa butter and 50% cocoa solids. Cocoa butter is a natural fat present in cocoa beans, and is integral to tempering due to its ability to crystallize, or to form crystals, at different temperatures. The crystalline structure of cocoa butter is what determines the appearance and texture of chocolate.

Cocoa butter crystals can pack themselves (molecularly) into six forms. Each crystalline form has a different melting point and the higher the form, the higher the melting point. In other words, Form I has a crystalline structure with the lowest melting point (16°-18° C) while Form VI’s structure has the highest (34°-36° C). The various crystalline structures make chocolate appear different to the casual observer.

While our chocolate bars are tempered into Form V, other unstable crystalline forms can be found throughout Dandelion’s chocolate making process. These unstable forms usually result in an uneven appearance–light brown spots or pale surface swirls on the chocolate, for example. These spots and streaks are known as bloom, and they appear due to a natural separation of unstable cocoa butter crystals from cocoa solids. Untempered, bloomed chocolate breaks apart easily, but is still edible and tasty. In fact, we eat it all the time for quality control. So, why do we temper chocolate?

Bloomed chocolate is easier to break apart (sort of).

The most important reason is to keep chocolate shelf stable. Form V chocolate contains the most stable cocoa butter crystals due to the fact that they won’t melt until 85°F/29°C – which is well above external body temperature. This crystalline structure allows our chocolate bars to retain their glossy sheen and shape when they are stored in a cool, dry place. Dandelion Chocolate’s bars can usually be kept in this condition for up to a year. Shelf stability is also the reason why many chocolatiers temper chocolate for their bon-bons and truffles.

At Dandelion, we use a continuous tempering machine designed and built by FBM Boscolo, the Unica. This machine allows us to control the temperature of the chocolate in three different steps – but we only use two. First, we raise the temperature of the chocolate to 50°-54° C in order to melt away any crystals that may have formed. Then, we lower the temperature and agitate the chocolate to encourage the development of a Form V crystalline structure. Done correctly and with some time, Form V chocolate will contract from our mold as it cools, leaving us with a beautiful, shiny, dark chocolate bar.

Stay tuned: In the next post, I will write about other factors that affect the tempering process.

References

Minifie, Bernard W. Chocolate, Cocoa, and Confectionery: Science and Technology. 3rd ed. Gaithersburg, Maryland. 1999. Print.

Join us for The Chocolate Maker Unconference!

July 9, 2014 by Greg

I love chocolate, and I have for as long as I can remember. But, when I became a chocolate sourcerer, I learned something surprising. While I enjoy making a product I love, what I really enjoy most is meeting other chocolate makers. There is nothing better than engaging with others who share your passion. This is why I’m excited to be involved in the upcoming Chocolate Maker Unconference in Seattle on October 2-3, 2014 (happening prior to the annual Northwest Chocolate Festival).

As chocolate makers we spend most of our time running our businesses and, well, making chocolate! This doesn’t leave much time to share thoughts, ideas, and tips on what we’ve learned. But, in order for the industry to thrive, we’re best off learning and growing together. This Unconference is meant to afford us the time to make that happen. From the event description:

The 2014 Chocolate Makers UnConference provides space and time for professional Chocolate Makers to engage with others in their industry to talk about the topics that are important and relevant to them. The conference is 2 days to allow time for each attendee to engage and work through multiple topics. The conference does not feature talks or lectures but rather an “open space” format that focuses on inclusive engagement with round-table style sessions and open dialogue to accomplish what the group determines to be their goals. Topics may range from: the best way for new chocolate makers to get small quantities of quality beans; working through a design for a new winnower; putting together an agreement for more effective direct trade; designing a tasting structure that fits the craft chocolate tasting goals.

If you have any questions for me about this, feel free to contact me at beans@dandelionchocolate.com. We wanted to make it free but we needed somewhere to meet so the fee of $100 is designed to cover the cost of the space. I encourage anyone in the chocolate making industry (makers, growers, equipment producers, etc) or even those getting started in the chocolate making industry, to join us. We’d love to meet you!

Sorting things out in Texas

June 12, 2014 by Caitlin

Cam and I took off for Texas last week to visit AMVT, a company that sells optical sorter machines. People’s eyes start to glaze over when I start talking about optical sorters until I mention that it could greatly improve the quality of our chocolate and decrease the amount of time it takes to prep beans before we roast them (maybe about half snap back to attention—and 100% of the Dandelion production team!).

The optical sorting machine in all its glory

Imagine a world where a machine with six eyes and a thousand lights is scanning the beans, rejecting anything cracked, moldy, flat, or foreign material. Then a chocolate maker can make sure nothing slips through rather than spending 20-30min per 5 kilos of beans like we do now (keep in mind batches are 30 kilos each and we are prepping roughly 65 kilos of beans per day). As a person hand sorts beans in the chilly bean room, attention can wander, and we miss things that a machine will be able to catch. This can help us make better chocolate by selecting only the best beans!

Things we want to get rid of

Assessing the sort done by the machine

We flew into Austin and stopped by La Barbecue to fuel up for the drive to Houston. We made it just in the nick of time to be their last late, late lunch customers of the day and got to sample some mighty fine brisket and pulled pork. It came with the most amazing sweet and tangy sauce and was just the ticket to kick off our Texas adventure. The AMVT lab had several machines and we were warmly welcomed by David and his colleague, Gary. There were several tests to try and we had brought an overweight checked bag (shh!) full of raw beans from a two different origins to play with.

David and Gary had calibrated the machine with a previous sample we had sent. We worked with them to understand the priorities around rejecting beans based on color, size, and shape. The machine has a set of cameras facing each other (so it can “see” both sides of the beans) and is fed from the top using gravity and slight vibration to move the beans down. The beans fall past the camera and then, if rejected, are blown into a different chute with compressed air. All simple in concept, complicated to achieve, and amazing to see in action.

David and Gary were incredibly knowledgeable and helpful and we both learned a lot during our visit. On our way out of town, we decided we needed one last barbecue fix before heading back to SF. We hit up Micklethwait Meat Company where we tried their pulled pork, pork shoulder, and brisket. These were accompanied by outstanding homemade pickles, jalepeño cheesy grits, and crisp coleslaw. The meat was delicious and the grits were amazing!

To top it all off, we stopped by Hay Elotes, a permanent structure version of a Mexican street cart selling all things corn and delicious ice cream/icees. Ivan helped us out and let us sample a few things and explained how they seek out the best corn in Mexico to import. He told us, “in Mexico, corn is life.” We were too full to sample the corn or the chicharones, but we both enjoyed mango, lime, and tamarind icees (kind of like sorbet). Ivan promised to come visit the factory next time he’s in SF.

All in all, a productive and illuminating trip to learn about some pretty amazing technology. Though we are still in the research phase, we are excited about the possibility of integrating this machine into our process.