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Archive | process

Mélanger à trois

March 19, 2012 by

We’ve really been struggling to keep up with demand these last few months. After making sure we had enough great beans on hand and getting some more help at the factory (thanks Chiann, Caitlin, Cynthia, and Natalie!), we started running into capacity limits with some of our machines. Fortunately, we just got three more big melangers from Cocoatown:

Having multiple melangers is really helpful since a single batch occupies one machine for anywhere from 2 to 5 days. It’ll take us a bit to get them set up but once they’re all working, we should be able to crank out some more chocolate!

Supermechanical

February 24, 2012 by

Don’t forget, we’ll be teaching Chocolate 101 next Wednesday night in our space. There are 15 spots and we’d love to see you there. Tickets are available in our store.

The other night David and John from Supermechanical stopped by to talk about their latest project- Twine. They recently raised one of the highest totals ever on kickstarter and are now working to keep up with an overwhelming demand. We met because we’d love to have Twines all over our factory. For example, we imagine using them to help us log data from our roaster and the ambient conditions. Months after a roast, we’d be able check the humidity and internal and external temperatures to help us understand any batch variation. We sometimes notice subtle differences in taste or viscosity between batches from the same beans and more data would help us get a better handle on the cause.

David and John came by during a whirlwind trip to the bay area- you can read about their take on our factory on their blog. We were really happy to spend a few hours talking about the joys of building machines. It seems like they have a lot of momentum behind their idea and are incredibly excited to move forward. They promised to stop by with prototypes for us to play with in April and we hope to have a factory decked out with Twines someday soon.

Chocolate 101

February 16, 2012 by

We’re offering our first class! We’re really excited about chocolate education. As we get closer to opening our space on Valencia, we’re starting to think about the different classes and tours we’ll host there. We’re teaching Chocolate 101 in our production kitchen in the Dogpatch, but this is just the start of a big part of our mission for our factory and cafe space.

This is a class for 15 people from 7-9 PM on February 29th. It’ll be an all around introduction to chocolate. We’ll cover the different types of chocolate, their ingredients, our chocolate making process, and a little about single origin bars. You’ll leave well-versed in the chocolate basics.

We’ll start the night out with a little chocolate treat, have a discussion about chocolate making, then a tour of our space, and plenty of time for your questions. We’ll taste chocolate in all of its unfinished and finished forms and provide samples of all we try for you to take home and share your knowledge.

We just added tickets to our online store, available to the first 15 interested people. We’d love to have you there.

Temper Tantrums

January 9, 2012 by

As many of you know, we had a bit of a rough December. First we moved (yay!) but then our tempering machine broke, Alice’s apartment caught on fire, and Cam had to leave for a family medical emergency. All of this of course happened during the holiday chocolate rush, leaving us with many late nights at the chocolate factory. I’m happy to report that Alice found a new place to live, Cam’s family is all ok, and our temperer is fixed — so we are back to making chocolate!

Since everyone’s been asking about the problems with the machine, here’s the quick synopsis:

The fat in chocolate, cocoa butter, is polymorphic — meaning that it can set in a few different forms based on the way the crystals in the chocolate are arranged. Only one of those forms is the one we want because the chocolate will have a nice shine, snap when broken, and won’t turn whitish and gritty while on the shelf. Tempering is the process of heating, cooling, and agitating the chocolate in a very specific way to get this proper crystal structure. You can do this with a marble slab and thermometer, but luckily we have a machine that greatly speeds up the process:

Before the move, we had noticed a slight noise coming from the temperer while the pump motor was on, but it didn’t seem to affect our ability to get good bars. After the move, the motor noise was so loud you could hear the temperer down the hall, and sadly, the temperer would often seize up and we’d wait a few hours to get the chocolate melted and flowing again before starting over. This meant that we might be able to temper a few bars at at time, but then inevitably the machine would seize and then we would try again a few hours later.

We called the US distributor, Tomric, and Sean was incredibly responsive and sent us a new motor within a few days. We promptly took apart the machine and went to install the new motor. Unfortunately, we discovered that the replacement motor was for three phase power whereas our machine is configured for single phase. We called again and found out that the correct motor needed to be shipped from Italy.

Amazingly, a few days later, a new motor and gearbox arrived at our door, straight from Italy:

I can’t express how happy we were to see this new motor. I was ready with a new blog post; I had already thought up a good title (“Hallelujah! Christmas came early”). Again, we took apart the machine, put in the motor, and this time we were able to wire it up:

And… the noise was fixed, it tempered better, but sadly — it was not enough: the machine still seized up and left us without chocolate. At this point, we decided we needed to fulfill our orders, with machine or not. We spent the next few weeks working super early mornings, crazy late nights, and a few all-nighters to eek out just enough to fulfill what we could. Cam got so good at predicting when the machine would seize that we nicknamed him the “temperer whisperer.”

Post-holidays, we took a step back and tried to debug the machine. Given what we knew about the motors, it felt like the machine was fine but there must be something wrong with our power. We called our favorite electrician, Arnold, who brought along his brilliant son, Anthony, to look at our machine. After a few hours of measuring voltages component-by-component, they confirmed our suspicion.

The issue was that the machine has an operating range of 220-240v and our outlet was only supplying 204v. Worse, under load, the volts dropped down to around 200v. As our chocolate has no emulsifiers and is thicker than most, we needed the full power, closer to 240v, which is what we had at our previous location. So the machine was getting a full 40v less than ideal. We thought that maybe it was a faulty wire, but it turns out our space itself had bad power. Luckily Arnold installed a small step-up transformer and now we are back in business! Many thanks to everyone, especially our wholesale customers, for their patience and support.

Madagascar: The Farm, part 2 (drying)

December 9, 2011 by

Just a reminder, we won’t be at this week’s Noe Valley Farmer’s Market due to some machine issues.

After spending most of the day looking at the trees, pods, and harvesting, we spent the last part of the afternoon looking at the bean drying process. After the beans have been fermented (we were too late to see that part this day, but we’ll cover it in another post), they have to be dried. Bean genetics, fermentation, and the environment where the beans are grown play a large part in determining the flavor. Drying can’t be ignored, though, as it also has a big impact on the final flavor. Here are some beans drying on the concrete on their first day post-fermentation:

To make sure the beans are spread out evenly and don’t clump up, the workers draw coarse rakes over the beans:

As Bertil explained, the first part of drying is to stop fermentation of the beans. Since fermentation generally takes place between 47 C and 52 C, you can either cool the beans down (e.g. by washing them) or heat them up (e.g. by putting them on hot concrete). Concrete works well because it’s hot (but not too hot) and it’s less likely to stick to the still wet beans. Usually, after a day or maybe  two of limited drying on concrete, the beans are moved to the mobile wooden drying beds:

The other part of drying is, not surprisingly, letting moisture, both water and acetic acid, out of the bean. How much acid you let out has a big impact on the flavor, with some makers preferring a more acidic taste and others preferring a more mellow flavor. You can control how much acid stays in the bean by varying how long the beans are left in the sun. Counterintuitively, the longer the beans are left in the sun, especially early on, the more acid stays in the bean. This happens because the outer shell of the bean dries first which then prevents any more acid from escaping. By getting the beans out of the sun sooner, the outer shell stays wet and the insides can keep drying. The great thing about visiting the farm and working with the farmer directly is that we can provide input on the drying process in order to get the flavor we want!

Once the beans have been out in the sun long enough for the desired flavor, they’re gathered up and moved inside, where they’ll rest (and continue to dry) until they’re moved back outside the next day:

It depends on the weather, but drying often takes about a total of seven days.

Since all of the other pictures in this post are mostly brown, here’s a picture of the delicious mango (from the tree outside Ivan’s house) I had for breakfast:

When not to buy beans…

November 12, 2011 by

We’ve been churning through our supply of cacao and we’re almost out of a few of our origins. That, by itself, isn’t a problem as we always like trying new beans and looking for great flavors. While looking for beans, we got a sample of beans from Ghana. We roasted them up, put them in our sample molds, and tasted them. They were delicious and aromatic, with flavors like clove and cinnamon that reminded us of a Christmas cookie.

We called the broker who sent us the sample to ask him some questions about the beans and where they came from. Unfortunately, the more we learned the more concerns we had about them. They are “conventional” (no certifications) which can be ok if you know how the beans are grown. The big problem, though, is that the beans aren’t traceable beyond the Ghana Cocoa Board. The Cocobod, as it’s called, fixes the price for most cacao produced by Ghana, in theory to protect the farmers from volatile prices. This creates a couple of a challenges though. First, there’s nothing to stop the Cocobod from setting the price arbitrarily low and keeping the difference between the world market price and the artificially low price for themselves. In fact, that’s happened numerous times in the Cocobod’s 50+ year history. Even if prices are set fairly, there’s no way to trace the cacao after it’s been sold by the Cocobod, making it impossible to set up direct trade with the farmer in the future. Even worse, there’s no way to verify the cacao has been grown without child or slave labor.

With all of this information, we had to make a decision: buy great beans with potentially questionable backgrounds or pass on them and find something else with great flavor. It’s often challenging to make this decision when you have something tasty in your hand. But, as we discussed it, we knew we couldn’t buy these beans in good conscience. This doesn’t mean that Ghana doesn’t have some great cacao or that it’s not possible for people to buy it responsibly. However, there wasn’t a way for us to responsibly buy this cacao given the size of our orders and the sources we have access to at the moment.

So, the search for great cacao continues… and to that end, Alice and I are off to Madagascar!

Roaster Surgery

October 13, 2011 by

We do all of our sample/test roasting in a little Behmor 1600  (and we do a loooot of test roasts):

During a roast yesterday, however, it started spewing out gray smoke. I wish I’d snapped a picture of it but we were busy unplugging it and grabbing a fire extinguisher. After the smoke cleared, we needed to do some quick roaster surgery or we’d have a serious kink in our testing pipeline. You can see all of the roaster guts below:

We figured out pretty quickly that one of the fan motors had burned out but the rest of it was fine. Here’s the failed component:

We replaced the part and Todd and Alice made short work of putting it all back together:

After that, we did a few tests and then we were back in business!

Before & After

August 28, 2011 by

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 smooth and delicious.

Last Call for Madagascar

August 17, 2011 by

We’re down to our last 100 bars of Madagascar. We’ll have a few for sale at this Thursday’s Mission Community Market, but we will probably run out soon thereafter.  For a little while, you may be able to find some at nearby retail locations, including Fog City News where Adam has placed an order for our final supply.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the response from this bar. It’s fruity flavor is undeniable — maybe even overwhelming. At farmer’s markets, we watch for people’s eyes to bulge when the first fruity notes kick in. We’ve had people come up to us and buy every Madagascar bar on hand. At last week’s market, a woman approached us an hour before the market opened, even before we had unpacked our tent, to ask if we had any Madagascar.  We rummaged through our unpacked boxes to locate a bar for her.  Before we could even count her change, she had ripped open the wrapper and downed half the bar. It’s moments like these that make us really happy to be in the chocolate business.

Since this bar has been so popular, you may be wondering why we are discontinuing it. The answer is that our approach to making chocolate is a quite a bit different than most large chocolate makers. There can be a lot of variability between each bag of beans but for a large chocolate maker, variability is the enemy. Instead, they’re focused on flavor consistency and cost control. Every Hershey’s bar tastes the same and in some ways that’s great — it’s a sort of miracle of industrialization. However, to achieve consistency, it means you need a large supply of relatively similar beans that you roast heavily (and, in our opinion, over roast) to reduce individual flavor differences and add additional ingredients that cover up or soften whatever flavor is left (e.g. vanilla, cocoa butter, or worse).

We take the opposite approach — each bag of beans is different and we like to find the highest quality beans we can and then get out of the way. Rather than stamp out the individual flavors for the sake of consistency, we like to let the individual nuances shine through, unadulterated by additional ingredients other than pure cane sugar. We roast the beans as minimally as possible, trying to find the strongest and most interesting flavors that characterize the cacao bean’s individual personality.

For each bag of beans, including bags from the same farm as our last batch, we run a battery of taste tests — usually 2-3 rounds involving 3-4 batches each — until we are sure we’ve found the best flavor out of that bag. And after all of that work, usually about two weeks, if we are not 100% thrilled with what we’ve made and proud to put our name on it, we won’t bring it to market, even if it means eating the cost of that bag of beans. For anyone who’s optimizing cost, efficiency, or consistency, this approach is nuts — but it ensures that we always have something we are proud of.

This means each batch is essentially limited-edition — the flavors change with the season, the harvest, and the fermentation. So while this Summer 2011 Madagascar is coming to an end, fear not, as we have 5 new bags of new Madagascar on the way that we are looking forward to bringing out sometime next month. The early samples exhibit some of that same great fruit flavor and we are excited to bring it out for you all to try.

New first stage grinder

August 15, 2011 by

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 first stage grinder to a new one. The old one would occasionally seize on nibs with less fat (like our Costa Rican) so we had to feed it a scoop at a time. With the new one, though, we can fill the hopper and it’ll crank through everything. It came configured with an 24 second auto-shutoff but after opening it up and changing a few dip switches, we were all set.