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The 2nd San Francisco Adventure: Part I

  • Writer: Serena
    Serena
  • May 13
  • 5 min read

Updated: Jun 3

A few weeks ago, I visited San Francisco. I had been a few weeks prior for a family event, but I find it quite difficult to make San Francisco boring. Over the course of this post and the next two, I will illustrate three notable events. The first is a tour, the second is a tasting, and the third is a conference.

We took a Waymo (as is the standard in SF) to the Dandelion factory and cafe, where we met up with my good friend Snooky, whom you may remember from the UnConferences. We went to brunch and then walked back to the factory for a second tour. Snooky claimed this tour would be far more in-depth and technical, and he was absolutely correct.

The first place we started was the bean room, where I learned a bit about how Dandelion sources its beans (I had some prior knowledge of the subject due to my perusing of Dandelion's excellent book, Making Chocolate). I asked a few questions about the visual sorter, and I was shocked to see how closely the process of sorting beans visually was similar to a technique I had been reading about in some of my math books, namely Fermat's Enigma, called reducto ad absurdium, or proof by contradiction, in which one assumes a statement is true and then proves that the statement is false because if it were true, the consequences would be absurd; the visual sorter first took pictures of "bad" beans and then filtered out all of the beans that did not bear resemblance to those beans, thereby leaving only the "bad beans".

Snooky demonstrated how the beans would then be funneled directly into their roaster and then into their cracker, and then their winnower. This whole process was essentially automatized, with the exception of the roaster, which had to be manually adjusted. Beans from different regions are larger or smaller, have higher or lower fat content, or develop flavor faster or slower. All these factors contribute to the roasting time and temperature, as I have highlighted before. This means roasting is mostly trial and error, a process that I struggle to understand, as I am a firm believer in the mathematical method, in spite of all the chemistry and science at work as the flavor molecules change from volatile aroma compounds to pleasant aroma compounds.

After the cracking and winnowing came the pre-refining, and Dandelion uses several massive melangers, machines that I've thoroughly covered in past posts. In a nutshell, they're steel basins with two stone wheels that spin, just barely off from the base. This both refines and conches, as most refining machines are enclosed, whereas the melanger is open-air, allowing unwanted intensely pungent odors to escape. As one of Dandelion's books, Making Chocolate, puts it, "No machine can perfectly refine and conch at the same time, but the melanger is a pretty good body double".

The refining machines, the ball refiners, were in a special soundproofed room, because, as you may have surmised, it was incredibly loud. Snooky showed me just how loud by activating one, and I can safely say it was louder than the time I went to a NASCAR race and forgot earplugs, and that was maybe 370 decibels. For comparison, the sound of an average jet taking off is 230. But they were efficient.

For conching, Snooky showed me how the refined chocolate was funneled back into the room with the roaster, cracker, winnower, and pre-refiners, and into massive basins that could probably hold about 500 kilos of chocolate. They had lids, which were usually off, and there were two stirrers that kept the chocolate in circulation, which is really all one needs to conch.

The tempering machines I had already seen and have provided an ample description of in previous posts, so Snooky mainly focused on the barring machine, a massive assembly-line type thing. The first stage was, of course, putting the tempered chocolate into the molds. The molds were then shaken around to evenly distribute the chocolate and eliminate any air bubbles that remained, and then they were put onto a system of cooling racks that varied in temperature. The bars, having solidified, were then popped out of the molds in a process that Snooky claimed was his favorite in the factory. The molds were pressed from the bottom on both sides with a fraction of a second between them, to pop out the bar, which was then transferred onto a tray for transport to the wrapping room.

The wrapping room featured just one machine, but it was quite complicated. From above, I suppose it would look like a T, with the bars going into the upper right. The paper was on the long side, and the gold foil was on the upper left. The machine would do something that we did not get to see, but I can assume it was faster than wrapping by hand. I suspect it would involve quite a few moving parts, or else the bar was moved around in such a way that the natural creases of the machine would fold it perfectly.

We came out of the wrapping room and walked to a few large vats that were just more storage for liquid chocolate. This can give you an idea of just how much chocolate is produced. I estimate all of the storage for chocolate, combined, could hold maybe 2000 kilos of chocolate. And of course, all of that chocolate had gone through many rigorous processes that involved trial and error, waiting, skill, technique, and a steady hand. But for now, it was time for a tasting, which will be thoroughly covered quite soon.


This is Snooky and I, as well as my grandfather, who has assisted me massively throughout my entire journey (and I have no doubt he will continue to do so) at brunch. Snooky said he knew of several places, and he was quite right.





This is Snooky explaining to me how the chocolate is piped through the storage tanks and into the rest of the system. These storage tanks can also conch, as you can simply take the lid off and turn on the stirring. There's a valve that opens and releases all 500 kilos of chocolate into the tempering machine, which is around the corner. If you follow the pipe with your eyes, turn right, and then forward, you'll eventually find the rest of the setup, which is the tempering and barring machines.





This is Snooky demonstrating just how loud the ball refiner is. My main question with the ball refiner is "How on earth would you effectively clean thousands of chocolate-coated ball bearings?" And the answer is: You don't. The keyword in that question was "effectively"; there's no good way to thoroughly and efficiently clean a ball mill.









This is the wrapping machine, and the blue conveyor belt has no paper on it, due to the fact that no batches are currently being made at the time of my visit, therefore the machine has virtually no use. When I first toured the factory, there was a batch in progress, which allowed me to see all of the machines in action. This visit, I got a deeper understanding of both the machines' function and why everything is placed and connected as they are.

 
 
 

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