The Great San Francisco Adventure Part 2

Today we went to the absolutely enormous factory of Dandelion Chocolate, and I could never have imagined that someone could be so amazingly thorough with their chocolate process. There were all kinds of crazy machinery that I never could have imagined.

This is me and our tour guide, Nate. we are currently in the Bean Room, and there were so many cacao beans. Just to give you an idea, that red bin next to me was brimming with beans, and there were about twenty-five bins. And then there were just as many bags of beans, each about two times the volume. For those of you keeping score, that's 75 bins of beans. I just couldn't wrap my head around how someone could go through that many beans. There was a sorter that vibrated like heck, and all of the heavier things like rocks and unidentified other things that weren't cocoa beans to the other side of the machine, while the beans dropped through a chute on the other side. Then all of those beans went through an optical sorter that determined the good beans from the bad beans. Nate told us that they did this by taking pictures of good and bad beans and then running those picture through the sorter.

Here we are at the roaster. Nate is showing me how they calculate the perfect roasting time for each bean. He also told me that roasting brings out 60% of the flavor in a bean. The other 40% comes from fermenting. after the beans were roasted, they dropped into a chute that took them to a connected winnower. Winnowing is the process of removing the husk from the nib. All the husk does to the finished chocolate is add viscosity. The nib, however, is the actual chocolate. There are several methods of this. The most common one is to blow air over the mix of crushed nibs and husks so that the lighter husk separates from the heavier nib.

Here is the gigantic refiner. Metal balls bounce around and smooth down the chocolate further. Also, chocolate slowly pours in, and covers the whole inside of the machine in warm melted chocolate.

Here we are at the melanger. A melanger's purpose is to smooth down the chocolate further and also eradicate more intense flavors. A melanger has two stone wheels that spin while the bowl in which the chocolate is in spins in the opposite direction. Eradicating flavors is called conching, and smoothing down the chocolate is called refining. The melanger does both, and there are also machines that do each separately.

This huge thing is basically a mondo storage tank of chocolate. It slowly sends chocolate to another tank in the tempering area.

After all of that, the chocolate is sent to temper. Tempering is when the chocolate fat molecule crystallize in just the right way so that the chocolate gains it's signature shine. there are six different ways for the chocolate to temper, and two of them are right. If it tempers unsuccessfully, then you simply melt it down and try again. that molten chocolate it then pumped into molds, then cooled while still in the molds, then popped out as fully formed bars.

Thank you to my mentor Marc, co-founder of andSons Chocolate, and Norah, of Dandelion Chocolate for arranging this spellbinding tour, and Nate for being the most awesome tour guide I could ever ask for.