I have loved chocolate for as long as I can remember, but it wasn't until I saw an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History in New York that I appreciated the complexity of its production. Although the Mayans and Aztecs cultivated the cacao bean, it took a thousand years of tinkering to evolve chocolate as we know it today, a food product that is as complex as wine to produce. The cacao beans must be harvested, fermented, dried, ground, mixed with sugar, and conched, tempered, and molded into its final form. At each step in the process there are decisions to be made about ingredients, temperature, moisture, and timing - all of which determine the flavor and texture of the final product.
Recently, entrepreneurs Timothy Childs and Louis Rossetto (photo at right) decided the time was right to rethink the process from the beginning, from the way they work with growers to building a chocolate factory on Pier 17 in San Francisco. I got a tour of the facility from Louis last week when I was in town for the
Web 2.0 Summit. We started with the laboratory, where they can experiment with different time/temperature profiles for roasting and make small batches of chocolate. They've come up with an innovatovative
flavor wheel concept and unltimately plan to make six different flavors. My favorite so far is "chocolately" but my friends and family are evenly distributed in their preferences.
The high point of the tour (other than tasting the chocolate) was the recently certified production floor where I saw their first 2.5 ton of chocolate going through a newly designed conching machine. The facility is all stainless steel, with the pipes encased in hot water jackets to keep the chocolate molten as it moves through the process.
The result needs to be tasted to be believed. You can purchase the chocolate online at the
TCHO web site, or at their new retail store on Pier 17.
There are more photos
here.
