»Salim and the chocolate factory
Last week, I went on an field trip to Vere Goods. Their factory occupies a single floor of a narrow industrial building crowded along a nondescript street of import/export shops at the southern edge of the garment district. Vere chocolate, which takes its name from the Latin for "true", specializes in hand-made chocolate candy from single-origin cacao beans.
We gathered around a large table in the kitchen area, and tried our hand at dipping chocolate pieces into ganache, making truffles. The ganache is a mixture of cocoa solids and butter, and pours out of a special machine at a tightly-controlled temperature (today, 30º). We filled wide metal mixing bowls with the ganache, and used metal dipping forks to place square, rectangular, and spherical chocolate pieces into the ganache. We could then dress the pieces with toppings such as chopped dried figs, freeze-dried raspberry (a powder), poppy seeds. We also had the more mundane ingredients, such as cocoa powder, espresso bits, and so forth. We used the forks to etch small patterns, usually geometric, into the cooling ganache; to arrange the pieces into other shapes, by placing a pecan atop the candy for example; and we kept the ganache bowls fluid by stirring them slowly.
After we had made a large tray each (I am happy to say that I pioneered the tasting of pieces along the way, with the reasoning that "I need to know how these taste if I am to make proper chocolates!", so my tray was thus slightly less-populous than others'), we placed them in a cooling rack in order that the ganache might set.
We then filled pastry bags with ganache and began making lollipops -- and other shapes. We squeezed out the ganache onto wax paper, making not only round but various other shapes; we squeezed melted chocolate onto special sheets of paper that had patterns made of cocoa butter, which transferred to the cooling chocolate.
The chocolate was delicious, with a very strong and distinctive taste of cocoa. The taste was unlike any other chocolate I have tasted, and strongly showed the single-origin bean, much as a varietal coffee or wine reflects a characteristic flavour.
At the end of the chocolate-making we packaged our candies (very low in sugar; with at least 75% cacao in the chocolate, and only crystallized cane sugar, the chocolates are definitely not "sweet") into boxes and cellophane bags. We also each had a sheet of chilled chocolate to take home, should we want to temper it and re-use it.
I learned a lot about chocolate-making, but, more importantly, had a good time. Previously I have visited chocolatiers in Bareclona, Paris, and San Francisco, and this was by far the most exciting (perhaps because I got my hands dirty!) and the most intriguing.
