♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ [bell ringing] Pam Halstead: Oh, this looks so good.

What should I get?

female: I have this chocolate from Brazil you might like.

Pam: Oh wow, that looks great!

Thank you.

female: Thank you.

You enjoy.

Pam: Oh, I will.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ male: You found the last golden ticket!

Quick, run to the factory and don't stop until you get there!

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pam: I found the golden ticket!

I found the golden ticket!

Adam Dick: Congratulations, Pam!

You won the free tour!

The tour starts right now.

Are you ready?

Pam: I sure am!

Let's go!

Pam, Adam, and Dustin Taylor: You're watching Field Trip!

Pam: Ooh, that kinda goes right up your nostrils.

Adam: But it really is tailored almost perfectly to be consumed by humans.

Pam: Wow, um!

Oh Gosh, it's so good.

Adam: Welcome to kind of our back warehouse here at Dick-Taylor.

This is kinda where we receive all of our ingredients.

You see we have cocoa beans all around, and we also do all of our order fulfillment here, so that's kind of where we're located in the building.

Do you have any idea where cacao comes from geographically?

Like if we were gonna distill it down, what would you say?

Pam: I would say somewhere tropical maybe--tropical.

Adam: Tropical, yeah.

Tropical's good.

Generally speaking, from about 20, 21 degrees north and south latitude, so from the Tropic of Capricorn up to about the Tropic of Cancer.

Pam: And so it grows as a tree or a bush or-- Adam: It grows as a tree.

So the tree is called Threobroma Cacao.

That's the Latin name of the tree.

Pam: Oh, sweet.

Adam: And what's interesting is you'll see these pods which are kinda like the shape of a, you know, like small football.

This fruit grows off of the trunk.

So, we think of fruit as growing out at the end of the branch when you think of an apple and an orange.

Pam: Oh, yes.

Adam: The cacao fruit grows off the trunk and it's called a cauliflorous fruiting pattern.

Inside here is this white kind of sugary pulp called mucilage, and this is surrounding all the seeds.

But the interesting thing is at this stage if you were to bite into one of those seeds, there is no chocolate flavor in it at all.

And so we have to get some chocolate flavor into those.

Do you have any idea how we would do that?

Pam: Well, I'm pretty sure you heat them up, or-- Adam: Not yet.

Pam: Not yet?

You don't do that yet.

Okay, so you take them out, you separate them from the mucilage, and then you--oh, I don't know, tell me.

Adam: We ferment them.

Pam: You ferment them.

Pam: Oh, that's so cool.

Adam: Yeah, so it's really interesting.

People don't think of chocolate as being a fermented food but the fermentation is absolutely critical to developing all that chocolate flavor.

Then what we need to do is dry them, and the drying does a couple things.

One is it stops the fermentation.

If you just let them continue to ferment, then they mold and rot, then it's just gross.

But if you can dry them, you'll stop the fermentation and you'll also reduce acidity in the beans and you're reducing moisture content so that they don't mold when they're being shipped.

And they look, they come to us-- Pam: Looks like we have a bag here.

Adam: Export comin' in.

Pam: Oh, nice.

Adam: Dustin walked this bag all the way from Brazil.

He just got back.

Pam: You're amazing!

Oh, my goodness!

Adam: Months and months of walking with the hand truck, and here he is.

Pam: That is one full bag.

A full bag.

Dustin: We'll see what we see inside this thing.

Adam: A lotta times they'll kind of come in a little liner bag and then we have, that's what the cocoa beans look like.

Pam: So these are fermented and dried.

Dustin: You can kinda smell 'em there.

Adam: Stick your nose in there.

You'll smell kinda like that fruity-- Pam: Wow.

Okay--oo, woo!

That kinda goes right up your nostrils!

It's like a little alcohol maybe-ish, you know?

Adam: And then what, sometimes it's the acetic acid or the vinegar left over left over from the fermentation.

Pam: Oh, of course, the vinegar.

The vinegar.

That's it, that's it.

Adam: Yeah, acetic acid from the bacterial fermentation.

Pam: 'Cause that's what it felt like.

Adam: If you look at the bean, if we kind of roll it between our fingers here, you can do one too if you'd like.

Pam: Yes, I would love to.

Adam: But you'll see that-- Pam: Goodness!

It requires strength!

Adam: It's a little tricky.

Pam: I don't have it!

Pam: Okay.

I'm ready, you're ready.

I'll look at what you have.

Adam: Okay, oo what we have here is I've got the shell for this cocoa bean or the seed, as it technically would be, we have the shell which is a papery thin husk.

This we'll use for garden mulch.

Pam: Oh yes, yes.

Adam: And then this is what we call the "nib."

"Cocoa nib."

This is where the magic happens.

Pam: This is the chocolate, going to be, going to become.

Adam: And you can taste it if you want.

This is raw.

Yeah, it hasn't been processed yet.

Pam: Oh my goodness.

Adam: You can taste it raw.

Pam: Mm, well, it's okay.

Ha ha!

Adam: It needs somethin', doesn't it?

Pam: It does need something.

Yeah, just get me a little sugar.

Adam: It needs a lotta work.

So now what we need to do is start down the processing train of getting all this stuff ready to be made into chocolate.

So the beans all get sorted for quality, and then we're off to kind of our first real, like, chocolate making step which is called "roasting."

Pam: Oh boy.

male: Field Trip Trivia female announcer: Fermentation is when bacteria converts sugar into what?

Is it a. carbohydrates, b. proteins, or c. alcohol?

♪♪♪ The answer is C: alcohol.

♪♪♪ Adam: This is our roasting room.

This is where we kind of do the early stages of processing.

Pam: It smells good!

Adam: Yeah, that's what happens when you roast.

It kinda smells like brownies and stuff.

By roasting them, we're gonna reduce kinda some of those more acidic or the harsh kind of raw flavors and we're gonna bring up that roasted, nutty, cocoa base-note.

Pam: Mm-hm.

Adam: So roasting's really important.

It allows us as a chocolate maker to kind of put our signature on that finished bar.

This is what the beans look like after they've been roasted.

We have to remove the shell from all of that, and the easiest way for us to do that is to actually crack it all, crack all the beans up with the shell on into small pieces, and they do that over here.

This is a pretty simple kind of a cracker machine, and basically, when you look inside here, you can see we've got all that nib that I talked about, but there's also a lotta husk and there's a lotta dust, there's a lot.

So what we need to do is we need to separate all these component parts out of it.

Pam: Could you separate them by weight?

Adam: We separate them by size.

Pam: Size.

Adam: Size, in a step called "classification."

When you separate things into different sizes, you classify them in the different sizes.

This machine is called our winnower, and just like when you winnow the chaff away from the wheat, we're using air flow to suck that lighter paper-thin shell off of the more dense nib.

The nib is, you know, more dense and the shell is very light.

And we can do it really well if we separate them into particle sizes, so inside here there's a whole bunch of different screens and the screens allow us to separate them into like-size.

And then they come down into these tubes here, where the vacuum sucks the shell off 'em.

Now what we'll do is we're gonna pour some of this in here, and you'll see it's gonna start to filter through.

Pam: Yes.

Adam: And as it cascades through these different layers of screen-- Pam: It's shaking Adam: It's shaking, yeah.

And so it's separating them.

And then if you look over here, what we're collecting is-- Pam: Bigger bits.

Adam: Yeah, bigger bits of nice roasted nibs, no husk.

Nice, clean winnowed nib here.

Really uniform particle sizes.

Pam: Oh, yeah.

Adam: And then we go over to the other side over here.

Over here, bigger pieces.

Pam: Those are big nibs.

Adam: But also, no husk in there.

So we're removing the husk and we're collecting the nib.

So this thing kind of just keeps screening and so we'll collect a whole bunch of this nib here, and now that the shell's been removed, we're ready to make it into chocolate.

Pam: Great.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Adam: Well, Pam, here we have our bucket of cocoa nibs that have been winnowed and roasted that we brought over from the roasting room.

And now we're ready to make 'em into chocolate, so there we go.

Now, one thing that's really interesting about cocoa nibs, and this is something that's really important.

If you take one thing away from the tour, really remember this: The nibs themselves are made up of almost 50% cocoa butter.

So when you look in there, half of that is vegetable fat.

Pam: Wow!

Adam: Yeah.

Adam: The other half is the fibrous plant material that we call the cocoa solids.

That's where the flavor and the, you know, the theobromine and a little bit of caffeine, the stuff that makes you feel so good when you eat chocolate.

But the cocoa butter is the flavor delivery system in the chocolate bar.

It's what melts in your mouth.

Yeah, it brings all of those solids and all the sugar, coats all your palate.

That's what makes it feel so good in your mouth, is that cocoa butter.

But what's amazing about cocoa butter is that it's the only vegetable fat that melts just slightly below the human body temperature.

If the melt point of the cocoa butter was slightly lower, just even a little bit, you'd have something like coconut oil.

Can you imagine a chocolate bar made of coconut oil?

It would melt in your hand before you could get it into your mouth.

Pam: Absolutely.

So, it's gonna stay soft.

Adam: Right, but if the melt point was just slightly higher, you'd put it in your mouth and you would chew and chew and chew and chew and chew and you would never get that sensation of the melting.

So whether we were, you know, made to eat chocolate or chocolate was made to be eaten by us, I don't know which side of the argument you fall on-- But it really is tailored almost perfectly to be consumed by humans.

male: Field Trip Trivia female announcer: Cocoa butter is one of the main ingredients in a chocolate bar!

Do you know what other products contain cocoa butter?

Is it a. skin cream, b. toothpaste, or c. shampoo?

♪♪♪ The answer is all of the above.

♪♪♪ Adam: So what we need to do now is we need to grind this down into something smooth enough, fine enough, silky enough that we're gonna call it chocolate.

'Cause right now, it doesn't quite look like that.

Pam: And I put one in my mouth and that-- That was kinda hard.

Adam: Yeah.

Right.

So the first step in kind of our processing here is we're gonna grind all this into a paste that's called liquor.

So we're gonna carry this heavy thing here-- Pam: Ha ha!

I'm glad it's you, I'm glad it's you.

Adam: We'll put the nibs in there and they'll fall down into this little grinding area right here into this machine.

So, what comes out here, while it's a liquid, it's still fairly coarse.

So we need to really, really fine grind it, is the next step in the process.

And we actually have some chocolate, or some liquor, coming out of the-- Pam: Oh my gosh, it is!

Adam: It is.

We have a little cascade but this allows the liquor to be really smooth, and then the next step in the process is gonna be to add a little sugar in there to sweeten it up so that we can get closer to something that we like to call chocolate.

At this tank here, we're starting to build this up with a really specific amount of liquor.

We weigh every little bit as it goes in here because right at this point is where we're starting to develop our recipes.

And we're gonna start to mix things at just the right ratio to get to what we're hoping to achieve in the end.

So in this tank, we'll put the liquor in there, we'll put a specific amount of sugar in there.

Now for the first time, it's sweet again.

Pam: Yay for that!

Adam: But when we put the sugar in there, it's gonna get chunky 'cause the sugar's crystalline.

So then what we have to do is completely refine it again through an entirely different machine.

But before we do that, we really wanna make sure that we've hit our recipes right.

So, in this tank we've got 350 pounds of the cocoa liquor that we just ground, and we're hoping to make a 72% chocolate bar.

Pam: All right.

Adam: So we've gotta figure out, if I've got 350 pounds of liquor and that's the 72% portion of the bar, the rest of that is just made up of sugar.

So I need to know, how many pounds of sugar do we have to add to get up to that finished 72% for a chocolate bar?

Pam: That's a good question.

That sounds like a job for Number Woman!

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Number Woman: Thanks Pam.

Let's figure out how much sugar these bars need.

So, we know that we have 72% of the chocolate bar, so we'll just do approximately 72%.

Draw a chocolate bar.

72% we know is chocolate.

So we'll start with that, and what we need to figure out is this question mark--how much sugar do we need?

So what we do is we take our 350 pounds of chocolate that we know; that's this 350 pounds, right, of that 72%, and we're gonna set it equal to 72%.

And 72% is .72, because .72 is per-cent, per penny, so 7200ths, and then that's times the entire bar.

But when we do it times the entire bar, what we're doing is we're multiplying, and the inverse of multiply is divide.

So we're gonna divide both sides by .72 to have the property of equality and balance it.

So we know that .72 divided by .72 is 1, which is the multiplicative identity, and then we'll use a calculator and do 350 divided by 0.72 is about a total of 486 pounds for all of the chocolate bars, right?

So if we know we have 486 pounds for the whole thing, and then we know we can subtract 350 pounds as we see over here for the 72%, and what we get is about 136 pounds of sugar so that extra part over here of the bar, that 28% to get to a hundred percent total, is gonna be about 136 pounds of sugar.

And then that will make a 72% chocolate chocolate bar.

And back to you, Pam.

Pam and Adam: Thanks, Number Woman!

Adam: As we talked about here, we get the sugar all mixed into our specific ratios, but the sugar is chunky again, so what we have to do is refine that whole mixture that comes outta here, and we do that at this machine called the roll refiner.

This is kind of a complicated machine, but what it allows us to do is very precisely grind the sugar down to that 18 microns as well.

And then the last step is called "conching."

♪♪♪ Adam: This is our Carle & Montanari R4 Rotary Conch.

One of the most critical steps in the entire process is conching.

Just as roasting was our first chance to impact the flavor of the finished chocolate bar, this is really our last chance to put that, like, final seal of approval on the bar.

There's about 880 pounds of chocolate in here right now.

Pam: 880 pounds!

Wow!

Adam: Yeah, it's full.

There's a lotta chocolate in there.

Pam: Oh, my God, yeah.

He compared, right.

Adam: Yeah, and this process, it takes us 48 hours to conch each batch of chocolate.

This machine will run continuously for 48 hours.

Pam: Wow.

Adam: It's pretty full, so there's not a lot to see, but you can see there's a lotta chocolate swirling around in there, and there's these kind of conical stones that are smearing almost like you smear butter, and so it's just really breaking down any chunks, any particles that are stuck together, and it's just ensuring that it's all gonna be really, really silky and smooth.

Pam: And it feels like you're controlling the temperature as well.

Adam: Yeah, temperature is very adept.

Pam: Yeah, feels warm.

Adam: We control the rotational speed, length of time, and the temperature also is really, really important.

So when we're gone with that conching process that takes 48 hours, we'll empty the machine out and we'll put 'em into molds that form them into blocks like this.

Pam: This is a huge chocolate bar!

Adam: This is 23 pounds of chocolate.

You think you can bite off the corner of that?

Anyway, this has been fully conched, the texture's great, flavor's great, aroma's great, but it doesn't quite look right.

Pam: It doesn't, no.

Adam: No, this looks like when you left the chocolate bar on the dash of your car, and you come out the next morning and you're like, "Oh no, my chocolate bar's ruined."

So what we need to do now is remelt these and make 'em into chocolate bars, and we do that in the room across the hall.

Pam: Wow, let's go check it out.

Adam: All right.

Adam: Well, Pam, welcome to the molding room.

Pam: Why, thank you.

Adam: So, where we left off in the other room, we had the big block of chocolate that looked like you'd left it on the dash of your car.

Pam: Yes.

Adam: And it got a little funky lookin', and so what we do in this room is we make it look good again.

So now, we have to get all of the chocolate to crystallize around one distinct form, so we do that through a process called tempering, and Dustin is already set up to show us how to do that.

Pam: Excellent.

Dustin: Hi, welcome.

Pam: Yeah, hi Dustin.

Dustin: Hi, so, like Adam explained, we have to heat and cool the chocolate much like tempering metal.

You know, we have to align that crystalline structure of the cocoa butter inside the chocolate.

Pam: Whoa, time out!

Crystalline structure?

Tempering?

Let's go over these terms.

Tempering means to improve the hardness of a material by heating and cooling it.

You might have heard of tempered steel when talking about sword making.

It's the same thing, except we're talking about chocolate.

There are three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.

But in between the states there are substates.

When turning from a liquid to a solid, some substances have a state known as liquid crystal, named for the fact that tiny crystals form in the liquid as it cools, also known as crystalline structures.

In the case of chocolate, the cocoa butter forms these crystals.

There are six phases of crystals in cocoa butter, and you will get a different phase depending on what temperature you cool it to.

Phase 6 takes so long to form we'll just ignore it for now.

For chocolate makers, Phase 5 is the best.

Beginning at a high temperature so that all the chocolate is in a liquid state, we first lower the temperature to 27 degrees Celsius, just cold enough to form Phase 4 and well below the melting point of Phase 5.

But then we heat it back up to 33 degrees to melt away Phase 4 and only leave Phase 5.

If we only cooled it to 33 degrees to begin with, it would take hours for these crystals to form.

By going lower and then back up, we speed up the process.

And that's called tempering.

Okay, back to the show.

Dustin: So you get a chocolate bar that has that nice mirror finish.

That gloss and the snap is really a complicated process a lot of people take for granted that your chocolate has that.

Pam: Absolutely.

Dustin: What else is interesting about chocolate is when it's untampered, the chocolate melts at a lower temperature point as well.

Pam: So you get it all over your hands.

Dustin: Yeah, you get it on your hand.

It melts at body temperature.

Where if you temper the chocolate, all of a sudden it melts at a higher temperature.

You can hold onto that chocolate a little bit longer, melts in your mouth, not in your hand.

So we have a lotta different methods to do that, but right now I'm gonna show you on our continuous tempering machine.

So this is an old solid tempering machine from Germany.

Pam: Oh, sweet.

Dustin: And this one does that whole process.

There's a heated tank in here, and then it's takin' out hot chocolate and cooling it as it continues doing the whole process.

So, then to turn it into chocolate bars, we need chocolate molds and that's what we've got right here.

This is chocolate mold.

Pam: Oh, sweet.

Dustin: You take this nice tempered chocolate like this, just kinda fill up that mold, fill up that mold, fill up that mold.

And then the chocolate's kinda stuck in there; I can either shake it around or I take it over here and this is just a vibratory table.

Pam: Oh my goodness!

Dustin: this is a paper jogger.

Dustin: It's not even a chocolate machine.

We kind of modified this paper jogger to vibrate that chocolate in there, get it into the corners of the mold.

Rock it around until it's nice and even and flat and you have it all in that space, and then we need to chill this chocolate.

So we have a walk-in refrigerator right over here.

We would take this chocolate bar, and so there's room.

We have these racks.

It'll take about 15 to 20 minutes for that chocolate to then harden up and drop out.

Remember hygiene is critical when making food.

Clean hands, clean food.

And so, once we start droppin' off the chocolate bars, they come out and this is about 2,000 chocolate bars on this rack alone.

And we'll peel this back and you can kinda see we put the layer of nice glossy chocolate bars.

Pam: Oh, I'm drooling!

They're beautiful.

Wow.

That's incredible.

And from a process that looks so messy to something that looks so beautiful and precise.

Dustin: Well it's very rewarding to be at this stage of it, form the start because now it starts coming to details of wrapping and making a fine looking chocolate bar.

How that mess comes out of there.

Pam: Oh, yummy.

Can I try one?

Dustin: Oh, of course.

This is peanut butter.

There you go.

Try that guy.

Pam: Oh, look at this.

So, it's beautiful and-- Okay, cool.

Dustin: See that snap of the chocolate?

Pam: Mm, oh my gosh, it's so good.

Mm.

Think I'll have another.

Dustin: Yeah, once you work in a chocolate factory, you eat a lotta chocolate.

Pam: Mm, what percent is this of chocolate?

Dustin: That's our 55% peanut butter.

So it's the same recipe as our milk chocolate bar, just with peanut powder instead of milk, so it's really, it's like a peanut butter cup chocolate bar that's so smooth and creamy and--yeah, yeah.

So now we've got all these great chocolate bars that we molded.

Now the next step is we need to wrap those chocolate bars and get 'em ready to go into everybody's hands.

Pam: All right.

Dustin: So, we'll do that right over in this room.

Pam: Excellent.

Dustin: So follow me.

Dustin: So now we have to wrap these chocolate bars, and the first step to that is the inner part of the wrapper.

Normally, we used to hand foil every chocolate bar.

Take a piece of foil, put a bar on there and fold it like for origami.

Pam: Yes.

Dustin: But in the last few years, we got a nice machine that helps us flow wrap and seal all this so they're airtight, keeps the chocolate more sealed, lasts longer, it's fresher.

So over here is this machine.

Pam: All right.

Dustin: This is our flow wrapper that wraps these chocolate bars, and you can see where we load in.

Our film comes through and it's aligned, and then these jaws here are heated, so that's our heat sealing into a tube, and as that chocolate bar goes through there, the heated jaws cut it.

So actually, would you like to try it?

We have Adam over here unloading the chocolate bars.

Adam: Slide in over here, Pam.

I'll put you to work.

Pam: They kind of stick a little tiny bit.

Adam: Yeah, you got, you'll develop your technique.

Good job.

There you go, keep goin'.

Pam, only two or three more hours.

Okay?

You're gonna be just fine.

Pam: Help me!

Adam: All right, see you later, Pam.

Pam: Yeah, thank you so much, Adam.

Oh no!

Don't do that!

Don't do that!

No, because it's not gonna work.

Okay, okay, wait.

They're gonna start building up.

They're building up, they're building up.

What if I start taking them from here.

Adam: They're building up on ya.

Pam: they're building up!

Help, help!

Okay, okay, okay, is that bad for the chocolate bar?

Yeah, probably, huh.

Oh no, it's going underneath.

Okay, cool.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Great.

Adam: This over here is where we do all the packaging and putting our bars in envelopes.

This is what we did prior.

We got our bar in an inner wrapper.

And it's nice and sealed, airtight, really preserving the aroma of that chocolate bar like the day we made it.

Now what we need to do is put 'em in our outer wrapper.

So these envelopes we have made for us in Denver, but they come to us blank like this.

So they do all the printing, the folding and gluing, and then we have a local business here called "Just My Type Letterpress" and she does the hand letter pressing of all--I'd say the colored portions on our bars also hand letter pressed, which is really kind of a cool touch.

So this right now, we're going our Brazil, Camboa, single origin, and we will just take the bars and just slide 'em in there again and again and again.

We've got a whole bunch of 'em.

And then when we've done that we end up with a whole box of them like this.

So now we've gotta put a sticker on the back, so we can pull one of these outta here like this.

Pam: Can I do the same?

Adam: Yep, and then we're gonna kind of pre-crease that down over there, making sure we get a nice fold, we're gonna grab ourselves a sticker, and then kind of using this little dotted line, the perforation-- Pam: Yes, dotted line.

Adam: We're just gonna line that up like that.

Pam: Okay.

Adam: Stick it down.

Pam: Oh my, what am I gonna stick.

Oh, well it's a little off.

Tiny bit.

Adam: It's okay.

Dustin does all the creative elements and kind of like that product design, the ideas behind how all this looks, and I oversee all the chocolate making, so it's gotta look good, but it's also, you want somebody to buy this bar thinking oh, this is so beautiful, it's gonna be great, and then they bite into the chocolate and they're not happy.

Dustin and I are always competing to see who can-- I gotta make it taste as good as he makes it look.

Pam: That's a challenge.

Pam: I've really appreciated this experience, you guys.

The flavors, the smells, the information, it's incredible.

Dustin: Oh, it was our pleasure.

Adam: Yes, and so fun to have you here.

Can't wait to have you back.

Pam: Oh, I'll be back.

Dustin and Adam: Bye!

♪♪♪ male: When I call action.

male: I know, I need my line.

male: Okay, okay.

You found the last golden ticket.

male: Pam, you found the l--oh, do I know her name?

male: It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.

male: Can't we have this written down?

male: It's okay.

It's okay.

Pam: Two parts.

male: Pam, you're holdin' it up.

You're excited.

male: Action.

male: You found the last golden ticket!

Quick!

Run--ha ha.

I don't know my line.

male: It's okay, it's okay.

♪♪♪