The Taza Chocolate Factory
When most people imagine our chocolate factory, their thoughts tend to run to Willy Wonka and I Love Lucy. Our setup is a somewhat less glamorous affair.
For the first step, our cacao beans are roasted in a mid-century, candy-apple red Barth Sirocco 200 cacao roaster. It’s a German machine that we found in disrepair in Italy and had refurbished and shipped to Massachusetts.
The roasted beans are then winnowed – winnowing is the process of removing the shell and germ from the cacao bean and breaking it into cacao nibs. Our winnower is an Italian Carle & Montanari RCM 7; it’s about the size of a large Winnebago. We found it at a candy factory in the Dominican Republic that was closing down. It works by using puffs of air to separate the lighter chaff from the nib and allow the heavier nib to be collected. This machine took half a dozen men five days to disassemble and extract it from the candy factory in the DR. Purchased new, it would cost upwards of half a million dollars.
Next, the cacao nibs are ferried upstairs to our main factory floor. There, the nibs are ground into cocoa liquor using authentic Mexican stone mills that we sourced from Oaxaca. This machine uses hand-hewn granite millstones to grind the cacao into a grainy paste. Alex studied under a Oaxacan ‘molinero’ to learn the secrets of dressing these stones.
The liquor is then combined with sugar and either reground in another ‘molino’ or refined in our stone refiner for about a day, depending on the final chocolate we’re making.
Next comes the crucial stage of tempering. Tempering refers to the precise raising, lowering, and raising of the temperature of liquid chocolate to develop and align the crystals in the chocolate to give it the right mouthfeel and snap. We use a relatively small tempering machine at the moment: the Sollich Minitemper 200FD.
Finally, the chocolate is precisely dosed into molds using a ring depositer. The molded chocolate bars are dried in our custom drying room and demolded onto sheet pans. Then, every single bar and disc is wrapped by hand, and packed into recyclable display boxes awaiting shipment around the country and world.
