When you pick up a Taza disc, the first thing you’ll notice is the texture. The disc doesn’t have the generic smoothness that most chocolate is engineered for, and that’s intentional. It’s stone ground chocolate, made the way chocolate was made for centuries before industrial machines were designed to make every bar uniform. Here’s what stone ground means, how the process works, and why the method changes the flavor, so you’ll know exactly what you’re tasting in every bite.
Stone Ground Chocolate Definition
Stoneground chocolate is chocolate made by grinding roasted cacao between stones, traditionally granite, instead of refining and conching it in modern steel equipment. Stone grinding is slower, cooler, and much gentler, so the finished chocolate keeps the bright flavor of the cacao bean along with a coarse, rustic texture. The whole idea is to process the cacao less so that more of the bean comes through.
How Stone Ground Chocolate Is Made
At Taza, we lightly roast organic cacao beans, winnow off the shells, and feed the nibs into a molino, a traditional Mexican stone mill fitted with granite millstones that we carve by hand. Grooves in the millstones pull the nibs between the stone faces and crush them until the cocoa butter releases and the nibs turn into a thick paste known as chocolate liquor. We blend in organic cane sugar and grind the chocolate again. For our discs, that second stone grind is the final grind, so they keep their full texture. Our guide to stone ground chocolate walks through the complete process from bean to wrapper.
Stone Ground vs. Conched Chocolate
Most supermarket chocolate is conched, which means other manufacturers churn it in heated tanks for hours or days after grinding until the particles are microscopically fine and the sharper flavor compounds evaporate. Conching is why mass-market chocolate melts so uniformly and tastes so mild. Stone grinding stops long before that point, so the particles stay coarse, the fruit and acidity stay in the chocolate, and you can still feel the texture on your tongue. Conched chocolate is engineered to be consistent, while stone ground chocolate is made to taste like the bean it came from.
Why Stone Ground Chocolate Tastes Different
The difference comes down to heat and time. Long refining and conching cook off the delicate notes that make one cacao different from another, which works when the goal is consistency. Our grind is short and cool by comparison, so our 70% cacao disc still tastes bright and fruity instead of generically chocolatey. The coarse grind also changes how the flavor arrives. Sugar crystals and cacao particles dissolve at different rates, so the taste unfolds in stages rather than all at once, and the gritty texture is exactly what makes that happen.
The Oaxacan Tradition Behind Stone Ground Chocolate
Stone grinding is how chocolate has been made in Oaxaca for generations, on molinos in neighborhood mills. Our founder Alex Whitmore tasted stone ground chocolate there in the early 2000s, studied with a molinero to learn the craft, and founded Taza in 2005 to make chocolate the same way in Somerville, MA. We source our cacao with the same care we put into grinding it. All of our cacao is USDA organic and Direct Trade Certified, and we publish our premiums and partners every year.
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