Transcriber: Ruy Lopes Pereira Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
I love chocolate.
(Laughter)
I don't know when I became a chocoholic,
but like most of you,
my love affair with chocolate began when I was really young.
Growing up, I secretly wanted to live
in Willy Wonka's blissful chocolate river.
(Laughter)
So, when my fourth-grade teacher gave us an assignment
to dive into an independent study
of anything our hearts desired,
I naturally and immediately thought:
chocolate!
(Laughter)
I didn't know it at the time,
but this project would take me on an unexpected journey,
one that would bring me here today.
Let me explain.
So picture this:
me at nine years old, I was about this tall
and slightly cuter than I am right now.
I know, hard to believe, right? (Laughter)
Having a hard time imagining?
Let me show you.
This clip is part of my discovery and journey
that chocolate comes from a tree.
[New York Botanical Gardens]
Ok. We're here at The New York Botanical Garden
to see cocoa trees.
Since we can't get any, we want to see some.
Ok, let’s go!
(Laughter)
Man, there're a lot of plants in here. They're so beautiful!
Oh, I think I see the cocoa trees.
I mean cacao trees, sorry.
Go on!
There's the tree.
The Theobroma cacao.
Chocolate tree.
It’s in bloom now.
If you’re wondering these buds turn into the pods.
Oh, look! There’s one!
Look. They are all up there. The green ones.
There's one small one, then some big ones.
You see, the pod is small, because it just started growing.
Inside the pod when you cut it open, there’s beans inside.
The beans are then --
are then scraped out and [taken] into a bin,
so that it could be fermented, sorry.
After they take the beans and make them into nibs.
With that, they add sugar, crush it up and you got chocolate. (Laughter)
I think that it's pretty clear at nine
I was full of passion, energy and curiosity.
So it isn’t that surprising that at that age
I was enthusiasticallly reading all about chocolate.
In fact, one of the best books I read
is called “A New Taste of Chocolate”, by Maricel Presilla.
And I found her book so helpful in my understanding of chocolate,
that I actually wrote to her.
And to much of my surprise, she wrote back to me
and she invited me to meet with her at her restaurant.
So at nine years old, I went and met with her. (Laughter)
And this author of this incredible book
sat with me and talked to me as if I were an adult.
And when I told her that I wanted to make my own chocolate,
instead of looking at me like a crazy person
she actually headed me a bag of cacao beans.
She said: “Amy, if all else fails, make some great hot chocolate”.
But... no!
With some of the best cacao beans in the world
I wanted to make chocolate.
Making chocolate must be pretty doable.
I mean, there’s lots of chocolate bars. I can do that at home.
Doesn’t matter that I am nine.
So I thought, why not write to some of these chocolate companies?
Most of these companies didn’t respond to a nine year old's curiosity.
And the ones that did, explained that
chocolate making is a highly industrial process.
I would need a factory,
because you need roasters and winnowers, and five-roll refiners,
and conchers and tempering and molding machines.
So essentially, chocolate making at home,
according to them, was not possible.
One of my mottos at the time and still today is:
”What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.”
by Henry David Thoreau.
At nine, I had little fear of failure.
I was not willing to accept 'no' as an answer.
And I was determined to prove them wrong.
But before I get there, let me explain
why chocolate making actually is very difficult.
So this is the cacao bean.
And cacao beans, unlike peanuts and coffee beans,
they’re pretty hard, hard as in— almost the consistency of rocks.
And to get it down to a chocolate form,
the ones that we're used to,
you can’t just dissolve this or melt it.
You actually need to break this bean into not thousands,
but literally millions of pieces,
otherwise if feels like we're eating sand.
This is one of the many challenges of making chocolate
and it’s a difficult process to refine the beans into a liquid form.
So I can’t say that after one attempt
I had pulled off a miracle and made my own chocolate.
But after several months and countless of attempts later,
I was able to manipulate and construct household appliances
into doing that of a chocolate factory,
essentially creating my own chocolate factory, in my kitchen.
But it wasn’t until experts started to taste my chocolate
that I thought something extraordinary had happened.
After molding my first bar
I was ready to ask Maricel for her opinion.
So I went back to Maricel
and I anxiously waited for the moment of truth.
To my surprise, Maricel loved my chocolate.
(Applause)
I few months later, I was contacted by the famous Parisian chocolatier,
Robert Linxe of “Maison du Chocolat”.
And when he was coming to New York, he wanted to meet with me.
It’s me and Robert Linxe.
(Laughter)
He also tasted my chocolate,
obviously like a professional, since he is a professional.
And after just a few bites he said:
“Extraordinaire, Amy, which factory helped you with this?"
(Laughter) (Applause)
And when I explained to him that I made it in my kitchen—
(Laughter)
he laughed, just like you guys.
He was so shocked and yet thrilled
and urged me to continue to follow my heart and my passion.
And then a year or two later,
thanks to chocolate expert Pierrick Chouard,
I was invited to exhibit at the New York Chocolate Show in 2003.
(Video) Speaker: Why would all this people,
including this mom and her two kids,
wait more than an hour in the cold? Young girl: Chocolate.
Speaker: They’ve come to the right place:
The 6th Annual Chocolate Show in New York.
That’s something Amy Singh learned first hand.
Eleven year old created her own chocolate bar for a school project.
Young Amy: It took a little while to get the recipe and everything right,
because chocolate is not something natural you would have.
You have to learn about it in books and research it.
Amy Singh: I was very nervous walking up to that stage.
And my heart was pounding.
Just like this very moment, my heart is pounding.
(Video) (Applause)
Amy: I love the Chocolate Show, it's really fun.
And I’ve been coming here since I was a kid.
I used my head and thought,
maybe a steam basket, two of them put together could work.
And here you can you see it, that it actually works pretty well.
And this is my roaster.
My winnower was a fan as you can see here,
and I just poured the beans back and forth, back and forth,
until I came up with nibs and shells.
The next step was grinding,
which is basicaly to make the chocolate particle size very small.
So here you can see what it looks like before
and here you can see what it looks like after.
So I thought, yes, I’m done!
No, but I figured out that the chocolate was very gritty.
And my first experiment, the experts were right, it turned out very gritty.
So I looked under the microscope at my dad’s workplace
and found out that they were too big.
They were 500 microns.
And I found out that your tongue can feel it,
because the chocolate is too big and your taste buds can feel them.
So I looked at Valrhona chocolate
and found out that the particle sizes were 20 microns.
So that was my goal, to get 20 microns.
So, I thought, OK, let me research the chocolate more.
I found out that they use refiners.
And they have these big steel rollers.
So I thought: Oh look, a pasta machine has rollers, maybe I can use that.
So I made the rollers as close as they can get
and I then added all the ingredients and this is my refiner.
And my chocolate that I looked under the microscope,
and found out that it was almost 20 microns,
which means I got my goal.
(Applause)
It was an incredible experience
to be able to share my chocolate story with adults and children alike.
After the New York Chocolate Show I started beeing featured
in lots of places, beginning with newspapers
and then magazines, such as American Girl
and Chocolatier Magazine
and then actually chocolate books,
including Maricel’s second edition of “A New Taste of Chocolate”.
(Applause)
All of this happened because, again, I refused to let no be the answer.
I’ve come into contact with the chocolate world.
And over the past ten years I have met chocolate experts,
chocolatiers and, of course, fellow chocolate lovers.
They are often passionate, dynamic and yet excentric.
And I've learned so much from them.
They've taught me how to expand my view on the world.
But I didn’t want to be a chocolate maker.
And as much as I love chocolate, my curiosity took me in new directions.
At fifteen, I began to see the world in a different way
and see that life can be pretty imperfect,
even in this chocolate world,
that we think is full of bliss and joy
and of course Oompa Loompas, is yet flawed.
And some of these flaws have stuck out with me
and struck me so much that
I decided to make a short public service announcement
about children being forced to work in cacao plantations in The Ivory Coast.
(Video) Amy: Sometimes, there’s an ingredient in chocolate
that should never be there.
This ingredient is called child labor.
Day in and day out, children in The Ivory Coast of Africa
wake up and go to work at cacao plantations.
The Ivory Coast makes up more than 40% of the global production of cacao.
AS: As my curiosity took me in new directions,
I became more interested in the so called developing world,
especially after learning about children being forced to work in cacao plantations.
And mainly out of curiosity, I wanted to go to Africa.
I naively at 17 was just like, let me pick up my stuff and go.
And the more people that told me,
”That’s a silly idea, Amy, what are you doing?”
I was more determined to prove that I could do it and I could go.
So in 2009 I actually was able to travel to Ghana.
(Video) Amy: I'm about to embark on a jurney to Ghana.
It is a bit scary, but it gives me a sense of independence.
The unknown, the un-experienced gives me butterflies in my stomach.
I still cannot believe it is really happening.
It's beyond my wildest dreams.
But I hope to connect with the people I meet
and learn how to become a citizen of the world.
Amy Singh, July 10th, 2009.
They might live in what seems worlds away,
but they’re closer than you think.
They’re children with real faces, real lives and real futures.
Just as I stepped into their lives, they stepped into mine
and will forever have a mark on my heart.
That clip was part of a fund raising event
for the Bright Future Orphanage in Ghana.
Today, I am 21 years old.
And I am so passionate about so many things.
And yet, I don’t know what I am doing or where my curiosity will take me.
But look at me today.
I’m in Prague because of a chocolate bar.
And this chocolate bar continues to give me courage
to meet challenges everyday.
So my challenge for you is to pursue your curiosity.
And when those difficult barriers come up,
dig deep inside yourself
and see if you can find that little child’s voice,
the one that grows silent as we age,
and let it inspire you.
Thank you.
(Applause)