Welcome back to the show.
What is it about chocolate really?
Good chocolate that satisfies.
It's the good stuff.
Just one piece will make
you feel better, right?
And and satisfied and spinnaker
chocolate in Seattle makes delicious
chocolates in small batches.
Spinnakers Kelly van Arsdale says it's
all about the beans and you're joining
me now to talk about the chocolate,
the beans and the awards.
I hear you just learned this
morning that you got like 9 awards.
Yes we did. Yeah, in our first
year which is pretty crazy.
That's amazing, thank you, appreciate it.
I'm not surprised that we did taste
this a little bit earlier in our office
and we all fell in love with that.
We thought we have to talk to
this man about chocolates. Yes.
How did were you a huge fan of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
How did Spinnaker get started Spinnaker
got started because my brother actually had
a crazy fascination with chocolate really,
so we started it together and then
we kind of built up in his garage
until the point where we decided hey,
maybe we should make this a real
business and then about nine months ago,
Spinnaker chocolate was born
so this was a hobby at first.
This hobby at first for a long time,
maybe 5-6 years before it became
a real a real thing.
Well, good for you. I'm excited.
Let's talk about beans because
it starts there, right?
Yes, starts there.
So we're a bean to bar maker,
which just means that we start
with the cocoa beans and we
process all the way through to
the finished chocolate bars.
The very first step for us really
is to break the beans open.
So if you want to,
you can kind of crack one. That's
pretty cool. I do want to crack one open.
Yeah, the difference is a
lot of chocolate makers.
I don't know if you all know this,
they actually buy their like
hunks of raw chocolate from you
know other beautiful places in
the world that make chocolate.
You make it that's cool.
OK, so we got the bean open.
We're making a mess.
I love that
yes, you got kind of see what's
in here there's a little pieces of
nibs that's what we call the inside
of the bean and then the shells.
OK, and we actually divide those so that's
what I have here is the sort of two
nights in the shells and the nibs, yeah?
And then we make chocolate from
the nibs and we grind those up.
Before we do that whole process.
We always kind of check the fermentation
level of the chocolate and that's
what our bean guillotine is here.
Bean
guillotine. That's right, that looks.
How does it work? Let me see.
OK, so it quite literally
just chops the beans in half,
so we're actually gonna do this right now,
and I can kind of show you the inside
and show you what these beans look like.
This is kind of fun.
Yeah, we get to slice about
50 of them in half and
the alliteration on this.
The bean guillotine is fantastic.
This is probably one of the
most fun parts of my job.
OK, get in there, yeah?
Alright, So what we look for is
cacao that is really well fermented,
so we'll open this up and you
can kind of see on the inside
what we're looking for here.
And so some of these beans won't make it.
Some of these beans won't make it.
Yeah, we do try and sort out some
of the beans that aren't very well
fermented and try and get rid of those,
so the basic concept is if
they're not well fermented,
they're not going to taste very good.
Can you tell from first glance,
like if I pick one out can I know
is that is that one fermented? Well,
yes, that's so.
Actually these are all fermented.
Well, that one is the one
that's not fermented. The
one I picked. Yes OK, yeah,
so the lighter one is the one that's
not quite fermented well, and so you
would pick that out and say forget
about it exactly. OK, so we're
making chocolate with more of
the good beans and therefore the
flavor is supposedly better, so
take us to the rest of the process.
You use the bean guillotine
and then you do this by hand.
We do a lot of these pieces by hand.
Yeah, a lot of sorting by hand.
We have some machines that we built ourselves
to kind of help us sort through things,
but after this step where we've kind
of identified the beans that aren't so
well fermented, we've got our nibs.
We roast those and then we grind
them and that's what this is.
OK, this is called a stone melanger and I
don't know if you can see inside there,
but there's a stone base I can
try 2 stone wheel
this so y'all can see it's heavy.
It's heavy serious stone wheels
exactly right.
Some grinding for us all right.
Let's see it. So the way this
thing works is it just kind of
turns you can kind of hear the
wheels grinding with the base so
we put the nibs in here and grind
everything for almost 24 hours
it'll run for quite a long time.
OK wow the nice part about this
machine is it heats up because
of the grinding and so it
actually melts the cocoa butter.
That's in the nib,
so it becomes liquid chocolate.
That's what I was going to ask
you is how does it does it?
Turn into some sort of it so it kind of
has like a little bit of a slurry to it
exactly, and then we add some sugar in here.
And after about 24 hours it'll
end up looking like this.
And this is our I can kind
of tilt this wow chocolate.
Ohh man. So if we want we can
pour a little of this out.
We can actually taste it.
Yeah yeah, let's do that.
I will hold this. That is beautiful.
Look at the color, OK?
That is some rich chocolate right there.
And so all you've added to that other
than the nibs is some sugar is some sugar.
Yeah, so no milk or anything like that.
Nothing at all. Yeah,
it's just 70% nibs and 30% sugar.
That's what our 70% bars
so I can try this now.
Go for it. OK, because I
am asking to be polite, but
I'm still gonna OK, let me see.
So this is our 70% Belize and
usually has a sort of a Berry flavor
to I was gonna say yeah it's
got like a Berry flavor.
Yeah and that's what I love about
super good dark chocolate has got.
That Barry yeah that bright.
It's very bright. I mean really,
truly you don't need anything else with it.
You don't need it to be flavored, right?
But you do kind of flavor it
just slightly because you have
like several different kinds.
Of chocolate I do, which I love.
Should we pour it in the mold?
We can yeah. So when we're
ready to actually make bars,
we would temper this chocolate so
this is untempered at the moment. OK?
And then we would pour it into our
molds and we have a little vibration
table that will kind of fill the
mold so it'll all kind of even out.
Get all the air bubbles out
and then that's where we have
and that's what it looks like in the end.
And what if you seasoned with this more nibs?
Yes, so this is nibs and salts are
Belize with nibs and salt which
we found out this morning is one
of our award winners so that's
very exciting. I love it, yeah,
so the once we're done these will
go into the fridge for about an hour
and then it'll settle and then we
can actually dump these guys out.
Well, you can see what they look like,
how pretty those are our finished
chocolate bars. You can see
they're so shiny and they're beautiful.
I love I love just the the design of it.
By the way, Spinnaker.
What what? What is that name? So
it's the if you've ever seen sailboats
that are going sort of with the wind
and they've got the big sail out front.
It's almost like a parachute that's just
basically the speed sail on a sailboat.
My brother and my mom are both sailors. Yeah,
so that's where the name kind of came from.
Love it so that big sale you see right
there that is the spinnaker sale.
I'm gonna take. Can I have a
try piece of absolutely please?
Yeah I'm gonna try this one but as I do
that can you kind of go through some
of the flavors that are most popular
and what are your favorite? Yes,
so we've got quite a few flavors.
We've got sort of single origin bars,
which are just 70% and then we've got
some of our bars which we call inclusions,
which is something like this.
And so one of our most popular and one
of our award winners this morning as
well is our believes with Bourbon bar,
which we can also try if you want.
If we can break that package, open
all right. If we must,
we only got 10 seconds left,
so I'm gonna.
Oh, and I like the packaging.
It's very fresh but not super.
Yeah, ridiculous.
It's just classy and does the job all right.
Show good thank you so much for coming.
You're welcome here anytime my friend.