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- We make many different types of chocolate.
We deposit chips and wafers and large 10-pound bars.
Our chocolate is for fine dining.
We have a whole line of products for chefs.
The company is over 155 years now.
We're the oldest continuously run family business
in the United States.
The cocoa bean, that's our hero
and that's the thing that we try and show off
the best we possibly can.
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This is our bean room.
We have beans from all over the world, from Peru,
from Colombia, from Ecuador, Trinidad, West Africa.
I mean, this is the key to the business.
Miguel's gonna cut the bags and will go into the hopper
which is below ground.
Then they'll go from that with a bucket elevator
into the bean-cleaning area.
Cacao comes from tropical rainforest-type areas.
Cacao is the seed of that fruit.
They scoop out the seeds with the pulp on it,
the very sweet pulp.
The seed itself doesn't have much flavor.
It's kind of bitter.
It's fermented and dried, and that's really developing
a lot of flavors.
We test our product every time it goes through a process.
A finished piece of chocolate's probably been tested
72 times.
We're one of the first chocolate companies
to have our own micro lab.
We get these samples in.
They're either samples that we're wanting to assess
for flavor,
they could be samples from a particular type
of fermentation that we want to assess.
Emily is one of our expert tasters.
- Every day around 11, we do taste-testing.
That will include everything
from the cocoa butters that we get in,
the chocolate liquor that we produce,
so, everything from beginning to end, we will taste,
making sure that everything is up to our standards.
(beans crunch)
- Man, you gotta be strong to do that.
In this kind of a test,
we can tell what the fermentation level is.
We can tell if there's mold.
This is a key part of giving it an indication
of what the flavor's gonna be.
The color's awesome.
There's a few purple beans, and then within the pod,
there's lots of different kinds of genetics going on.
It's not just one genetic.
The color gives us an idea of how we want to roast them.
That pinkish, light purple, very fruity,
hopefully a little bit of a floral kind of flavor.
There's tremendous and beautiful diversity with cocoa.
One of our biggest focuses is what I call
incremental degradation of the crop of cocoa.
Because of the breeding and the changing
for more productivity, more disease resistance,
has affected the flavor of the cocoa.
We've put these labs in countries
where their research arms of the country
can understand the importance of flavor.
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So, it goes through the roasting process.
We have two different types of roasters,
one which is a kind of a high heat,
one which is drier, and depending on the beans
or the type of chocolate and flavor we're after,
it would depend on which of those roasters we might use.
The beans that have been roasted
are gonna go through a breaker,
and the breaker's gonna break the bean up and the shell.
Then, it's gonna get separated
by screens to different levels.
Heavier, bigger pieces stay on one level.
The screens get progressively smaller,
and then there's a vacuum
and that vacuums off the lightest part of that material,
which is the shell and separates the shell from the nib,
which is the part we want.
Guittard Chocolate got started by my great-grandfather.
He came to the U.S. to look for gold and realized
that the people that were really making
the most money were the merchants.
So, he went back to France.
He came back with melangers,
which were the kind of the main grinding pieces of equipment
to make chocolate.
So, we basically did anything we could grind.
We made coffee and mustard and spices, teas.
We have numerous different ways of grinding.
When you grind cacao nibs,
you get unsweetened baking chocolate.
It then goes through the triple stone mill.
This machine itself is probably 60, 70 years old
so we can adjust this one a little more precisely.
So, we really like this one.
So, from here, it goes into a ball mill.
That chamber is filled
with these little stainless steel balls,
and they're all crashing into one another.
It becomes a very fine liquid.
The one thing that we need to make chocolate
is cocoa butter.
You take some of that liquor
and you take it to the cocoa press
and you separate the fat from the solid.
And we add sugar in, or milk.
Mix them together by taking this thinner mass
and putting it through these rollers,
which break big particles of sugar down
in the process, create more surface area
for the fat to cover so it becomes thicker.
This is the mass.
This is maybe one of my most favorite products
of the process to taste.
I kinda scratch my mouth when I eat it,
so I like the texture.
After we have that thick mass,
it goes through a five-roll refiner.
Each roll goes a little bit faster
and in going a little bit faster,
it's shearing the particles and making them smaller.
You can see how this is all kind of stuck together
because there's enough fat to coat all the particles,
and let's look at the other side.
It has the same amount of fat as this.
It's just that the particles are much smaller now.
It's all about the smoothness of the product
and then it goes into the conch.
The conch heats it up, kind of starts
sticking it all together, creating the Maillard reaction,
which is the browning action
which makes chocolate taste unique.
It's like where a lot of the secrets take place
in chocolate making.
It depends a lot on the ambiance within the factory itself.
After conching, we adjust the product that we're making
to have the proper flow characteristics.
Chocolate needs to be solidified
at the proper temperature,
and the product gets tempered.
This is going through the stages of tempering.
It's coming in at like 104 degrees,
and then it'll slowly cool down.
Right at the end, we'll raise it up,
making sure that when chocolate solidifies,
all of the crystals form properly.
We make so many different kinds of products.
We deposit chips and wafers and large 10-pound bars.
The products we sell for consumers
are focused in the baking area,
but we have a whole line of products that we make
for the chefs called the Etienne Line, and restaurants,
that's super high-end.
Places like Spago, Gramercy Tavern, Father's Office,
Nightbird, just a whole bunch
of kind of new-wave and old-style classic restaurants.
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- So, today we're working a bunch of different types
of the Guittard chocolates.
First chocolate we're working with is the Hawaiian,
the Kokoleka.
We're gonna melt it over a double boiler
for a chocolate mousse.
I heat up some milk and glucose.
Now, I'm just gonna put it through a strainer
and then let it set overnight and then I'll paddle
and whip it and it'll be chocolate mousse.
We are gonna fill raspberries with it.
(playful music)
This is kind of a play on a black forest flavor
but with raspberries instead of cherries.
We're gonna make a magic dipping shell sauce
to dip the chocolate-filled raspberries in,
and we're using the 61%.
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Next, I'm making cocoa meringue.
I love the black cocoa.
It makes it like a little bit different color,
and it also has a really rich flavor.
We start with egg whites 'til they're frothy.
Add the powdered sugar kind of slowly.
Add granulated sugar.
Let it get to a nice place,
and then we're gonna add the cocoa powder.
I think that when you're thinking about food,
number one is always taste, right?
And then how it looks.
And what's cool about Guittard
is, they have multiple different types of cocoa powder.
So that's like what it is after overnight,
and since I like organic-looking,
I like to break things
and make it just kind of different.
And it tastes good.
We're gonna make a chocolate sable.
We're using the Rouge Cocoa and then also the 61% chocolate.
I let it chill for a little while
and then I roll it and then bake it.
Whenever I'm thinking about a product I'm gonna use,
I think like, well, where are the beans grown?
Who's growing those beans?
This is the chocolate sable in its final form,
and I'm gonna place that in the base.
Farmers are the heart and soul of everything that I do
and what we do as restaurants, especially in the Bay Area.
They're thinking of the person who's planting, growing,
taking care of the product,
and that shows in their chocolate
and who they are as people and as a company.
- I love what chefs do with chocolate, how they apply it.
We try and create things that punch through
in regards to the personality of what our product is.
It all starts with a really great product
and then making sure that each step is done
to the parameters that are required
for that particular product.
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