today i'm in the city of brotherly love philadelphia pennsylvania the us's first
capitol home to independence hall and the liberty bell for a while philadelphia was one of the most
active ports in the u.s because of that most of the cacao beans entering the united states
during the 19th century were processed right here about a hundred years before that in 1739 benjamin
franklin was selling chocolate out of his print shop just a stone's throw from where i'm standing
on market street today shane confectionary remains the oldest continuously operating candy store in
the entire united states it started right here in this very building in 1863 the magic of shane hits
me the moment i set foot inside i'm immediately struck by the sweet smell of enticing treats
this chocolatey scent has been permeating every nook and cranny of this shop since the civil war
in fact this place is so old the cash register hadn't even been invented until long after the
first customers were served we're going to be learning some delicious chocolate secrets i
feel like i've been handed a golden ticket and the wizard behind it all is head chocolate maker kevin
paschall these beans come to us from colombia from a region called tumaco then it works really really
well because it's got a big fat chocolate backbone these beans are fermented before they come to us
and that fermentation imparts a good amount of the aroma that we smell pre-roast
pre-roast and even before getting to shane cocoa beans have to be grown then fermented
these treasured beans grow inside the pods of the cacao tree cacao trees are native to central and
south america and the earliest known use of cacao started there three thousand years ago people in
modern-day honduras were fermenting cacao they were likely trying to make booze but stumbled
onto something that to some is even better chocolate today we still grow and ferment cacao
but only in areas 20 degrees north and south of the equator this section is called the cacao belt
what we're going to do here is we're going to load these onto these perforated trays
and some folks roast in like a big drum roaster kind of like the way you'd see for coffee
but here we try to economize on space by roasting in a convection oven
the whole roasting process time-wise start to finish is how long for this being about
40 minutes the next step is to crack these beans open now that our roasted beans are nice and cool
uh-huh i'm gonna dump them on into the winter work just like this shall i do
the honors oh please do because i will drop them everywhere to get at the nibs inside our entire
batch we'll use a special machine known as the winner work all right let's get to winnowing
once kevin loads the beans into the hopper and releases a catch the winower gets to work
the beans first fall into the cracker which has a blade that will chop them up into a mix of husks
and dark brown nibs the crushed beans then tumble down a tube where precise
vacuum pressure will suck up all the papery husks leaving behind the solid nibs it usually takes 24
hours to crush cocoa nibs into this vat of chocolatey liquid but lucky for us kevin's
got a batch from yesterday ready for our tasting pleasure uh this is remarkable this is just nib
correct that's right you haven't like added any oil or anything to this no nothing up my sleeve
that's right this melty liquid is just pure cacao nib ground up and heated down to a rich liquid
by the friction inside the melange the way this works basically is these are big granite wheels
and they're rolling on a granite base they're in contact at the bottom there and we control
the amount of pressure that's being applied to them this batch should be done at this point
i'm looking at a batch of fresh chocolate that's been combined with sugar and cocoa butter
into this luscious concoction this looks and smells like the chocolate i've been dreaming
about we can go ahead and take a taste if you'd like i would like get you a little
smear here so this is our house dark chocolate blend all righty let's give this a little
taste
this is the droid i've been looking for this is it's like the essence of chocolate you know what's
so weird you put it in your mouth and you're like i guess your mind goes to any time you've had that
liquid chocolate consistency so you think of hot fudge or the thing you put in your milk to make
chocolate milk it's kind of remarkable because i only associate that creaminess with milk chocolate
and yet here it is with this dark chocolate blend but as delicious as this is it turns
out it's still pretty far from the final product so once we pull this we're going to pull these
this batch into a series of blocks and they're going to set as like solid blocks of chocolate
and then we're gonna age them upstairs for about two months before we go to use them
what is the advantage of aging why do we do that so as the chocolate refines those
sort of off flavors are balancing into that like nice big chocolate note and then as time passes
that sort of continues to happen the flavor becomes a bit more complex as time goes on
do you have any chocolate that's already in the next phase we do upstairs we've got chocolate
that's already blocked up and uh ready to go so we can temper and mold that now all right
ready to rock after you sir we've reached the final stretch of our chocolate marathon
after sorting roasting winnowing grinding and conching our beans it's time to temper
the blocks of aged chocolate and mold it up first the blocks of aged chocolate are melted down in
a special machine so saucer this is our automatic tempering machine tempering chocolate is basically
the process of strategically raising and lowering the temperature i have a pastry bag here we fill
up some tempered chocolate and then we'll take it over there and mold some stuff how's that sound
let's shane sculpts their chocolate into all sorts of shapes so when kevin asked me to pick out
today's mold i hopped to it all right so so you picked out the frogs which is one of my favorite
molds so how about this i'll fill up the first like two or so and then i'll hand the bag off and
you can do a few sure now check this out we're gonna fill this up and then i'm gonna take the
mold give it a couple of good taps and that's gonna kind of help the chocolate settle out
and ideally it'll help some air bubbles kind of force their way to the surface
why don't you give it a try i am terrified i feel i'm gonna ruin all yours so grab the end
there so it doesn't slide out there you go so should i do the other end here uh you can how
about you do this this row right here okay when we began this chocolate odyssey kevin mentioned
that handcrafting chocolate deepens his connection with what he makes trying to get that bubble out
i can see it right up here teamwork makes the dream work there you go
i get it this batch went from a pile of beans
to a rich chocolate clay that i'm sculpting into a confection and i cannot wait to taste it
by the way let the record show he kept this line to go okay here are my beautifully filled ones and
here are these things that you've created some of them look pretty good you know a little bit
of practice you'll get there uh this we could let it set up in room temp but it'll take a lot
longer what we're gonna do is we are gonna pop this in the fridge for just a couple minutes
just to get it to set up and then in just a few minutes it'll be ready to pop out
and we'll have some frogs let's do it and just a few minutes later
it's the moment of truth all right i want to see how the master does it
that is so cool so let's say you were doing quality control on these what are you looking for
before it's officially considered worthy of being a shame chocolate well uh one thing
we don't want is like surface bubbles but the great thing about chocolate is we can
just melt this down and re-temper it and do it all again so we've seen these chocolates
from bean to nib to liquor to conch to temper to being piped in a somewhat messy fashion by me in
a much cleaner fashion by use but this is really the one we have followed truly from bean to froggy
ball that's right okay well i am going to take a perfect frog i am going to give my man kevin some
adequate social distance that i might put this delicious amphibian in my face hole all right
hmm that's really fantastic you you bite into it and it borders on fudge or a truffle as you chew
it i personally have a deeper appreciation having tasted it at different phases you know we've been
talking about varietals talking about fermentation that i think much like a great wine there should
be complexity and i and i guess i've always just sort of taken chocolate for granted as chocolatey
it's creamy it's sweet it's chocolate chocolate tastes like chocolate and this it's it's it's
superb it is truly superb if you're ever in the city of brotherly love may i recommend the frog
you