Day 4 - Swiss Chocolate Adventure

This afternoon we were able to attend the chocolate making workshop at Funky Swiss Chocolate.  I had originally scheduled this on Sunday, but messed up my itinerary and missed it (I was so mad at myself!) The shop graciously worked us in to their very full schedule for today.

We began by learning about the history of chocolate, then did tasting, then tempered chocolate, poured it in molds, decorated and made 3 custom bars to take home.

Chocolate comes from the cocoa plant.  The cocoa beans are the seeds inside the cocoa pods.  The Aztecs first discovered and cultivated the plants and crushed the beans, adding water and powdered chilis to make the 'drink of the gods'.  This gave their warriors extra energy.  When the Spanish arrived, they were given this drink and eventually took it back to Europe.  The plants eventually spread to West Africa and the Malaysia region.  They will grow in the zone between 15 degrees north and 15 degrees south of the equator.  One of the things that makes Swiss chocolate exceptional is that they grind the beans for 72 hours before taking the next steps to make various types of chocolate. 

Dark chocolate is any mixture that is more than 50% cocoa.  Semi-sweet chocolate chips are 50/50 cocoa and sugar.  Swiss milk chocolate is made with Alpine milk, from cows that have been grazing on herbs/grasses in the mountain passes throughout the summer.  This gives it a unique (and delicious) flavor.

We tasted a roast cocoa bean, 100% dark chocolate, 85% dark (with 15% sugar),  50% (choc chips), 36% milk chocolate (with 50% sugar and 14% alpine milk), one with "double milk" (maybe 28%, milk 50% sugar, 22% cocoa), and some white chocolate which is made from the cocoa butter that is separated out in the processing.  

We began by tempering the chocolate.  Just like tempering metal, it involves a heating and cooling process.  If you have a chocolate bar that gets white on the outside when its heated and cooled, its the cocoa butter leaching out because it hasn't been fully tempered.  Tempering helps "align the cocoa butter crystals".  I'm not sure exactly what that means chemically...). We were given heated chocolate (milk or dark) at 113 F, then we seeded it by adding some nibs and stirred until they were fully melted and the chocolate cooled to 86 F.  Then we added some more heated chocolate and stirred it a bit more.  

Our next step was to put the chocolate in some piping and then squeeze it into the molds.

This little girl in the group was so adorable.  She got chocolate on her nose right off the bat.  She decided she wanted to taste Charlene's chocolate and Charlene, of course, obliged ;)

We were told that wasting chocolate is illegal in Switzerland (lol), so everyone licked their bowls.

We filled the molds with chocolate, then got to decorate with white chocolate and a ton of sprinkle choices!

Adding them all would have been ugly, but it was hard to choose.