Main Entry: cocoa butter Function: noun, Date: 1872
: a pale vegetable fat with a low melting point obtained from cacao beans
Courtesy of Peter's Chocolate
Ecole Chocolat Note: This is a good introduction to chocolate facts and specifications from a commercial perspective – it disappeared from the Peter's site so I've included a copy here.
The first "chocolate box" was introduced by Richard Cadbury in 1868, when he decorated a candy box with a painting of his young daughter holding a kitten in her arms. Cadbury also invented the first Valentine's Day candy box.
Depending on the size of your operation, you'll need specific equipment for chocolate making. This might include molds (or moulds – both are correct spelling and can be used interchangeably), tempering machines, oscillating (vibrating) tables, racks for stacking trays, cold tables, cooling tunnels, refrigeration units, etc.
The curriculum will go into more details about equipment in Module 5 but it's never too early to research and source equipment in your local trading area. Note that there are both small equipment and large equipment manufacturers included in this list. I think it's important for you to see the whole spectrum of equipment so you can decide on your production needs, depending on what you're producing and the size of your operation.
In Chantal Coady's book The Chocolate Companion, she not only talks about each of the featured chocolate companies, but lists the kind of chocolate they use.
Chantal Coady is a force for chocolate in the UK. She founded Rococo Chocolates.
Whether you refer to the product as cioccolato, chocolate, chocolat, schokolade, chocolates, chokolade, choklade, coklat, schokoladen, chocolade, sjokolade or cokolade – there is a world of chocolate out there.
Included in the following list are the larger candy/confectionary product manufacturers who mainly sell their products to food retailers and who have a website (or are described on one) – many others do not. It is too long a list to spend time looking at each one but try at least to research a random group of 20.
Major international companies
Use each company's website to do your product research. You should be familiar with all these producers and their products by the end of the program. The bigger companies have distributors in different regions. If you're interested in tasting a particular chocolate, use the company contact or lists of distributors on their website to find the distribution source in your region.
A few years ago, I got the following questions from one of my students concerning "raw" chocolate products. I thought the questions were indicative of the confusion that exists so I added them to this existing lecture. I've put my personal opinions in Red. The student's name has been omitted to protect the confused :o)
Can bean-to-bar chocolate makers really call their chocolate "RAW" when the cocoa beans have been fermented and roasted at temperatures way above 115° F?
We used the Program Glossary to start you thinking about the process of chocolate making from tree to couverture. This lecture will build on that general knowledge. For the moment, we will not include a discussion of the chemistry of the cacao species that leads to differences in flavor and properties. We'll leave that instead to the next Program Module where we concentrate on taste.
We start this lecture with an overview of processing, a diagram of the manufacturing process and then online resources where you have access to more processing details with pictures and even videos that help you to visualize the process.
第一章 (1) 第二章 Product Knowledge (4) 第三章 Introduction (1) 第四章 Introduction (1) 第五章 Introduction (1) 第六章 Continuing Education and Graduating from the Program (1)
