A field study conducted at OmNom Chocolate Factory in Reykjavik, Iceland over the course of four weeks. During that time, I actively participated in the chocolate making process, learned about the business of chocolate, and gained an understanding about the ingredients used and how they related to terroir.
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“Restless in Reykjavik”
During my field study at OmNom Chocolate Factory, I was encouraged to think of a flavor for a chocolate bar and then create it; in order to better understand the chocolate making process. My flavor is going to be a dark chocolate banana bar with nibs on top, but some may also have sea salted almonds. I plan on using the cacao beans from Tanzania, because of their wonderful fruity notes…hopefully it will co-mingle nicely with the banana!
May 18:
Obtain brown bananas from Kronan (local grocery store) & chop them into thin slices to put into the dehydrator for the next few days. Overly ripened, brown bananas were used for flavor purposes. Also sampled caramel pieces that may be potentially used in the chocolate bar.
May 23:
Learned how to roast, winnow, grind, and conch. Decided on making a 65% dark chocolate and used the following recipe:
(Makes 2 kilos)
55% cocoa mass- 1.1 kilos
10% cocoa butter- 200 grams
35% sugar- 700 grams
Measure out your ingredients using a scale.
Add in the cocoa butter to the machine first.
Then add one scoop of cocoa mass at a time in two minute intervals. Keep the machine heated with the heating gun or it will get stuck.
Once finished, let run ten to fifteen minutes.
Finally, add the sugar gradually.
The machine will conch the chocolate for two days, then it will be ready.
I also decided to name my chocolate bar “Restless in Reykjavik’…which is a play on ‘Sleepless in Seattle’, since that’s where I’m from. (I couldn’t think of a banana pun that I liked enough to use for the name of my chocolate bar.)
May 24:
We taste tested my chocolate in the morning and decided to add a little more cocoa butter later in the day, since my chocolate was a bit too thick. After letting that mix in, we poured my chocolate into a bowl and stored it in the heating chamber for tempering the next day.
May 25:
I collected a bowl of nibs, crushed my dried bananas into smaller pieces, and readied a bowl of sea salted almonds.
To start the tempering process, we first took the temperature of my chocolate to see what we were dealing with. Then we poured the chocolate onto the (clean) granite table and I used the scraper to move the chocolate around the table to help cool it down. Movement and cooling is important in tempering because it helps the fats to crystallize and stabilize properly. Every so often, I would move the chocolate back to the center to measure the temperature; the goal was to reach 27 degrees Celsius. Once this temperature was achieved, the chocolate was put back into the bowl and then we used the heating gun to gradually bring the temperature back up to 31 degrees celsius (mixing and taking the temperature after every 10 seconds of using the heating gun).
Finally, the chocolate was at the right temperature to put into the molds. Scoop. Bang the molds on the table. Scrap off excess chocolate. Repeat 10x. While I filled the molds and made a complete mess, Viggo helped to put the toppings on the chocolates (bananas, sea salted almonds, and nibs.). Unfortunately we ran out of bananas so six of my chocolate bars went without. Oops.
The molds were left to cool for one hour or so in the fridge, then I removed them and wrapped them in foil. I also chose to use the yellow Tanzania envelopes for their packaging.
May 26:
The design team created belts to complete my chocolate packaging.
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Thinking about Lecithin
During my first day working at OmNom Chocolate Factory, I had a short yet thought provoking discussion with Kjartan (co-founder of OmNom Chocolate). To his dismay, the original recipes were not working as well as they should have with the use of of the new machines, so Kjartan had to make the decision to start adding sunflower lecithin to the white and milk chocolates so everything would bind better together. He explained that he was originally prejudiced against lecithin, but by researching it he found out it’s actually good for you. Now of course my curiosity was peaked at this point, because I’ve always look down on lecithin filled chocolates. I believed that great chocolate doesn’t need a binding agent, but it occurred to me that I may have been a bit snobby about that. So I decided to give lecithin a chance and to learn more about this mysterious soy/sunflower product that I inherently knew nothing about, yet hated.
According to WebMD.com, “Lecithin is a fat that is essential in the cells of the body. It can be found in many foods, including soybeans and egg yolks […] You will often see lecithin as a food additive. It is used to keep certain ingredients from separating out.” Although lecithin appears to have many medical uses, a majority of them cannot be scientifically supported. Sunflower lecithin seems to be superior to soy lecithin, because soy is considered a major food allergen by the FDA. The process of obtaining lecithin usually involves a chemical solvent that is then removed, but the FDA does not regulate how much hexane is allowed to exist in lecithin after removal, so it is hard to know how many harsh chemicals are contained within. Most soy used is GMO, so if you prefer not to consume GMO’s and possible chemicals, then it is suggested you search for the non-GMO and organic lecithin.
From a business perspective, soy lecithin has such a bad reputation for being harmful to your body, that sunflower lecithin seems like the smarter option. Plus you can put a nifty little “soy free” advertisement on your chocolate bar. Even better is if you can find a good source of organic sunflower lecithin.
After conducting my research, I feel like I misunderstood lecithin and owe this mixture of phospholipids and oil a bit of an apology. Sure lecithin has a bad reputation and often a pesticide ridden extraction process, but it is definitely an important tool for emulsions and for helping to prevent fat bloom in chocolate. I just personally would feel a bit more confident about consuming it if I knew that it was organic…whether soy or sunflower based.
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