The Process | Land Chocolate | From Bean To Bar

HOW IT’S DONE

Stripping chocolate back to its basics, Land treats the cocoa bean with meticulous detail at every stage of the process. This process starts with sourcing our cocoa. We work with similar minded producers such as Ingemann and Uncommon Cacao to buy the best quality cocoa whilst also providing a living income to the farmers paying 2-3 times fair trade price.

Once the cocoa has arrived in our workshop, its our job to extract the array of natural flavour which all stems from the bean, and create enjoyment of a food in one of its purest forms...

1. SORTING

Once the cocoa beans have arrived in the workshop first job is to hand sort them, prepping them for the roast. This process simply involves removing spoiled beans and any foreign materials; the odd, dead bug stowaway who came along for the ride from the farm. Hand sorting through endless kilos of cocoa beans sounds time consuming...it is.

Welcome to small batch chocolate making.

2. ROASTING

A key role in unlocking the myriad of natural flavour found in the cocoa bean can be found at the roasting stage . Every bean variety has its own distinct personality, so we have developed a different roasting profile for each.

Roasting drives off volatile acids from the beans and converts amino acids and sugars into more tasty fully formed flavour compounds through the Maillard reaction (browning process).

3. CRACK & WINNOW

Next step is to crack open the beans and discard the unwanted husks, which at LAND takes place on a rather primitive device.

It’s a bespoke hybrid of second-hand machines and a household hoover that successfully cracks open the beans and blows away the husks, leaving us with clean cocoa nib ready to load up into the melangeur and turn into chocolate.

4. GRIND & CONCHE

The cocoa nibs are thrown into our stone granite melangeur or one of our Universal grinders. These machines break down the nibs and sugar over a 72 hour period into liquid form. By the end of the grind particle size reduces to something between 15-20 microns, something that feels smooth on the tongue.

The chocolate is then moved onto the conching phase where we do some final flavour development. This involves agitating the chocolate to improve mouthfeel, drive off any left-over volatile acids and coax out the deeper more nuanced flavour notes.

5. TEMPER & WRAP

Tempering gives chocolate structure and is what gives chocolate that nice shine to it. It involves heating and cooling down the chocolate and allowing the cocoa butter to crystallise. It’s this crystallisation which is crucial to giving chocolate its glossy finish.

Bars are then all hand wrapped by our patient team. A bar wrapping machine has been on the Land Christmas list for a while… maybe next year.