Nestlé Chocolate
How We Make Chocolate
In Côte d’Ivoire, Nestlé experts cut open 100 beans to check for any defects. They also roast some beans to check the taste and flavour
Great tasting chocolate needs good quality cocoa beans. That’s why, at the start of the production process, we carry out a quality check at the port in the producing country where the cocoa beans are waiting to be exported.
Once checked and approved, the beans are transported to one of our factories. Sometimes this can involve shipping them halfway across the world. On arrival they’re checked again to make sure that they meet all our strict quality standards. The next step is to clean them thoroughly.
The cleaned beans are then roasted. The roasting develops the chocolate flavour. That’s why the real skill in making good chocolate is to select cocoa beans from one or more origins and roast each origin to bring out the desired flavour.
We use large industrial roasters, however the effect is the same as if you roasted them at home by spreading them on a baking tray and putting them in the oven at 145°C for half an hour.
Separation
Straight after roasting we remove the shell or skin from the beans. We crush or roughly grind the beans and then use a combination of sieves and air flow to separate the shells. The remaining inside parts of the bean are called cocoa “nibs”. The discarded cocoa shell is used for energy production or sold as garden mulch in garden centres.
The roasted cocoa nibs pass through several grinding stages until they are ground very smooth into a dark brown liquid. This liquid is called cocoa mass or cocoa liquor and tastes strongly of cocoa, although at this stage it’s quite bitter.
Unless we’re making a single origin chocolate, we usually blend the cocoa mass from several selected origins and different roast levels to create exactly the right flavour profile.
Making Dark Chocolate
If we’re making dark chocolate, we mix cocoa mass and sugar and then pass this mix through large steel rolls set close together to grind the sugar and make a smooth chocolate mass. This is the refining stage. From here the chocolate mass goes to a machine called a conche. These are like giant mixers and can contain as much as six to nine tonnes of chocolate. That’s equivalent to 4 - 5 average size cars worth of chocolate!
The chocolate is kneaded and stirred for up to 48 hours in the conche. It’s this conching process that improves the texture and flavour of the chocolate, producing those wonderful chocolate aromas. During the conching, other ingredients are added such as cocoa butter, the vegetable fat from cocoa beans, and normally some vanilla flavouring.
Making Milk Chocolate
The process to make milk chocolate is similar except that milk powder is added into the mixer at the beginning.
The next step in the process is to convert the bulk chocolate that’s being gently stirred in the conche into finished products that our consumers can buy.
To do this, the liquid chocolate is ‘tempered’. In effect, it’s heated, cooled and reheated. This makes it set quickly when it’s finally cooled. It also gives the chocolate a pleasant melting texture when eaten. The tempered chocolate can then be moulded or cast into a mould to form, for example, a chocolate tablet. Alternatively, wafer biscuits or other centres can be passed through a curtain of liquid chocolate, a process called ‘enrobing’. After moulding or enrobing, the bars are cooled and wrapped. Then they head off into the distribution chain to the various shops or kiosks, ready to be bought, eaten and enjoyed.
