ABC News has up a story on Chocolate and health. If you’ve followed chocolate and health stories a lot will be familiar.

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No, not what you think. In fact heart attack survivors who eat chocolate two or more times per week cut their risk of dying by about three times.

According to the study author, the effect was specific to chocolate — we found no benefit to sweets in general.” Likely the effect was due to the high anti-oxidants.

So dark chocolate is the way to go and if you have to eat dark chocolate why not get the good stuff?

Sorting and Cleaning the Beans

Last week we showed how we make chocolate here at Amano in terms of the grinding. This week we want to show how we roast our beans and winnow them.

The grinding of cacao nibs into chocolate tends to get all the attention. Very few people pay close attention to the roasting and winnowing. In fact many companies don’t even do their own roasting and winnowing! However it really is a crucial step in developing the flavor of chocolate. The temperature you roast at has a significant, perhaps one of the most significant, affects on the final chocolate flavor. Likewise the hard husk of the cacao bean, if not removed, will create an “off” flavor that can’t easily removed. Removing as much of the chaff as possible is crucial for maintaining the proper flavor development. To compensate for having chaff in the final product some use a heavy roast to disguise the flavor. But that destroys a lot of the subtle flavors we love to find in chocolate.

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Someone asked for nutritional information on our chocolate. Our nutritional information is on the side of every bar of our Amano Chocolate. I’ll put this up in our main web site but I wanted to put it here as well.

Many people have asked us about doing chocolate tastings. Chocolate is a wonderful food because there are so many subtle flavors in each bite. Much like fine wine fine chocolate has a unique flavor profile that is determined by genetics, growing conditions, fermentation, roasting and other processing techniques. Knowing a little bit about the main flavors of each bar can help you enjoy the experience as the chocolate melts on your tongue. With each shipment of chocolate we always include a short tasting guide. (You can also download a pdf of the tasting guide) Now we don’t list every flavor of each bar but we try to hit the major ones.

We’ve also found that tasting wheels are tremendously useful for tasting chocolate. These have long been used with wine and cheese tastings. As best we can determine Jean Luca of Domori Chocolate introduced their use into chocolate tastings.

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We’ve put up a short little video at YouTube of us making chocolate. We also have some photos of our chocolate making.

We’ll have more pictures and videos over the next few weeks. Continue reading…

Our Expanded Winnowing Machine

We apologize that our blogging has been a little intermittent the past couple of months. As we’ve mentioned we’ve been tremendously busy going to chocolate shows, sourcing cacao beans and most importantly expanding our factory. We promise to update the blog much more regularly from now on.

Over the next few days I’ll put up pictures and movies of the new factory in production. We’re still expanding a portion of our factory but the main part is now making chocolate. We have quite a few new machines (not all of which we’ve finished restoring yet). We also have really streamlined our production. Our ethic here at Amano is that we always look for how we can make even better chocolate. That means we’re always on the lookout for things we can do better. Chocolate making is an art and an artisan always is improving their craft.

To start out I wanted to show some pictures of the expansions to our new winnower.

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We’re all terribly sorry for not regularly updating the blog. We have a number of stories and photos we want to put up, but we’ve all just been overwhelmed between a slew of chocolate and trade shows along with doing pretty thorough renovating of our factory. We’re nearly doubling its size. We’ve also received quite a lot of equipment. I’d say new equipment except that it’s really not new and much of it was in an old Caribbean chocolate factory. All the equipment needs a lot of work. Months of work.

We’ve also been modifying a lot of our other equipment to make it more efficient, safe and productive. It’s been quite an undertaking with many plumbers, electricians, carpenters and others around not to mention all of us here at Amano doing quite a bit of work.

To let you in our what we’re doing I thought I’d share a few photos.

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Just a note that we’ll be at the Seattle Luxury Chocolate Salon this July 12th. There will be quite a few other chocolate companies there. We hope to see you there. We had a lot of fun there last year.

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First our profound apologies for not keeping up on the blog. We promise that once we get back into chocolate production in a few weeks that the blog posts will go back to normal. We’ve been busy with travel (someone’s been gone nearly every week) and then renovations of our factory. We’ve received quite a bit of new machinery and are expanding the size of our factory. As you might imagine that takes a lot of work to get everything ready for chocolate making at the best of times. Combine all that renovation with numerous chocolate shows, award shows, and other travel and it’s been a very busy Spring and early Summer to say the least.

Those of you who have been in New York may have seen us at the New York Fancy Food show. We’ll be back tomorrow night. But in the mean time we’ve been spreading the word about Amano Chocolate.

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Amano will be at the Aspen Food and Wine Classic this week. We’ll be sampling chocolate and mingling with the Chefs. So please visit us there.

We’ll be there from June 19th through the 21st and are sure we’ll have a good time.

We were at the Best in State gala over the weekend. It was quite an honor to be there with all the winners. We won for best production of gourmet or artisan foods. At the gala they also announced the winner of the overall category of production and manufacturing. We won there also! This was doubly humbling as we weren’t just competing against other food manufacturers but also electronics, mining, printing, and other goods.

In other news Art was at London the same time picking up our awards from the London Academy of Chocolate. Much to our surprise they gave us a special award and trophy. Unfortunately I’m not sure the exact title but it is related to bean to bar manufacturing and innovation. We’ll put up a picture here on our blog when Art is back at the factory.

Sorry we’ve been so busy that we’ve not updated the blog that frequently. I think you’ll all be excited about what we have coming up though. We’ve finally finished the big part of our renovations. We still have a little bit more to do but we’re excited the hard parts are over. We’ll put up a blog post with pictures when we are done with all the changes.

In other news we’ll be at Log Haven this Thursday, May 28th for “Meet the Makers.” We look forward to seeing you there.

We’ve had a few requests for some images of the new paintings commissioned for our bars. Here they are. We’re really ecstatic about how they turned out. The art for our Montanya bar in particular I love. We were worried it wouldn’t show up well when reduced for the bar. But it is.

Let us know how you like these. Would you be interested in prints? We’ve been thinking about having a local print shop print them up for order if there is enough interest.

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We get a lot of requests from Amano lovers here in Utah county for our chocolate. The BYU Bookstore and the BYU Museum of Art store now are selling our chocolate bars. So if you are in Utah county and have wanted to avoid a drive up the freeway to Salt Lake City now you can buy us locally. You can also continue to buy us at the Sundance resort at their cafe or at their spa. (They do a special chocolate spa using cocoa chaff we provide for them)

As you know we have been letting people stop by the factory to purchase locally the past month. We’ll be ending this shortly as we start to go back into heavy production. (Our building is also fairly non-descript and not easy for everyone to find)