Like fine wine, refined gourmet chocolate can be savored for subtle nuances in its flavor. The best-quality cocoa beans, when properly roasted and conched, or mixed, should yield fruit and floral notes in its scent and taste, said Art Pollard, co-founder of Amano Artisan Chocolate in Orem.

Amano, which in Italian means "by hand" or "they love," is one of a few manufacturers in America that still makes chocolate from cocoa beans, as opposed to buying chocolate blocks and molding it into candy. Its goal isn't to churn out mass-produced candy, but to cultivate the finest flavors possible from each grade of cocoa bean by making it slowly and in very small batches.

But be prepared to pay more for Amano's premium dark, bittersweet chocolate bars, which have a 70 percent cocoa solid content. A 2-ounce bar retails for between $5 and $10, depending on the grade of cocoa bean used.

"We're doing this for the love of chocolate, not to have a mansion on a hill," said Pollard, who also owns Lextek, a Provo search engine software developer, with Clark Goble, his business partner in Amano. Pollard, who has a degree in Middle Eastern archaeology, met Goble when the two were working in the Physics Department at Brigham Young University in 1990.

Pollard's love affair with chocolate began during his honeymoon in 1996 after he stumbled on a de Granvelle Belgian chocolate shop in Honolulu. Unfortunately, for Pollard, his supply of de Granvelle chocolate ended when its Honolulu store closed after the main store at the former World Trade Center in New York was destroyed in the 2001 terrorist attacks.

To feed his passion for fine foods, Pollard studied chocolate making in Germany, traveled throughout southern France and northern Italy -- which are known for their strong chocolate-making traditions -- and found a number of small European gourmet chocolate makers, who gave him tips on roasting, different conching temperatures and techniques.

"Apart from Scharffen Berger Chocolate, the U.S. doesn't really have a gourmet chocolate-making tradition. So you have to do a lot of experimenting on your own. There are consultants you can bring in, but they're more familiar with industrial-grade chocolate than high-grade chocolate," Pollard said.

The chocolate-making process at Amano starts with the sorting of cocoa beans from the sticks, stones and other undesirables, Pollard said. Then the beans are roasted at between 210 and 300 degrees Fahrenheit, a critical process that caramelizes the natural sugars in the beans and brings out their flavor.

"Unlike mass manufacturing plants that roast all their beans at set temperatures, which destroys their flavor, we roast our beans at different temperatures depending on the variety and type of bean, and even the crop variety. To determine how to bring out the optimal flavor of the bean, we roast test batches before roasting bigger batches," he said.

The roasted beans are then cooled with a blower and vacuumed into a hopper where their papery husks or skins are removed. The beans are dropped on a sorting screen and sized, and then go into a mélangeur-broyer, (French for mixer-grinder) and are ground by a 300-pound granite roller. Sugar and high-grade Tahitian vanilla beans are added to the ground chocolate. The mixture goes into a machine called a conch and is stirred for a long period to make the chocolate as smooth as possible.

At full capacity, Pollard says his 2,000-square-foot Orem plant will produce up to 1,000 pounds daily.

He knows his cocoa beans.

For Amano's recipes, he sources beans mainly from cocoa-growing regions in Mexico, Venezuela, Madagascar and Ghana, which he says yields a better quality bean than the Ivory Coast blend, favored by most mass chocolate manufacturers.

But getting high-quality cocoa beans like Criollio, which is native to Central America, can be a problem because they tend to be very susceptible to tropical funguses and diseases such as witches'-broom, which can destroy the cocoa pod and render the tree infertile.

"We use Porcelana, which is the rarest variety of Criollio bean, almost exclusively. Criollio has the best flavor but is also very disease-prone," he said. "Forestero, which is native to the Amazon basin, has a very strong chocolate flavor, but is considered fairly uninteresting because it lacks nuances of flavor. Today's Trinitario bean, which is native to Trinidad, is a hybrid bean that has the rich chocolate flavor of Forestero and the nuances of the Trinitario."

To protect his cocoa bean supply, Pollard regularly visits and inspects his supplier's farms in Mexico and Central America and troubleshoots potential problems.

"Our trips tell our farmers that we do care about the product they grow. Certain fungus growth, caused by poor irrigation, can be arrested if they drained the farm properly," he said.

"We also examine the farmers' cocoa bean fermentation process to make sure it's done properly. The bean quality and flavor can be affected if they aren't turned daily during fermentation, or if the fermentation boxes have too much or too little ventilation."

The fermentation process, which can take between two and eight days, enhances the beans' chocolate flavor.

Pollard says he has received a number of inquiries at his Web site, Amanochocolate.com, from upscale restaurants and grocery stores throughout Utah, as well as from gourmet chocolate distributors in Europe.

"Dark chocolate is coming into its own in America because of its widely reported health benefits. That, and the quality of restaurants in Utah have gone up considerably in the past decade, also helps us," he said.

But no, the company doesn't have help from the Oompa-Loompas, he quipped. The Oompa-Loompas are dwarves in Roald Dahl's children's book, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

Amano Chocolate Co. doing business as Amano Artisan Chocolate
Founded in November 2005
Owners: Art Pollard and Clark Goble
Industry: Manufacturer of gourmet chocolate bars and baking blocks
Retail costs: 2-ounce chocolate bar costs between $5 and $10
Location: 496 South 1325 West in Orem
Work force: Two employees. Plans to hire between five and 10 more.
Web site: Amanochocolate.com
Contact: 655-1996

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page C10.

Copyright © 2006, 2007, 2008 Daily Herald. Used by permission.