Original subtitles

- It can be enjoyed as a solid or as a liquid.

It can be served hot, cold, room temperature, or frozen.

It's an essential part in religious rights,

holiday traditions, even romantic gestures.

And, when placed into a box it can serve as a metaphor

for the uncertainty of life itself.

But today, unlike life itself,

I know exactly what I'm going to get, chocolate.

Even though the United States has less than 5%

of the world's population,

it consumes close to 20% of the world's chocolate.

The United States eats almost 100 pounds of chocolate

every second of every day.

And chocolate generates $100 billion

in worldwide revenues per year.

Whether it comes in a truffle, a cup of hot cocoa,

or a scoop of ice cream,

nothing compares to the decadent indulgence of chocolate.

And today, we're doing a deep dive on chocolate candy.

Where does the word chocolate come from?

What are some of the bizarre foods

that people coat in chocolate?

And how did Milton Hershey revolutionize

the way we enjoy this beloved sweet treat?

How does this chocolate economy work?

How does the tropical fruit grown around the equator

become one of the world's most beloved sweets?

And how many tiny cocoa beans does it take

to keep up with this gigantic demand?

There's only one way to find out.

This is Modern Marvels: Chocolate.

[upbeat music]

[upbeat music]

Today, I'm in the city of brotherly love

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The US's first capital, home to Independence Hall,

and the Liberty Bell.

For a while, Philadelphia was one of the most active ports

in the U.S.

Because of that, most of the cacao beans

entering the United States during the 19th century

were processed right here.

But a hundred years before that in 1739,

Benjamin Franklin was selling chocolate out of his print shop

just a stone's throw from where I'm standing

on Market Street.

Today, Shane Confectionary remains the oldest

continuously operating candy store

in the entire United States.

It started right here in this very building in 1863.

For perspective, that's the same year that Abraham Lincoln

issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

I can't wait to check this place out.

The magic of Shane hits me the moment I set foot inside.

I'm immediately struck by the sweet smell

of enticing treats.

This chocolatey scent has been permeating

every nook and cranny of this shop since the Civil War.

In fact, this place is so old,

the cash register hadn't even invented

until long after the first customers were served.

Today, we're going to be learning

some delicious chocolate secrets.

I feel like I've been handed a golden ticket

and the wizard behind it all,

is head chocolate maker Kevin Paschall.

- This building and this block

have a ton of really, really rich confectionary history.

I mean, Philadelphia as a whole does.

Part of the mission of this establishment

is to kinda highlight that history.

- [Adam] Philadelphia's chocolate connection

reaches back to the 18th century when chocolate was touted

by elite citizens like Dr. Benjamin Rush,

a physician and politician who signed

the Declaration of Independence.

Rush, promoted drinking chocolate not just as a treat,

but as treatment for smallpox.

- The current owners got here not all that long ago.

And we had only started making bean-to-bar chocolate

about six years ago here in this space.

- [Adam] Making bean-to-bar chocolate means that Shane

takes raw cocoa beans and handcrafts them

into their prized, small batch chocolate.

- So, these beans come to us from Columbia

from a region called Tumaco.

Then it works really, really well

because it's got a big fat chocolate backbone.

The batch that we're gonna do today

is gonna be about a hundred pounds.

And the way that we start them literally is just by hand.

I'm gonna spread out a scoop full of beans

onto this grate here.

- That must be so time consuming for you guys.

- I can do it pretty quickly and-

- Now you're just bragging.

[Kevin laughs]

Big brand chocolate companies have machines

that can sort hundreds of pounds of beans in minutes

but Shane prefers the hands-on approach.

- Sorting by hand really gives us

a little bit of a connection to what we're doing in a way.

To really start at the beginning with the raw cocoa bean.

It gives people sort of a window

into the building blocks of chocolate.

So you're looking for beans

that are really, really tiny, beans that are flat.

- I expected these to smell like chocolate.

That fudgy, cocoaey smell,

but it actually,

it has the stringency that's similar to soap

or a cleaning product or vinegar kind of thing.

Is that okay?

Is there something wrong with these beans

or is that expected?

- No, I'd say that's pretty normal.

And that's one of the things that's sort of a by-product

of fermentation.

These beans are fermented before they come to us.

And that fermentation imparts a good amount of the aroma

that we smell pre-roast.

- [Adam] Pre-roast and even before getting to Shane,

cocoa beans have to be grown, then fermented.

These treasured beans grow inside the pods

of the cacao tree.

Cacao trees are native to Central and South America.

And the earliest known use of cacao started there.

3000 years ago, people in modern-day Honduras

were fermenting cacao.

They were likely [chuckles] trying to make booze,

but stumbled onto something that to some

is even better, chocolate.

Today we still grow and ferment cacao

but only in areas 20 degrees north and south of the equator.

This section is called the Cacao Belt.

On the upper end of this belt is a rare chocolate farm

located in the U.S.

- Aloha, my name is Koa.

We're on the lovely Island of Kauai in Hawaii.

- [Adam] On a pair of five acre farms

Koa Kahili grows some of the most well-known types of cacao.

- There are two large families of cacao

they're called Criollo and Forastero.

Forastero accounts for about 95% of global production.

- [Adam] Like all cacao, both Forastero and Criollo

are grown in the Cacao Belt.

But a Forastero is a really great burger,

then Criollo is more like a filet mignon,

more rich, more rare, and more prized for its flavor.

- Criollo beans are very, very rare.

And the reason is that they are very susceptible

to diseases and to pests.

- [Adam] Despite their differences,

all cacao trees bear pods and inside these pods

are kernels of a sweet white fruit

which cover the cocoa beans.

- So we're gonna have to see which ones are ripe

so you do a quick scrape test.

It doesn't hurt the pod 'cause it's really thick.

If it's green it's not ripe.

If it's yellow or an orange it's ripe.

[upbeat music]

- [Adam] With a fresh haul of harvested pods in hand,

the next step will be to crack them open

and remove the beans for fermentation.

- We're gonna take our wet beans and put them in the box.

- [Adam] The beans then get fermented in mahogany crates

packed with banana leaves.

Fermentation changes the flavor of the bean

from their natural bitterness

to something closer to the chocolate

that we all know and love.

- [Koa] On the underside of the leaf

there's this natural yeast.

- [Adam] As the yeast chumps away

of the sugars of the white fruit,

it breaks down leaving behind a brown bean.

- It takes about a week to ferment.

- [Adam] And a week later we're ready for the final step,

drying the beans.

- You wanna sun dry them for about three weeks

until the moisture content is about 5%.

That you can take one in your fingers

and crack it like that.

- [Adam] Most farms dried beans are then packed

and sent to chocolate makers like Shane

where they're sorted and ready to get roasted.

[beans rattle]

- What we're gonna do here

is we're gonna load these onto these perforated trays.

And some folks roast in a big drum roaster

kinda like the way you'd see for coffee.

But here we try to economize on space

by roasting in a convection oven.

[beans rattle]

[upbeat music]

- So talk to me a little bit just about roasting.

How does roasting affect this bean

'cause essentially that's what we're dealing with, right?

May I touch them again?

- Of course, yes.

So, you can really express the best qualities

of a given cocoa through a great roast

and you could take what otherwise would be

a really delicious bean

and you can kind of kill its flavor with a bad roast.

And we're still learning about new varietals.

It's an agricultural product and it grows out of the ground

and as such-

- [Adam] There's lots of variation.

- There's natural differentiation.

Soil conditions, rainfall, things like that

they might taste a little different

so we have to adjust our roasting to compensate for that.

- You're using terms that are very much the same terms used

with wine when you're talking about varietals,

and rainfall, soil composition.

So, I think it's really kinda cool.

The whole roasting process time-wise start to finish

is how long?

- For this bean about 40 minutes.

- [Adam] Roasting is the first step

in bringing out real chocolate flavor

but it's far from the last.

After the roast, the beans are cracked open

to separate the paper-like outer shell

from the chocolatey inner nibs.

The nibs get fed into a grinder

where they're ground into this shiny fudgy goo.

That fudgy liquid gets mixed with sugar and cocoa butter

to sweeten and fatten it for its transformation

into chocolate candy.

The sweetened molten chocolate is set into solid blocks

that Shane ages for two whole months.

Finally, the aged chocolate is melted down

and cooled repeatedly

because this step ensures that once it's molded,

it's a shiny bar of chocolatey goodness.

And the first hint of that magical bar

at the end of the road starts right here

with our freshly roasted beans.

I know these are hot but may I try one of these?

- Yeah, absolutely. Just watch you don't burn yourself.

- Alright, whoo.

- And we're just gonna kind of

in your hand you're gonna just kind of crack it up.

You can kind of peel that outer husk off.

- [Adam] That's the actual cocoa bean right here.

- And you're left, exactly, you're left with the inner nib.

- [Adam] So this is all the husk and this is bean.

It's crazy there's really none of that vinegary smell

remaining at all.

[upbeat music].

Wow.

- [Adam] The history of chocolate candy is littered

with iconic brand names like the Baby Ruth bar.

This block of milk chocolate, nougat, caramel, and peanuts,

was originally called the Kandy Kake

but was renamed in 1921.

The same year a certain New York Yankee

was at the height of his fame.

This sweet treat also happens to be a childhood favorite

of a certain Yankee fan, yours truly.

In my experience a Baby Ruth can help fix everything

from a skinned knee, to a broken heart [chuckles] .

Just the thought of a Baby Ruth has me feeling like a kid

in a candy store, which is exactly where I am.

At Shane, I'm getting my first taste of chocolate delight.

May I try one of these?

- Yeah, absolutely. Just watch you don't burn yourself.

[upbeat music]

- A little floral, the flavor's a little bit

like that corner brownie where it touches the pan.

- Right, right.

So it's that fudge but more of a char to it and it has a-

- You taste a little bit of roast?

- Yeah that roast,

and there's a little bit of like a chicory coffee note

a campfire coffee note.

It's remarkable that just time and temperature

have taken this organic thing

and brought out whole new characteristics of it.

- [Kevin] That's true. - Wow.

Well, we've unlocked new flavors in this chocolate,

it turns out we're just scratching the surface.

- Chocolate is a really, really complex foods.

There's hundreds of chemical compounds in chocolate

that give it a lot of complexity.

- [Adam] In fact, over 600 flavor compounds

have been found in chocolate

making it one of the most complex foods on earth.

- And it is the complexity of chocolate flavor

that lends itself to a lot of different uses

beyond simple chocolate bars.

- [Adam] Some of these uses include using chocolate

to coat things that are a little unconventional.

- We normally think of it as something only in dessert

something that's sweet,

but it's a huge applications in savories.

- Like bacon, potato chips, and popcorn.

- Chocolate can go with so many different things.

It really can coat porcini mushrooms, and shrimp,

and all sorts of delicious and bizarre things.

- And when you come into other cultures, all bets are off.

- There's several makers in Brazil

and all over South America really who are making things

with worms, and ants, and crickets.

- You're gonna find scorpions,

grasshopper's really common in Mexico for many, many years.

So insects and chocolate are huge.

That lends itself to what can't you cover it with?

The only thing that gets in your way

when you think about what chocolate might cover,

is how squeamish you are.

- Over at Shane, the next step is to crack these beans open.

- Now that the rest of the beans and nice and cool,

- [Adam] Uh-huh.

- I'm gonna dump them on into the Winnower just like this.

[beans rattle]

Should I do the honors?

- Oh, please do because I will drop them everyone.

To get out the nibs inside our entire batch

we'll use a special machine known as the Winnower.

Alright, so let's get to winnowing.

Once Kevin loads the beans into the hopper

and releases a catch, the Winnower gets to work.

The beans first fall into the cracker

which has a blade that will chop them up

into a mix of husks and dark brown nibs.

The crushed beans then tumble down a tube

where precise vacuum pressure

will suck up all the papery husks

leaving behind the solid nibs.

Because the husk is so much lighter than the nib,

it just automatically separates it?

- Exactly, yeah.

The heavier nibs will fall down these tubes

and into the bucket.

And we want the lighter husks to be sucked back up

and into the vacuum chamber.

Should we fire it up?

- [Adam] Fire it up.

[Winnower squeals]

Like much of the machinery at Shane

the Winnower here is designed

to handle small batch chocolate making.

[upbeat music]

But some artisan chocolate makers [chuckles] go big

like Theo Chocolate in Seattle.

In the 15 years since their start

Theo has raked in over a dozen

national and international awards

for their chocolate making.

And they've gone from hand delivering their chocolates

locally, to booming sales that have taken their products

coast to coast.

Now, they're one of the most highly regarded

chocolate makers in the U.S.

And here at their 30,000 square foot chocolate factory,

they deal with sacks of beans so large

they need industrial lifts to move them to the roaster.

- Each one of these sacks can weigh up to a thousand pounds.

[upbeat music]

And this is where they cook.

It's also the reason that if you come to Seattle

and visit us, there's a four block radius

around the building where it smells like brownies.

- [Adam] And once the beans are done roasting-

- [Man] There we go.

- [Adam] They're released into a tank

where they're rotated and cooled.

- This is what 600 pounds of cacao beans look like.

There's a little hole in the bottom of this tank,

the beans go through the hole,

up into this machine the Winnower.

- [Adam] This towering structure here is Theo's Winnower.

- The beans enter through that top compartment,

they get hit by a steel plate so they shatter,

and then move down the staircase.

As each nib hits each level,

these silver boxes are vacuums

and those vacuums are sucking up the shell.

- [Adam] The high-tech machinery at this Washington factory

helps Theo pump out 70,000 pounds of chocolate every week.

But human ingenuity is also at play.

- At the end of the day,

someone is here checking the temperature,

someone is here tasting the nibs,

and seeing if we need to modify anything.

So even though machines are helping us out,

it's still relying upon a human there

to make sure we can make the right product.

- [Adam] And this human touch is equally essential

at small batch shops like Shane.

The nibs here might not weigh in at 600 pounds a batch.

- [Kevin] That all looks pretty clean to me.

- But it's the taste that counts.

[Winnower squeals]

So these right here, the meat of the bean as it were,

is just pure cacao nib.

[upbeat music]

It's funny 'cause I was looking for a very chocolatey taste

but it's much more like a roasted flavor,

but then there's like that back note

of a dark chocolate and almost like red fruit,

like a dark cherry, a blackberry kinda note to it.

- And it's really amazing you'll see what refining does.

It really will pull that chocolate note out

and kinda like mellow out some of those other higher notes.

Now that we've finished winnowing,

these are pretty much ready to start refining.

- Refining the nibs means throwing them into a machine

called the melanger and crushing them into a chocolatey goo.

Mh, just saying that makes my mouth water.

Alright, so the melanger is the next step?

- That's right, yes, so let's head on over there.

- Show me the way brother.

- Alright.

At the oldest candy shop in the U.S.

chocolate making can be a real grind.

It usually takes 24 hours

to crush cocoa nibs into this vat of chocolaty liquid,

but lucky for us Kevin's got a batch from yesterday

ready for our tasting pleasure.

All right, this is remarkable.

This is just nib, correct?.

- [Kevin] That's right.

- You haven't added any oil or anything to this?

- [Kevin] No, nothing up my sleeve.

- [Adam] That's right.

This melty liquid is just pure cacao nib

ground up and heated down to a rich liquid

by the friction inside the Melanger.

- The way this works basically

is these are big granite wheels

and they're rolling on a granite base.

They're in contact at the bottom there

and we control the amount of pressure

that's being applied to them.

- [Adam] Using stone to grind chocolate

isn't a modern innovation.

- The Olmecs and the Toltecs

were Maya cultures in Mesoamerica

and they are believed to be the first culture to cultivate

and to start breeding the cacao.

Nobody knows why, but one of the theories is that

there weren't a whole lot of stimulants growing natively

and so they would have consumed it.

It would have made them feel energized

like drinking a cup of coffee

and that some of the substances actually get you high

and they would have used it as part of their sacred rituals.

- So the Olmecs past cacao onto the Mayans

and cacao is really important to the Mayans as well.

- The name chocolate is derived from a Mayan word xocolatl

which literally means bitter water.

- [Adam] This bitter water was a drink

made by mixing ground cacao and water

and it's use didn't end with the Mayans.

- The Aztecs use chocolate for a variety of things.

They would give it to people

before they were sacrificed to the gods

and it was supposed to give them courage.

- [Adam] That definitely redefines the phrase,

death by chocolate.

- There's a really famous story of

Montezuma drinking 50 jars of chocolate

at the end of this big ceremony and banquet

and then going off to his harem.

- I'm not sure if I can put away

50 jars of Shane's bitter water,

but there's only one way to find out.

Is this creamy?

- [Kevin] Well you could take a taste if you like.

- [Adam] I would like to very much.

- [Kevin] Yeah I mean,

at this point it's completely unsweetened there.

So, it's going to be a little on the bitter side.

- [Adam] Got it, okay.

[chuckling]

Whoa.

Here's the thing, right.

It's not bad.

It's just the richest single bite of food

I may have ever eaten.

I wouldn't want to make it seem at all to you guys at home

like it was yucky.

It's chocolate, but the most pure,

most intense chocolate flavor I can possibly think of.

That's like the soul of chocolate.

So we're going to add sugar

and this is cocoa butter that you've melted?

- [Kevin] That's right.

It's about 8% cocoa butter added to the system

in addition to the naturally occurring cocoa butter

within the beans.

- [Adam] So now the elements

that we all love about chocolate, the creaminess

and the sweetness we now get to add.

So which do we add first?

So all the cocoa butter can go in now.

We're gonna add the sugar kind of gradually.

- [Adam] Okay.

- [Kevin] So I'm gonna go ahead and dump this.

So you see now how the texture is really liquidy.

In a second we're gonna start adding sugar

and that's gonna tighten it back up

and then these sugar crystals are gonna refine down

to microscopic size.

So we're gonna add this sort of gradually here.

I'm going to put. - [Adam] Can I do it?

- [Kevin] Yeah, absolutely, go ahead.

- [Adam] Thanks.

So just slowly?

- [Kevin] Yeah, you can go ahead and start pouring

'til we feel and hear the machine start to

kind of slow down a little bit.

I can only imagine once we add sugar,

this is gonna be absolutely an explosion of flavor.

- [Kevin] We're refining and we're conching here.

- [Adam] What is the definition of conching?

- [Kevin] As the particles

run below the roller stones there.

- [Adam] Right.

- [Kevin] They're breaking down and they're getting smaller.

Well, if you look at the chocolate under a microscope,

generally you're gonna have a lot of small particles,

but they're going to be all jagged and misshapen,

but conching kind of polishes off those surfaces,

nice creamy mouthfeel that we associated

with really fine chocolate

is the result of little tiny spheres,

as opposed to little tiny jagged little pieces.

- [Adam] In some cases,

the particles of chocolate here

can measure nearly 50 times smaller

than a single coffee ground.

- [Kevin] At that point,

those solid particles are small enough

that we perceive them as just a creamy uniform mixture.

Once we get all this loaded in,

the next thing we're gonna do

is we're gonna start messing with the tension a little bit.

So I'm gonna gradually do this on both sides.

- [Adam] Can we, wait a second.

Let's add some tense violins, go.

[tense violin music]

I feel the tension in the air.

- [Kevin] We're gonna try to do this nice and evenly.

- [Adam] More violins, bring up the strings.

- [Adam] Chocolate.

Just saying the word conjures up images

of some of our favorite treats

like Reese's chocolate peanut butter cups,

Snickers bars and M&Ms.

While these sweets are among the top five

highest selling chocolate candies in the country,

craft chocolate makers like Shane

have managed to muscle into the market.

Annual craft chocolate sales

are growing more than 20 times faster

than the mainstream competition

and there may be no single craft chocolate maker

more well-known than Jacque Torres.

- I have kind of a dream job, making chocolate for living.

The artistry that you can do with chocolates.

You can sculpt it.

You can melt it.

You can mold it.

I mean, I just love to work with it.

- [Adam] An accomplished Chef,

Jacques has built a chocolate empire

on the strength of his name.

With seven retail locations in New York City

at a 40,000 square foot chocolate factory in Brooklyn

that ships to customers around the country.

With sales approaching $10 million a year.

It's no wonder Jacques Nickname is Mr. Chocolate.

The company uses over 150 tons of chocolate annually

and all that chocolatey goodness gets combined

with an array of tasty ingredients

to create 300 tons worth of sweets every year.

- The number one selling product going to be the bonbon.

- [Adam] In French bon bon,

literally translates to good good

and it's no wonder they had to say it twice.

This best-selling confection has two layers.

On the outside is a tempered chocolate shell

and on the inside is a filling called ganache.

Ganache is a blend of melted chocolate and heavy cream.

To make these decadent nuggets Jacques uses a machine

that oozes a slow and steady stream of chocolate.

It's called the enrober

and its magic begins with ganache filling.

- [Jacques] We're going to remove some of the filling

from the mixer.

- [Adam] First 24 pounds of liquid ganache filling

are poured into two plaques and left to set.

When the liquid filling has cooled into solid slabs

they're cut into 1600 individual pieces

- [Jacques] And now I'm putting it into this frame

and I'm going to run that to the enrobing machine.

- [Adam] The solid pieces of ganache filling

will run through the enrober

and as they roll by,

the enrober will pour warm tempered chocolate over them.

- [Jacques] That's why we call that an enrobing line.

It enrobe whatever center we put inside.

Then the chocolate go under a fan to push the excess,

shake a little bit and go into a cooling tunnel

that's going to refrigerate the product.

- [Adam] But before the chocolates

enter the cooling tunnel, there's one important step.

- Go in between the enrobing machine and the cooling tunnel.

We have this space.

This is the decoration space.

Sometimes we're going to work with color,

sometime with texture, and sometime we design.

- [Adam] For this batch,

as the wet chocolates pass the decoration space,

assistant production manager,

Rachael Barba lays a transfer sheet over them.

- [Rachael] This will transfer the image

onto the surface of the bonbons.

- [Adam] Transfer sheets are plastic sheets

printed with images drawn in edible ink.

It's the incredible artistry

of the folks who shaped these sculptures

that makes them more than just the tasty sweet.

- When you remove the transfer sheets here

you get the decoration

that was on the transfer sheets into the chocolates.

Viola.

- [Adam] The bon bons at Jacques Torres

wouldn't be out of place in a museum

if they weren't so tasty

and over at Shane, I'm getting a sneak peek

at their own delectable works of art.

This fine, snazzily dressed gentleman

to my left is Ryan Burley, one of the owners here.

This is called clear toy candy.

Is that right?

- [Ryan] Yes.

- [Adam] A tradition that dates to the 18th century,

clear toy candies were gifted to children

during Easter and Christmas.

Shane keeps this tradition alive

and only makes these candies during the holidays.

- [Ryan] Cheaply made sugar toys

would obviously be a kid's dream.

- These days, between January and Easter,

Cadbury's produces 1.5 million holiday cream eggs

every single day,

but imagine unwrapping a holiday treat that's also a toy.

- [Ryan] So it's actually a fairly simple process.

It's three ingredients, it's sugar, water,

and this is glucose, confectioner's glucose.

This stuff's not super easy to work with.

It's thick.

- [Adam] Oh really?

- [Ryan] So we just go right in with our hands.

- [Adam] Oh, it's almost like silly putty.

- [Ryan] You're welcome to get into this if you.

- I wouldn't mind. Should I put my hand in the water.

- [Ryan] Yeah and then just dunk it in there.

Here, you can put it into there just to get a sense of it.

Oh my gosh.

- I have to be it's such a cool feeling.

It's somewhere between syrup and like,

I don't know, like wax or something.

I want to recommend everyone at home.

Go get yourself some glucose and play with it.

It is the grooviest thing ever.

- [Ryan] This is the time for us to wash our hands.

- [Adam] Ever wonder how lollipops are made.

It's just like this,

except instead of using glucose,

it's corn syrup that gets boiled with the sugar and water

and then the sweet sap gets molded,

but instead of a lollipop, we're using toy candy molds.

Oh wow.

Oh, I love that smell.

It smells like cotton candy.

There's this, oh it's like a toasted sugar smell.

- [Ryan] It is, it's like a toasted marshmallow.

- [Adam] Once each mold is carefully filled

all it takes is a few minutes rest

before we can start cracking these babies open.

- Wow, wow.

That's Santa,

Look at that one.

- [Ryan] Nice job.

- [Adam] Look at the detail on it's face

and the hands and the robe.

- [Ryan] That's a beauty.

- [Adam] And then how old are these molds?

- [Ryan] They're probably 125 years old.

- [Adam] Oh man, come on,

come on man.

That is gorgeous.

I am blown away.

I am legitimately blown away.

- [Ryan] Oh, there's William Penn.

- [Adam] And for those of you don't know,

even the name of this state,

Pennsylvania means Penn's Woods.

- [Ryan] We've lost his head.

- [Adam] May I respectfully here,

can I have William Penn's head?

Can I try it?

- [Ryan] Oh, please.

- And I feel it's only appropriate

if I'm gonna be in Philadelphia to have William Penn.

- It's odd, because even though it's not caramel

it has that butteriness to it.

That is delicious.

All right, let me let this man get back to his work.

- Let's go and catch up with Kevin

and let's continue our chocolate odyssey.

- [Kevin] This batch should be done at this point.

- [Adam] I'm looking at a batch of fresh chocolate.

That's been combined with sugar

and cocoa butter into this luscious concoction.

This looks and smells

like the chocolate I've been dreaming about.

- [Kevin] We can go ahead and take a test if you'd like.

- [Adam] I would like.

Get you a little smear here.

So this is our house dark chocolate blend.

- Alrighty, just give this a little taste.

This is the droid I've been looking for.

This is, it's like the essence of chocolate.

You know, it's so weird, you put it in your mouth

and you're like, I guess your mind goes to

any time you've had that liquid chocolate consistency.

So you think of hot fudge,

or the thing you put in your milk to make chocolate milk.

That's kind a remarkable,

because I only associate that creaminess

with milk chocolate

and yet here it is with this dark chocolate blend.

The difference between milk

and dark chocolate depends partly on who's making it.

- Dark chocolate typically contains

at least 30% cocoa solids, plus cocoa butter, sugar,

and often vanilla.

- [Adam] Cocoa solids are the tiny solid particles

in ground up liquid chocolate.

Milk chocolate only has a third of the solids

found in dark chocolate.

- A craft or artisan milk chocolate

often contains much more cocoa 35% to 55%

which makes it more expensive,

but also more intensely flavored.

- [Adam] Expensive chocolate has roots in history.

- As the 19th century was advancing

a number of people get into this business

of making bar chocolate

and it's an expensive high class kind of snack

for the elites of Europe.

- [Adam] Europeans mainly drank chocolate refined with sugar

until the industrial revolution

and by the beginning of the 20th century,

Milton Hershey sought to find a way

to bring this elite treat to the masses.

- By 1900, he spends some time trying to figure out,

okay how do I make milk chocolate?

He wants to keep the stuff cheap and available.

So how do you make chocolate cheap?

Chocolate's expensive.

No matter how you cut it, chocolate's expensive.

You have to import it.

You have to grind it.

What's cheap is sugar and milk.

He's in the middle of dairy country in Pennsylvania

and so he founds this town called Hershey Pennsylvania.

Builds a giant factory and starts producing Hershey's bars.

- Milton Hershey's genius is that he figured out

how to make chocolate affordable

so that everyone with a nickel in their pocket

could buy a bar of chocolate

and what this does is it took chocolate

from being an artisan handmade product

into a truly industrial product

that everybody in the world could afford to purchase.

- You know, this idea of Hershey's chocolate

is synonymous to the American culture.

These snacks that we really think of

when we think of chocolate broadly, are these things

that Hershey's brought to the American market.

- [Adam] Over a century later,

Hershey's business model has paid off.

In 2018 they alone were responsible

for 43% of the total us chocolate market

and they produce affordable chocolate candies

at a staggering rate.

70 million Hershey kisses are made every single day

and all of it happens in the great state of Pennsylvania

not far from where I've just had a taste

of Shane's magical chocolate,

but as delicious as this is it turns out

it's still pretty far from the final product.

- [Kevin] So once we pull this,

we're going to pull this batch into a series of blocks

and they're gonna set as solid blocks of chocolate

and then we're gonna age them upstairs for about two months

before we go to use them.

- [Adam] What is the advantage of aging?

Why do we do that?

- [Kevin] So as the chocolate refines,

those sort of off flavors are balancing

into that nice big chocolate note

and then as time passes that sort of continues to happen.

The flavor becomes a bit more complex as time goes on.

- [Adam] Do you have any chocolate

that's already in the next phase?

- [Kevin] We do.

Upstairs we've got chocolate that's already blocked up

and ready to go.

So we can temper and mold that now.

- [Adam] All right, ready to rock.

After you, sir.

- [Adam] We've reached the final stretch

of our chocolate marathon.

After sorting, roasting, winnowing, grinding

and conching our beans

it's time to temper the blocks of aged chocolate

and mold it up.

First, the blocks of age chocolate

are melted down in a special machine.

Soft serve.

- [Kevin] This is our automatic tempering machine.

Tempering chocolate is basically

the process of strategically raising

and lowering the temperature.

- [Adam] Repeatedly heating and cooling the chocolate

strengthens its chemical structure,

making sure the hardened chocolate bar

has that classic shiny appearance.

Do you ever come by and dunk something in here,

take a marshmallow, a bipity bip?

- [Kevin] I'll go in for the occasional taste.

Usually I'll pull the chocolate out and dip out of that

so I'm not contaminating the rest of the system here.

- Okay, fair enough.

That's disgusting on my part.

- I have a pastry bag here.

We fill up some tempered chocolate

and then we'll take it over there and mold some stuff.

How's that sound?

- Lets.

Shane sculpts their chocolate into all sorts of shapes.

So when Kevin asked me to pick out today's mold,

I hopped to it.

- [Kevin] All right so.

- [Adam] So.

- [Kevin] You picked up the frogs

which is one of my favorite molds.

So how about this?

I'll fill up the first like two or so

and then I'll hand it back off and you can do a few.

- [Adam] Sure. - [Kevin] Now check this out.

We're going to fill this up

and then I'm going to take the mold

give it a couple of good taps

and that's gonna kind of help the chocolate settle out

and ideally it'll help some air bubbles

kind of force their way to the surface.

Why don't you give it a try?

- [Adam] I am terrified.

I feeling I'm gonna ruin all yours.

- [Kevin] So grab me in there so it doesn't slide out.

There you go.

- [Adam] So should I do the other end here?

- [Kevin] How about you do this row right here.

- [Adam] Okay.

When we began this truck that odyssey,

Kevin mentioned that handcrafting chocolate

deepens his connection with what he makes.

Trying to get that bubble out.

I could see it right up here.

- [Kevin] Yeah.

- [Adam] Teamwork makes the dream work.

There you go.

I get it.

This batch went from a pile of beans

to a rich chocolate clay

that I'm sculpting into a confection

and I cannot wait to taste it.

♪ Oh oh oh

Oh, by the way, let the record show,

he kept this line to go okay,

here are my beautifully filled ones

and here are these things

that you've created that you've created.

- [Kevin] Some of them look pretty good.

A little bit of practice you'll get there.

This, we could let it set up at room temp,

but it'll take a lot longer.

What we're going to do is

we are gonna pop this in the fridge

for just a couple of minutes just to get it to set up

and then in just a few minutes it'll be ready to pop out

and we'll have some frogs.

- [Adam] Let's do it.

- And just a few minutes later

it's the moment of truth.

All right. I want to see how the master does it.

That is so cool.

So let's say you were doing quality control on these.

What are you looking for

before it's officially considered

worthy of being a Shane chocolate?

- [Kevin] Well, one thing we don't want is surface bubbles,

but the great thing about chocolate is

we can just melt this down and re temper it

and do it all again.

- [Adam] So we've seen these chocolates from bean to nib,

to liquor, to conch, to temper

to being piped in to a somewhat messy fashion by me

and a much cleaner fashion by you,

but this is really the one we have followed

truly from bean to froggy bar.

- [Kevin] That's right.

- [Adam] Okay, well, I am going to take a perfect frog.

I'm going to give my man Kevin some adequate social distance

that I might put this delicious amphibian in my face hole.

All right.

That's really fantastic.

You bite into it and it borders on fudge

or a truffle as you chew it.

I personally have a deeper appreciation

having tasted at different phases.

You know, we've been talking about varietals,

talking about fermentation

that I think much like a great wine

there should be complexity

and I guess I've always just sort of

taken chocolate for granted as chocolatey.

It's creamy, it's sweet.

It's chocolate, chocolate tastes like chocolate

and this it's superb.

It is truly superb.

If you're ever in the city of brotherly love

may I recommend the frog.

Chocolate has been around for thousands of years

with the way that people love and consume chocolate

it's gonna be around for a thousand years more.

Yeah, we all love chocolate,

but hopefully after today's deep dive

into this mouthwatering modern Marvel

you have a deeper appreciation for this fudgy phenomenon.

I know I do.

In fact, I'm going to express my appreciation

in the tastiest way possible with one more bite.