Jacques Torres Gives a Tour of Chocolate Haven

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Hello I am Jacques Torres

from Jacques Torres Chocolate here in Manhattan.

And I want to talk to you about chocolate.

This is my favorite topic.

First thing is, how to pick good chocolates.

When you buy chocolates and you see numbers,

72% or you see other numbers, 60%.

The percentage is the cocoa contents.

More cocoa contents, higher the number,

more quality chocolate you will get.

Always read the label.

Chocolate contain a lot of cocoa beans.

You will find cocoa beans from all around the world.

From Africa, from Venezuela, Ecuador, Trinidad,

a lot of different location.

A lot of the chocolate that I make here,

have beans from Guyana.

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This is the bean storage place

where we receive the cocoa beans.

Those beans are pretty nice.

So we will mix them with other beans

and then roast them.

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So, cocoa beans became cocoa nibs

when they are breaked and roasted.

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We will take those cocoa nibs,

put them into this hopper

and then they're going to come down,

get grind and then we get cocoa liquor.

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This is the mixer where we decide

the percentage of cocoa contents.

If we do a 60% cocoa chocolates,

we're gonna to put 60 kilograms cocoa liquor,

40 kilograms of sugar

and then we're going to mix that

and bring that paste to the refiner.

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So this piece of equipment is very interesting.

This refiner will crunch every particle

of chocolate so small that you don't

going to feel any texture.

The size of the particle is between

20 and 25 microns.

We take that chocolate and we bring it to the conche.

When we refine and we come

to such a small particle of 20 microns,

those particles can be spiky.

So this machine act like the ocean with the sand.

Going to round the particles,

make that chocolate even more creamy.

So, 12 hour of dry dry conche.

Meaning, just the leaves and the sugar.

Then we add cocoa butter, we add vanilla,

we add lecithin and we do 2 hour

of the wet conche and then, chocolate is ready.

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Here we are dipping arrangements in chocolate.

This kind of work has to be done by hand.

It's a sticky job.

Another fun machine is, the I Love Lucy machine.

Come this way.

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We can take pretzels, we can take apricots,

we can take any kind of thing that we want

and we will put it here,

in this conveyor belt.

It take about seven minutes

from one side to the other.

We will take any kind of little things

that we want to coat with chocolate

and we will put them into this piece of equipment.

And then we turn it on.

So, the nuts going to tumble.

So we put melted chocolates over those nuts.

And then we put cold air to set that chocolate.

So that's the way that we do

all those macadamia that you can see here.

All the almonds, I mean, a lot of the things

that we do here, are done in this piece of equipment.

This machine is called a spinner.

We put chocolates into the mold

and then we cover the mold with the other 1/2.

Then, when that's done, we put the mold

over this magnet here and turn the machine on.

Because the mold is moving,

the chocolate will go everywhere inside the mold.

This is how we do it.

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