Visited the Callebaut chocolate factory!!

And it was a most interesting trip! Met at the Academy, and by 8am we were all on the way. Traffic was pretty good, and the map they sent us was extremely good! No problem finding the place - in Klang!

By 9.40am we were all seated in their training room (freezing our butts off!), watching a video that basically took us through the cycle from cocoa pod to shipping off the cocoa powder, cocoa mass, and cocoa nibs, to the factories in different countries.

- Here we are, in the training room.

- and this is Jean-Marc. He had such a lot of patience with us!

After the video we had a short Q&A session with our host, Jean-Marc, and then we had a tour of the factory (no pictures allowed in the factory :-p). From there, back to the training room where Jean-Marc showed us cocoa pods, cocoa beans, cocoa nibs...

- cocoa pods, dried

- cocoa beans, extracted from cocoa pods

- cocoa nibs, extracted from the cocoa beans.

He then got us to taste different couverture chocolates (2 milk, and 7 dark) from different countries. Amazing range of flavours!

- These are the 7 varieties of dark couverture chocolate that we tried. My favourite was the Trinidad dark choc! Smooooooth and so nice and tasty!

He then showed us WHY we have to temper chocolate - basically it is because the cocoa butter requires tempering properly, or else it will crystallise. He tempered cocoa butter for us to see, and it was really interesting watching the transformation from liquid to solid. Now I can understand a lot better why the tempering process is necessary!

- the chocolate bar on the left was done with UNtempered chocolate, while the one on the right was done with properly tempered chocolate. The one on the left crystallised while the one on the right remains perfectly smooth!

- here you can see tempered cocoa butter, the round yellow patch on the table(!), which has taken just 3 minutes to set. The translucent yellow patch is untempered cocoa butter which is still liquid, even though it has been lying on the table for at least 10 minutes at this point.

We had lunch after that - provided by Callebaut. This included 3 items for dessert - 2 different types of cakes, both very yummy, AND the most amazing ROCHER I have ever seen! They were HUGE (and that's putting it mildly!). Had to share with Xiao-Ly as I just could not finish one by myself. Half was all I could manage :-p. They then gave us catalogues (showing their products) and a bag full of chocolates each! Truly generous :-D.... and then we all headed back to KL feeling rather happy with the whole day.

Till next time, have a good day, every day!