Blog Visiting Chicago's chocolate academy

When we first caught wind of the Barry Callebaut Chocolate Academy opening mere blocks from our office, it was hard to shake visions of Oompa Loompas, chocolate rivers, and the beloved clip of Homer Simpson imagining a “land of chocolate.”

 

Our recent visit to the Callebaut academy’s open house proved the reality was much more down-to-earth, but no less exciting. The school is little more than three sizable rooms, each are packed with a considerable amount of expensive chocolate-making technology.

Emily Withrow

Also lining the large work-station room were chocolate sculptures bearing grand names like “Pearl.”

Emily Withrow

Chocolate sculpting is one of the many, pricy and multi-day classes offered by the academy, but it’s definitely a discipline to be taken seriously. (There’s a reason classes start at $500 and range up to $900.) But the real reason for the open house, Cusick said later, was for them to study us: They plan to offer budget-friendly classes to consumers and needed to know what kind chocolate amateurs are interested in.

Our guess is that the answer has to more to do with chocolate than it does machinery. Donning hair nets and paper labcoats, 30 chocolate enthusiasts followed him around, listening and nodding, but mostly anxious for what was coming next--a chocolate tasting.

When is the right time to eat chocolate? Cusick says it's simple: whenever you're hungry. He ushered the lot of us into the academy’s classroom—a smallish lecture hall complete with a high-tech vat of chocolate that was also projected via camera onto the room’s TVs and projection screen.

Emily Withrow

We were then walked through the delicate process of not only eating chocolate (it should be swished around the mouth like a thick, melted wine) but the proper language to discuss its taste. (Is it tobacco-y? Mushroom-y? Creamy?) Everyone took their seats and received a plate filled with six different kinds of wrapped chocolates and a bottle of water to cleanse the palette—and as it turns out, our tastes weren’t quite as sophisticated as we thought.

Emily Withrow

First, though, here are our notes from the tasting sessions:

 Chocolate Tasting Notes:

1. Java (32 percent cocoa solids): Butter, toffee, butterscotch, creamy
2. Arriba (39 percent cocoa solids): Raisin, cinnamon, nutty, leather
3. Compound chocolate (34 percent cocoa solids): Grain, wood-y, bitter. Smells bitter, too—used largely for impulse-buy chocolates like Hershey’s.
4. Madagascar (66 percent cocoa solids): Earth, cinnamon, spice-y, mushroom, orange.
5. Sao Thome’ (70 percent cocoa solids): Oak, banana, perfume-y
6. Alto el Sol: Coffee, banana. It’s a plantation chocolate—only one plantation makes this. This is from 2007, and costs $12 per pound. “It should excite your dopamines—it’s like a drug.”

It took about the last 30 minutes of the open house's hour and a half to work through these six different chocolates. Everyone discussed aloud what they tasted as we went down the chocolate line, calling out adjectives until someone got something sort of halfway right. Some one offered, "Banana?" Cusick sought out the voice and corrected, "Yes, exactly! Yellow fruit!"

Professional chocolate-makers were easy to spot, at least for Cusick. "Raisin!" someone called out during the second chocolate tasting, and Cusick immediately turned to him: "Are you in the industry?" He was, and was told to keep quiet while the less enlightened of us were eating our chocolates. Chocolate can have up to 170 flavor components, and that it isn’t something people are born knowing—it’s a skill you have to build upon to recognize. We struggled to get past the initial chocolate flavor.

The evening was brought to a close by everyone receiving a complimentary box of just-made chocolates. One woman in attendance asked Cusick for the proper method to store the box. “Can I freeze it?” she asked, words that fell upon Cusick like daggers to his heart.

“Well, it should probably be gone within a week,” he countered, noticeably wincing.

“It’s just too many calories!” she responded.

We told her to pass her box our way, that we'd be happy to take care of it for her, but she just huffed and pulled it in a little closer to her body. Chocolate hog.