Chocolate starts with the beans. At any one time the
Haigh’s storage warehouse might hold 250 tonnes of
cocoa beans from plantations in equatorial countries
including Ghana, Venezuela, Ecuador and Grenada.
These are roasted, ground and blended in the Haigh’s
factory according to family recipes, which have been in
development since the company started in Adelaide
in 1915. Today, Haigh’s produce eight different chocolate
blends, each with their own flavour profile, as well as
single-origin varieties; in total Haigh’s roasts almost
10,000 kilograms of beans every week.
The process is a long one. First, the cocoa beans
are roasted to a specific profile then broken so that the
cocoa nibs are separated from the husks. The nibs are
ground into a thick paste, called cocoa mass, and mixed
with cocoa butter, vanilla and icing sugar, with milk
powder also added for milk chocolate. The resulting
slurry is rolled to ensure smoothness, and then mixed
and aerated in a heated conch machine during a
10-hour process to remove excess moisture, develop
flavour and caramelise the milk powder. More cocoa
butter is added and the chocolate is then pumped into
holding tanks. 20 tonnes of chocolate a week are
shipped to the Haigh’s finishing factory at Parkside.➤
comicgek
(Comicgek)
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