THE GIOARI CHOCOLATE FACTORY

The bags of cocoa beans are further sorted, and the product is cleaned of any foreign matter using special machinery.

The heat of roasting helps to eliminate excess humidity and allows the finest aromas of cocoa to develop. Roasting times and methods vary according to the variety and origin of the bean.

Roasted beans are crushed into small pieces by means of a cocoa crusher which separates the cocoa skin from its inner part called cotyledon. The product resulting from this process is called cocoa nibs.

At this point cocoa beans are turned into a liquid paste called cocoa liquor or cocoa mass. It is made up of a fatty part, being cocoa butter (obtained by breaking down the cell walls by friction) and a dry part of the cocoa.

The cocoa mass or cocoa liquor is pressed by hydraulic presses which extract the fatty part or cocoa butter. The dry residue of this pressing is called cocoa powder.

The right proportions of ingredients are wisely blended together with cane sugar to achieve the refined flavours of our chocolate range.

Refining allows the size of the mixture to be reduced to particles smaller than 18 microns.

The conching phase lasts an average of 14 hours in order to achieve different purposes: to improve the amalgam of the components in the chocolate, to reduce the acid or astringent aromatic parts and to extract the residual humidity.

In order to obtain a qualitatively stable chocolate over time, which guarantees easy unmoulding and a perfect crystalline structure, it is necessary to proceed with one of the most important phases of chocolate production, called tempering. This phase allows the selection of cocoa butter crystals only in the most stable form obtained by cooling and subsequent heating of chocolate according to precise tempering curves.

At this point Gioari chocolate is packaged, and thanks to its versatility, it is ready to create infinite recipes.