Charlie & the Chocolate Factory

I will hold my hands up and admit I am a bit of a chocoholic…. I will also admit that, despite it being one of my favourite things, I have never actually thought about / discovered how this brown tablet of loveliness is made. I mean, I know you need cocoa beans and they usually come from tropical sounding places like Madagascar, but other than that I am a bit clueless. So on a damp Saturday afternoon we decided to amble through the backstreets of Grasse to find the lovely Maison Duplanteur and get some answers to our questions.

Nestled amongst the cobbled streets of the historic centre of Grasse, just down the road from the famous Fragonard perfume museum and below the Musee International du Parfum, you will find this small but perfectly formed chocolate factory and boutique.

Maison Duplanteur in the heart of Grasse old town

We called in around 2.30pm and asked if we’d be able to do a visit of the atelier – we were told to come back in about 10 minutes, which we duly did, and were met by a lovely, enthusiastic young lady who is one of the chocolate making team.

She gave us a guided visit of how the cocoa beans go from arriving in big hessian sacks to the silky smooth delights that are on offer to buy in the shop.

The kids were fascinated to hear how the sacks of cocoa beans arrive from Thailand, Madagascar and beyond, and are firstly ‘tested’ for their quality – this involves a guillotine type contraption which slices 50 beans in two so they can be checked. 

Cocoa beans

In the example she showed us 2 of the halves were ‘bad’ (/grey). This equated to 2% of the batch which is perfectly fine… as long as less than 18% of the sample are bad that sack has passed ‘quality control’. If over 18% of the beans are bad the whole sack is thrown away!  We were allowed a little taste of a freshly crushed cocoa bean and found it to have a bit of a gritty / nutty taste which wasn’t unpleasant but certainly didn’t taste like chocolate.

Charlie tasting the raw cocoa bean

Next step is a laborious ‘sorting’ process that is done by hand – and really makes you appreciate how time intensive chocolate making can be. Of course this isn’t done by the huge manufacturers but this little producer prides itself on doing each process to the highest level to make for a truly wonderful final product.

It’s then over to the machines for the roasting, shelling and grinding – at the end of these processes you have a chocolatey paste that has a ‘tapenade’ consistency which dries into crumbly-stone like blocks.

The crumbly blocks of cocoa paste and flavours for mixing

The roasting oven on the right and the shelling machine on the left

These blocks are then put into what I would call a big mixer – I think it had a more technical name (concher maybe) but I forget. This process takes about 4-5 days of mixing, adding air and other ingredients -  organic sugar, flavours, milk powder and cocoa butter. If you see a bar of chocolate that is 70% cocoa you will find that the additional 30% is made up of these ingredients – more low grade manufacturers will pad out this 30% with ‘stuff’ – quite often palm oil but here it’s all good quality additions.

This machines capacity is about 500 bars of chocolate!

The last stage of the process is tempering – changing the temperature of the melted chocolate from hot to cool in order to give it that extra glossy look and a nice clean break when you crack off a piece.  This only takes an hour or so but really adds to the look of the finished product.

It’s then into the moulds and cooled / cut. Amazingly some of the cutting machines are incredibly expensive – one of the pieces of equipment is worth many thousands of euros.

And voila! You arrive at beautiful glossy dark bars of hand-made chocolate.

Chocolates!

We completed our visit with a little tasting in the shop and of course bought some more to take home and share with the family. They have all manor of flavours – orange, hazelnut, chilli to name but a few. The unpackaged prices are €7 per 100g and the tablets vary from about €5 - €7. They also have divine looking artisan chocolates and chocolate mousse!

Some of the products in the gift shop

All in all a lovely way to spend an hour or so sheltering from the rain and we came away with some Christmas presents for chocolate loving friends to boot!

Open 10am - 6.30pm every day of the week - you can also purchase their chocolate online - Chocolaterie Maison Du Planteur

Address: 22 Rue Marcel Journet, 06130, Grasse - nearest parking Honore Cresp

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