Of the many
words that recall
my job, ‘opificio’,
workshop in English,
has always been
my favourite.
As opposed to ‘factory’, which is all about the product being created, ‘opificio’ reveals the true protagonist of any production: the work. Opifex, from the Latin word ‘Opus’, work, together with ‘Fex’, to make: ‘to make a work’, therefore, from beginning to end, to conceive it and carry it out.
A pastry shop, as I have always imagined it, cannot be just a laboratory, but rather a workshop, an opificio: a place where works are thought up and made, which for us are these beautiful sweets, our chocolate.
Our production philosophy
It was cocoa that made us aware of our production philosophy.
Even though we had already been making artisan chocolate for many years, according to the Modican tradition, we had never been fully satisfied with it, we had never been proud of it until we managed to carry out the project of radically transforming the production process and completing it with the ‘bean-to-bar’: from the cocoa bean to the chocolate bar, as it is becoming increasingly clear that the production of quality artisan chocolate should be.
I think that it is only when you close the circle, that a chocolatier can feel like a true artisan. A process from which we learn something new about this extraordinary raw material every time.
La nostra selezione di semi
Tutti i miei bean-to-bar sono il frutto di un profondo lavoro di selezione e sperimentazione, a partire dalle più preziose varietà di cacao: dalla Colombia, dalla Bolivia, dal Nicaragua, al Perù, dal Vietnam, dal Messico, dalla Papua Nuova Guinea, dal Madagascar, ogni giorno ci arrivano i semi da cui nascono le nostre tavolette monorigine.
How cocoa is processed
Selection
We went back to the starting point, the selection of cocoa beans, bringing them to our workshop to develop the entire process of their transformation.
Roasting
We choose by ourselves the ways and times to roast them, trying again and again until we find the exact way for each type of cocoa.
Grinding
Then we grind them in the cocoa press exactly as first the noble Spanish and then the Modican families used to grind them in the past, on the ancient Metate (mealing stone) and this is how we obtain the grain.
Milling
The grain reaches, a few meters away, the small mill, which dissolves it in the cocoa liquor.
And from the cocoa liquor, our bars are born.
The making of the bar
Processing
Just as traditionally occurred on the ancient Metate, still today for the production of Modican Chocolate the liquor, obtained from the processing of the seeds, is worked at a temperature which never exceeds 50°C.
Cocoa butter and tempering
The absence of stabilization phases allows cocoa butter to follow its natural tendency to crystallize in a polymorphous and irregular way and sometimes it can appear on the surface of the bar. To limit this phenomenon we perform tempering, a process that pre-crystallizes cocoa butter.
No conching
Most of the production processes of chocolate are carried out – in respect of the artisan tradition – without conching, which is the refining process of adding lecithin and cocoa butter.
Rough consistency
Without conching, when sugar is present among the ingredients, its crystals do not melt: for this reason the consistency of chocolate remains rough and grainy.