When Craft Is Like A Box Of Chocolates

You never know what you’re going to get: Lemuel and the bean-to-bar chocolate they make.

- Charlene Chow

Round and round and round and round. It’s not a hypnotist’s totem we’re staring into but the eye of a melanger, a stone grinder for making chocolate. “This is the longest step in our bean-to-bar process,” says craft chocolate maker and owner of Lemuel Chocolate, Ronald Ng. “We add Brazilian organic cane sugar to a pre-grinder paste of cacao nibs. Stone rollers grind the mixture for at least 48 hours until it becomes a fine, smooth liquid chocolate. After that, we block them and put them into trays for a week or two in an ageing process. Only then would we re-melt the chocolate, temper them and put them into moulds.”

Before reaching the melanger stage, Ng would have taken his cocoa beans through a host of steps, a lot of it done by hand. There is the first ‘cut-test’ to weed out mouldy beans, hand-sorting to remove impurities, a roasting process, then cracking and winnowing to separate the husks from the cacao nibs.

BOONS AND BEANS

This is all in a day’s work for Ng and his two daughters Natasha and Nathalie. At their new premises at Star Vista (a move from Westway building, West Coast Highway), they make chocolate from scratch in their open-concept production kitchen. 12 and counting types of single origin cocoa beans spanning Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia are their raw materials. Single origin implies that the beans come from the same country, area or farm. Just as terroir determines a wine’s character, origin shapes a chocolate’s flavour.