"Making chocolate requires some big, expensive machinery"

The title "chocolatier" can refer to someone who processes cocoa beans into chocolate, but more often it's someone who takes that chocolate and works it into candies or other products. I’ve been a chocolatier for over 20 years now, but I have never "made chocolate". Making chocolate is, at the very least, a semi-industrial process, by which I mean that some heavy-duty machines will have to be involved. This applies especially to two aspects of the process: the "refining" (grinding) and the "conching".

The tongue is an amazingly sensitive tactile organ. It is capable of feeling incredibly small particles, but you want the chocolate to feel perfectly smooth in the mouth, which means that all of the solid stuff in the chocolate has to be ground down to about 20 microns in diameter (about like 10X powdered sugar) or finer. Nothing in even a professional kitchen will get you anywhere near that. Centuries ago, chocolate was ground on stones, but if you were to taste that chocolate today, it would feel like your mouth was full of sand.

The second problematic step would be the conching, a process that accomplishes several desirable transformations: it gets rid of the acetic acid (vinegar) that is a by-product of the fermentation of the cocoa beans, it further smooths and reduces the solid material of the chocolate, and it thoroughly coats all of the solids with the fat component of the chocolate, the cocoa butter. Even a small conch is a big, heavy, expensive machine. There is no other way of getting the same results.

All of these pieces of chocolate manufacturing equipment do exist in miniature versions; they are used by manufacturers to process test batches of chocolate for testing shipments of beans and composing new blends. They don’t yield anything like a polished, marketable product because that’s not what they’re used for. Even these mini-machines are very expensive.

That said, there are a handful of smaller chocolatiers that have equipped themselves with small production machines so that they can have the cachet of making their own chocolate. That does have a certain marketing appeal, but frankly, I’ve never tasted any such chocolate that I thought was close to the quality of the best commercially available chocolates. There is simply no advantage that I can see to making your own. You could come up with something that looks like chocolate and has all the right stuff in it, but the big boys can do it much better. Add to this the fact that they have access to a variety and quality of cocoa that you and I would never get.

We are blessed to have access to some amazing chocolates from all over the world, far more than when I started in the business. Most chocolatiers, myself included, buy these great chocolates and take it from there. There’s a whole lot more to it than just pouring it into molds, though, which is why you don’t see many chocolatiers around. Even without making your own chocolate, it’s considered one of the most technically demanding branches of the culinary arts.