Hand-crafted, bean-to-bar chocolate that’s good for you!
How We Make C-Sweet Chocolates
At C-Sweet Chocolate, our bean-to-bar chocolates involve several steps requiring an abundance of love, care, and attention.
Handcrafting chocolate from scratch, we hold the reins tightly on quality, ensuring that every element in our chocolate is as clean and natural as it is delicious.
Our selection of chocolates is crafted from ingredients that are organic and completely free from any contaminants — because we believe in offering nothing but the best.
Plus, we have the ability to control the flavors and sweetness levels, resulting in unique and personalized chocolate.
When you make chocolate from scratch, you gain a deeper understanding of the chocolate-making process which makes it rewarding and such a creative culinary experience.
Sourcing
When it comes to our ingredients, particularly our cacao, we want only the best for you, our customer.
It’s important to us to work with rare and unusual beans that no one would use for couverture chocolate.
We took our usual hard-nosed scientific approach, delving into everything we could learn about cacao history, farming, fermentation, rheology, and flavor.
We've learned a lot in this search and have found the right people to work with.
We provide products you can be proud to know are ethically sourced from distributors who have direct-trade relationships with cacao farmers or co-ops at origin.
Sorting
When you open a bag of cacao, you can really experience the region it comes from, which makes trying new beans an adventure in curiosity.
With training and experienced senses, you can tell how well the beans are taken care of, giving confidence in the care and passion put into the product from the very start.
By carefully examining the bean’s external and internal appearance and taste, we’re able to determine the roast we’ll use on the beans and sort out any unwanted bits.
This ensures only quality beans make the cut for the chocolate you’ll be enjoying.
Roasting
My favorite part of this stage is that it makes your whole house smell like brownies! There’s nothing quite like it!
Our cacao beans are slow-roasted to ensure sterilization and flavor development. We typically do a lighter roast to ensure a more pure-bean experience.
The main reason for roasting is to dry the beans even more to get most of the moisture out of the beans, as chocolate and water do not mix.
Up to 2 pounds of beans are roasted for 18 minutes at a time. The cacao beans then cool for at least 3 hours before moving onto the next step.
This roasting process isn’t just for flavor — it makes the cacao safe from harmful bacteria that could be in the surrounding areas where the beans are dried.
Cracking & Winnowing
This step is required for any small-batch chocolate maker, and Leanne’s amazing husband, John, used his knack for engineering, making this step unique to C-Sweet Chocolate’s from-home set-up.
John saw flaws in all of the winnowing and cracking machines on the internet, so he decided to create his own machine.
After some trial and error, this unit perfectly separates the husks and nibs.
His machine draws the husks into a shop vacuum after the cacao beans are cracked by the Champion Juicer.
The weight of the cacao nibs makes them fall into a bowl while the lightweight husks are sucked up into the vacuum.
This process yields 80% of the cacao nibs (the inner part of the bean), which smell like you’re sticking your whole body into a chocolate bar.
It’s a full-body experience, and you can just imagine the pod on the tree soaking up all the nutrients around it.
Refining & Grinding
This is where the real magic starts to happen!
After the beans are cracked and winnowed, we use a food processor to release the fat from the nibs to make a paste.
Once the nibs are refined they then go into a machine called a melanger. This stage can last 24-72 hours.
All the powder molecules get ground down to the smallest micro-particles so they won’t be detected by your taste buds and feel grainy but smooth.
After a few hours, sugar and any other powdered inclusions are added.
While this is the longest part of the process, it’s well worth it.
We took beans and made pure chocolate with three ingredients, and we can now make whatever we want. The only thing between you and pure bliss from chocolate is the imagination.
After the much-anticipated end to the conching and grinding, we taste the chocolate, and it’s perfect!
We look for a fluffy consistency and a smooth texture — we don’t want to feel the chocolate stick to the top of our palate, but rather something that melts in your mouth and has a complex flavour profile.
Tempering
All this beautiful chocolate is then poured into a container where it will sit and harden.
As chocolate has a crystalline form, it needs to be tempered to get a product that doesn’t melt in your hand, snaps when you break it, and has a smooth-mouth feel.
While you can temper the chocolate by hand, we save time with larger batches by using a tempering machine.
Taking a chisel and hammer and breaking up the chocolate block as if it were a block of granite really makes you feel like a sculpturist discovering the beauty within the chocolate.
Moulding
This step is what gives the chocolate its shape.
If we’re just making bars, we mould them into bar-form — the result — a single-origin bar.
If we include infusions, we add them to the mould and pour the tempered chocolate on top — then we’re done.
With our shell-shaped chocolate, we have to be careful to get it just right.
We want the shell to be thin enough so that when you bite into the piece, it snaps. It’s a lot of fun just hitting the side of the mould and seeing all that chocolate spill out.
Packaging
Why waste when you can recycle or repurpose?
C-Sweet Chocolate prides itself in being a full-circle chocolate maker, and our packaging is what makes it so.
Leanne learned how to make paper with husks and recycled shredded paper. As a big proponent of sustainable products, this was an easy decision.
So, how do we make our packaging from cacao husks?
First, cacao husks and shredded paper are combined with water and let sit overnight. This mixture is then put into a blender to make a pulp.
Next, this pulp goes into a large basin with water and is stirred around. Once all the pulp is incorporated, we use a deckle and screen to pull the paper. This is then set on towels and sponged off to get rid of all the extra water.
The paper is then turned onto a drying board and left to dry over the course of a couple of days. We then press the paper with an iron so it is nice and flat.
Then, we cut out the paper put score lines in to create a package. We sew the cover and back onto the package as we want to avoid glue products. Leanne was a seamstress for many years so it seemed like an easy decision to sew the labels on.
Then, the bar is wrapped and placed into the package, ready to place in the hands of the customer to enjoy.
Our package for the Nutribites is an aluminum tin as it’s more sustainable, and we can get a month's supply to the customer.
Shop Our Bean to Bar, Single-Origin Chocolate Bars
C-Sweet Chocolate Love
Don’t just take our word for it. Here is what some of our satisfied customers have said:
"We were fortunate to attend a C-Sweet chocolate tasting where we were comparing the flavors of chocolate made from the beans from various sources. It was remarkable to experience the consistent flavor of singe-origin chocolate. We look forward to experiencing C-Sweet chocolate with their unique flavors in the future.” — Bill & Linda C.
“Leanne is passionate about making chocolate and has dedicated much time to learning the craft. Her detailed hands-on attention in every step of the process (from sourcing, roasting, and grinding the beans to the end product, where even the outer wrapping and labels are made by hand and can be thoughtfully personalized) has resulted in the highest quality and most unique-tasting chocolate my husband and I have ever tasted. Leanne’s curiosity for creating new flavours leaves us in suspense about what she will next concoct.” — Marja M.
“Working with Leanne to have custom chocolate made for our retreat was one of the best experiences from start to finish. It felt so good to talk with her about what we were looking for — it was like she already knew. Seeing the custom packaging with our logo brought a tear to my eye, and seeing everyone enjoy their chocolate put a smile on my face. C-Sweet Chocolates exceeded our expectations and knocked it out of the park. Their chocolate is outstanding and truly some of the best we have ever had. An unforgettable experience all around.” — Jennifer B.