by Cassidy Nunn –
Anyone who knows me knows my extreme love for chocolate (paired with a good cup of coffee; not much is better than that!) so when I found out that delicious chocolates are being made right here on the Peninsula I was eager to sample them and to see how the treat I enjoy so often is actually made.
Amber Isles founded Rock Coast Confections out of her home around six years ago and began by selling her English toffee and chocolates at local craft fairs. “I didn’t know anything about sugar and chocolate before I started doing this,” says Amber. She’d spent years working in the restaurant industry and has continued her chocolate schooling by taking online courses and travelling to meet other chocolatiers around the world. Her business continued to grow over the years until she found her 400-square-foot, home-based kitchen had been outgrown. In October of 2018 her company expanded into a commercial kitchen space in Central Saanich where they continue to operate from. It’s large enough for the business to have a storefront area where customers are welcome to drop by Monday to Friday (10 a.m. to 3 p.m.) to purchase toffee, boxes of chocolate, protein and energy bars (with vegan options too) and gluten-free ice cream sandwiches.
English toffee is the number one seller for Rock Coast and therefore “it’s what I concentrate most on,” says Amber. The toffee making begins in a gas kettle where the caramel is heated up until it’s liquid. Then a mechanical lift is used to transfer the large cauldron to a refrigerated candy pouring table where the caramel is poured and then flattened out evenly with trowels. After the caramel has cooled and hardened, a cutter is used to slice the toffee into even parts. Amber used to break it up by hand into different sized pieces but it’s quite strenuous work and makes keeping a consistent weight to the toffees too difficult. The toffee is then weighed before it enters the chocolate machine, which was imported from Italy, and is a tempering machine that enrobes the toffee in an even coating of chocolate. The tempering process is incredibly important as is prevents the cocoa fat from separating which can then give the chocolate a waxy texture or little white spots on the surface. The machine blows the chocolate off to a desired level so that all the toffees come out with the exact same amount of chocolate on them. Weighing is crucial as the nutritional information that appears on the labels needs to be accurate and that’s determined according to weight. The toffees are then transferred to racks where they sit and cool at room temperature until the chocolate has hardened. They then spend some time in the fridge before heading back out to the cooling racks. It’s all a part of the tempering process – so much with making chocolate has to do with having the exact right temperature, which is very difficult here in Victoria because, as Amber says: “chocolate doesn’t like our climate; doesn’t like humidity or drastic changes in temperature.”
Any nuts used in the chocolate recipes are all roasted in an oven in the kitchen, but the roasting has to occur at a different time from the chocolate-making process as the oven heats up the space to a point where any chocolates in the area would be negatively affected.
Packaging the chocolates takes about 50% of the production time – it’s a laborious process involving packaging each individual treat, adding nutritional information labels and branding stickers and preparing them for their final destination, whether that’s the storefront, on a hotel pillow, or one of the many retailers that are now selling Rock Coast treats. The recent arrival of a new flow wrapping machine is going to cut the packaging time way down; the machine can process 40 to 230 pieces per minute (yes, you read that right!) depending on how fast the goodies can be fed into the machine. The flow wrapping machine has just arrived and it will take some practice to operate but Amber is very excited about the newest addition to the kitchen.
I had no idea how much work goes into the chocolate making process, and I don’t think it’s an activity that I’ll be trying my hand at any time soon. After spending time in the Rock Coast kitchen, I have a whole new appreciation for my favourite tasty indulgence (not to mention its packaging)!
Rock Coast will be a presenter at Culinaire on March 7, 2019. Tickets are still available for this event.
