“We have lots of machines; smaller things on the one side, things like a grain mill, chocolate machines, coffee roasters, blenders, things like that. Professional kitchen stuff."
“On the other side is the kitchen proper. There’s a fridge, a hot line right here, a six-burner stove with a conventional oven, a convection stack (that’s two convection ovens), then the last oven is a combi oven. It can inject steam into the cabinet, so you can change the humidity, the temperature, and the fan speed. It’s a German-made oven, and it’s one of the nicest appliances we have."
“We have a soft serve machine. The thing that looks like a washing machine is a freeze-dryer. We have a centrifuge, there’s an ice cream batch freezer, a commercial meat grinder, and a Pacojet, which is another kind of ice cream machine that lets you experiment in small batches very quickly."
"There are also a lot of chocolate moulds, pasta tools, and an ice-maker. Then, we have a storage room at the back where members can rent extra storage space if they need.
“Our members are mostly two kinds: R&D, they’re working on the development of food products for their clients. They’re food scientists. Developing beverages, or frozen yoghurt, protein bars, all kinds of food products. They get clients, and there’s some product that needs help, whether it’s in very early development or there’s some problem with it. Like maybe, it’s changing colour while it’s on the shelves, or becoming gummy, or they just don’t know what they want yet so they need to experiment."
“The other set of members is hobbyists: people who aren’t in the food industry, they just want to have fun exploring all these machines."
“That’s the split in terms of members, but then the other big revenue source for us is team-building activities. If you’re a team looking for something fun to do together, we can put something together for you to do. Chocolate-making is really popular. We also do a pasta-making one with our extruder, and we do an ice cream-making one that’s also popular."
“We have these machines that enable you to melt and then temper the chocolate so that it will be nice and smooth, shiny, and snappy. If you melt a bar of chocolate in a bain-marie at home, and then let it cool down, it gets a satiny finish. That’s called bloom, it’s a recrystallisation of the fat and sugar molecules into shapes that we do not like. So, it’s not an inherent defect in the product, it’s just that chocolate is mostly fat and sugar, and those things crystallise. The crystals can take different shapes. There’s a particular shape that we want. These machines play around with the temperature to kill off the bad shapes, the bad crystals. The different crystals happen to have different melting points, so the machines exploit those different temperatures to leave the current ones."
“It’s like making steel – that’s why it’s called tempering. The difference is that, in the case of steel, you have a structure and you’re looking to insert other elements to add strength, which you’re not with chocolate. But, you are looking to create crystals that line up tightly. When you melt it and reform without temperature, you can see that looks ugly; that’s because there are different crystal shapes that don’t fit tightly together. It’s waxy, and it’s mushy. You put it in your mouth, and the melting temperature is now slightly higher than body temperature, so it doesn’t melt in your mouth."
“Between the food scientists and the hobbyists, everyone is really nice. People feed each other. Everyone has their own projects, but they’re curious about what people are working on, and they share. There’s this one guy who makes chocolate, bean to bar. He comes in with raw cacao beans. He roasts the cacao here, cracks it with a rolling pin, winnows the beans with a hair-dryer – that’s to remove the shells. He does a pre-grind, a dry grind, then a wet grind in this machine that grinds stone on stone. It keeps on turning, and eventually, over one or two days, it gives you very smooth chocolate. He makes little chocolate bars that he takes to his office. He’s not in the business at all."
“Members can always bring one guest, and he just keeps bringing different people to taste things”.
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