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HEBER — The co-founder of Heber-based Ritual Chocolate began her bean-to-bar chocolate journey with enthusiasm, but not much experience.
"Part of what was exciting to me when I started this was that I didn't know how chocolate was made, and I was like, 'Oh, chocolate making is kind of like making a cake. You put it together, put it in the oven,'" said Ritual co-founder Anna Seear. "I had no idea how involved it was."
But the British-born chocolatier quickly found out that "it takes us about a week to make a batch," Seear said. "Yeah, it's a pretty involved process."
Seear learned to make chocolate in a rented, small-scale factory on equipment from Europe.
"We really learned this older European style of chocolate making," Seear said, "which is really about being gentler on the cacao, and just really putting flavor first and texture first."
Ritual Chocolate first opened in Denver in 2010 but moved to Utah in 2015.
"We wanted to be somewhere we felt would inspire us every day," Seear said.
Take, for example, Ritual's most popular bar made with honeycomb toffee.
"My favorite thing about it is how much it represents where we are, Utah based," said recipe developer and operations manager Kim Berg. "We're in the Beehive State, why wouldn't you want to try the Beehive State honey?"
Watch the video above to see the from-scratch chocolate process and learn how cacao beans influence the different flavors.
"Craft chocolate compared to commercially available chocolate is vastly different," Berg said.
