The World’s Finest Chocolate
While the chocolatier’s craft is to turn ‘raw’, untempered chocolate – or couverture – into delicious handmade chocolates, it’s the chocolate maker who buys, roasts and grinds the cocoa beans to make the couverture. For this we turn to Switzerland, home to Felchlin – a family-owned business that shares our commitment to ethical sourcing and quality.
For our couverture, Felchlin uses only the finest and rarest cocoa bean – the ‘criollo’. Grown mainly in Venezuela, the criollo makes up just a small percentage of the world’s cocoa. With its fine, complex flavour, the ‘noble criollo’ is a world apart from the high yield ‘common forastero’, used in the mass production of most chocolate.
Once harvested, fermented and sun-dried, the beans arrive in Switzerland. At Felchlin, they are roasted for longer and at a lower heat than usual to bring out the flavours, and then shattered to separate the bean from the shell. The centre of the bean, the ‘nib’, is then stone-ground to form the powder cocoa mass, which is passed through rollers over a period of several hours to extract the cocoa butter.
The final stage, after adding sugar and milk to the cocoa mass and butter, is ‘conching’. The conching machine – so called because the original design resembled seashells – kneads and massages the chocolate for 60 hours giving the couverture its smooth texture and final flavour.
Once the thick, heavy slabs of top quality couverture arrive at our Craft Bakery in Yorkshire, it’s then hand-crafted into a range of delicious chocolates, from pralines, caramels, creams and truffles, to adorable novelties for children.
Read more about:
About Bettys Chocolates
Our Story
Behind the Scenes
How We Trade Ethically
View our full selection of chocolates.
Raw cocoa beans, drying in the sun.
The finished product - exquisite chocolates.