Opificio

Of the many words that recall my job, ‘opificio’, workshop in English, has always been my favourite.

As opposed to ‘factory’, which is all about the product being created, ‘opificio’ reveals the true protagonist of any production: the work. Opifex, from the Latin word ‘Opus’, work, together with ‘Fex’, to make: ‘to make a work’, therefore, from beginning to end, to conceive it and carry it out.

A pastry shop, as I have always imagined it, cannot be just a laboratory, but rather a workshop, an opificio: a place where works are thought up and made, which for us are these beautiful sweets, our chocolate.

Our production philosophy

It was cocoa that made us aware of our production philosophy.

Even though we had already been making artisan chocolate for many years, according to the Modican tradition, we had never been fully satisfied with it, we had never been proud of it until we managed to carry out the project of radically transforming the production process and completing it with the ‘bean-to-bar’: from the cocoa bean to the chocolate bar, as it is becoming increasingly clear that the production of quality artisan chocolate should be.

I think that it is only when you close the circle, that a chocolatier can feel like a true artisan. A process from which we learn something new about this extraordinary raw material every time.

How cocoa is processed

We went back to the starting point, the selection of cocoa beans, bringing them to our workshop to develop the entire process of their transformation.
We choose by ourselves the ways and times to roast them, trying again and again until we find the exact way for each type of cocoa.
Then we grind them in the cocoa press exactly as first the noble Spanish and then the Modican families used to grind them in the past, on the ancient Metate (mealing stone) and this is how we obtain the grain.

The grain reaches, a few meters away, the small mill, which dissolves it in the cocoa liquor.

And from the cocoa liquor, our bars are born.

The making of the bar

Processing

Just as traditionally occurred on the ancient Metate, still today for the production of Modican Chocolate the liquor, obtained from the processing of the seeds, is worked at a temperature which never exceeds 50°C.

No conching

Most of the production processes of chocolate are carried out – in respect of the artisan tradition – without conching, which is the refining process of adding lecithin and cocoa butter.

Rough consistency

Without conching, when sugar is present among the ingredients, its crystals do not melt: for this reason the consistency of chocolate remains rough and grainy.

Cocoa butter and tempering

The absence of stabilization phases allows cocoa butter to follow its natural tendency to crystallize in a polymorphous and irregular way and sometimes it can appear on the surface of the bar. To limit this phenomenon we perform tempering, a process that pre-crystallizes cocoa butter.

Confectionery

Cocoa is the centre of our work, but the history we have behind us – and which inherits the precious heritage of Sicilian confectionery tradition – does not allow us to be neglected.

For this reason, we are constantly renewing some of the inevitable rituals of this tradition, dedicating ourselves, for example, to the production of nougats, cobaita, aranciata, jams and, when autumn arrives, martorana fruit.