Chocolate crystals viewed under the ioLight microscope

EnJoy Raw Chocolate has a fabulous new production facility in Andover close to ioLight HQ. They make a truly delicious product and best of all it is organic, vegan and free from the yucky additives of mass produced confectionery. So of course we had to think of an excuse to visit Chris and Steph.

enJoy! Raw chocolate is made using Raw Peruvian Criollo Cacao, known as the “Queen of Cacao”, and sweetened naturally with coconut blossom sugar, with a Glycemic Index (GI) of 35. It’s raw because the cacao is never processed above 42 degrees Celsius, allowing the nutrients to remain intact. The result is a luxurious raw dark chocolate with a great texture and a taste to savour!

Chris showed us round their wonderful process and explained that the secret to that texture is controlling the size of those crystals to below 20μm.

We gently softened the EnJoy! Intense over a cup of espresso before putting it on the microscope. The sample is quite thick so we lit it from above using ioLight’s top illuminator. The background on this image is quite dark compared with most of our other images because the bottom illuminator is switched off. The top illuminator has picked out the edges of the chocolate crystals quite nicely. We like this image because it shows off our top illuminator instead of the bottom illuminator we normally use on translucent samples.

The image shows that Enjoy has successfully reached that 20μm target. Perhaps that partly explains why this is the best chocolate we have tasted.

Thanks to Chris for showing us around. You can find out more and buy EnJoy Raw Chocolate on line at http://www.enjoyrawchocolate.com/.

It seems that we have eaten all the samples. Please may we have some more, purely for research of course?