Chocolate Tasting

Chocolate makers Alan McClure (Patric Chocolate) and Steve DeVries (DeVries Chocolate) will discuss the challenges and rewards of micro-batch chocolate making, explain what to look for and avoid in fine chocolates, and guide participants through a tasting of their hand-crafted bars. The guided tasting will begin at 2 p.m. in the Milestone Culinary Arts Center's main auditorium on Saturday, August 22. The price for the tasting is $7 per person. Reservations are recommended, due to limited seating.

After a life-long love of food and a year living in France led to a passion for fine chocolate that could no longer be contained, Alan McClure decided to start a bean-to-bar chocolate company in 2006. In between cacao sourcing trips to Central and South America, McClure designed his own chocolate-making facility and built several types of small-batch chocolate equipment. In January 2007, Patric Chocolate opened its doors. Since that time, McClure has released two single-origin dark chocolate bars, with other fine chocolate products on their way. To learn more about Patric Chocolate, visit www.patric-chocolate.com After buying his first cacao and making a crude chocolate in 1999, Steve DeVries spent five years -- the last two full-time -- traveling and studying the history and traditions of chocolate. After visiting more than a dozen factories in Europe and the Americas and numerous cocoa plantations in Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Mexico; he started DeVries Chocolate using "100 years behind the times" as a tagline and guiding principle. At DeVries, the chocolate making begins on the plantation with close personal involvement in the fermentation and the slow sun-drying of the cacao to maximize the development of positive flavors and aromas. In the factory, after a long, low-temperature roast, the beans are processed on "classic" granite chocolate machinery, including over three days in the original type of conch invented by Rudolph Lindt in 1879. Finally the chocolate is aged in blocks for at least three months. To learn more about DeVries, visit www.devrieschocolate.com. DallasChocolate.org is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to educate Dallas about chocolate one bar at a time.