Chocolate frontiers

SAN FRANCISCO — MEET THE new Willy Wonka: Timothy Childs is a former space shuttle technologist who's building a 29,000-square-foot chocolate factory on prime waterfront property in the Embarcadero. He stands in the factory's laboratory inspecting a sample of split-open cocoa beans, pointing out the ones that have been properly fermented and talking intensely about the hedonics of chocolate -- as in the hedonistic sensation of eating it, how it melts in the mouth, when it starts to break apart and the way in which flavors and sugars are released. "We're freaks about it," says Childs, chief chocolate officer (his official title) of Tcho.

He's not the only sweet tooth/techno-tinkerer with chocolate on the mind. In fact, Childs is one of a generation of new Willy Wonkas, a recent crop of American bean-to-bar chocolate makers who are building their own factories -- sometimes their own machinery -- and tracking down cocoa beans to transform them into bars of chocolate (also known as couverture), for eating and for making confections.

There's no mistaking these chocolate makers for traditional chocolatiers, who create confections such as bonbons and truffles. Instead of enthusing about ganache, they're wont to talk about cacao genetics, or the advantages of a roller mill versus a ball mill during chocolate refining, or the stability of certain types of crystalline structures in chocolate.

These entrepreneurs tend to be excited about a just-found piece of vintage machinery (say, a 1930s mahogany winnower) or the next shipment of beans from Bolivia. They're continuously experimenting with roasting times, for example, or with stone-grinding techniques. Or they're taking the extra steps (or leaps) to oversee the drying of their own beans or to press their own cocoa butter.

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Setting new standards

The RESULT is an envelope-pushing variety of chocolate, some of which is on par with the chocolate from European producers that connoisseurs have long considered the standard.

"We haven't even seen how great chocolate can be yet," says Colin Gasko, owner of Rogue Chocolatier (a chocolate maker despite the word "chocolatier" in the name), who launched his Minneapolis company in November. "I don't think that anybody in the world making chocolate right now is making the best chocolate that can be. There's such tremendous potential."