I promised to tell you all about the chocolate spies. I should explain right now that the South Bend Chocolate Company makes chocolates. Not chocolate. Chocolates. They buy the raw materials, including bulk blocks of chocolate, and make them into all manner of bite-sized confections and fun-shaped bars. They have nothing to do with turning the cacao beans into what we know as chocolate, though the free tour explains how this is done.
We took the Inside Scoop tour of the South Bend Chocolate Company. If you ever get to South Bend, do the Inside Scoop tour, not the free tour (you want the free tour, click here and save driving to Indiana). With the Inside Scoop tour, you get a caramel cashew turtle roughly the size of your standard box turtle, you get to dip your own chocolate spoon, and you get to see the chocolate enrobing machine (cooler than it sounds). When you add in the 10% discount on the chocolates from the gift shop, we actually saved money by paying the $4 tour admission. Our tour group included two middle-aged men we decided were Chocolate Spies, sent by a rival chocolate company to check out SBCC's operations. They kept asking technical questions that were clearly beyond the scope of what the tour guide could be reasonably be expected to answer, like how often they remelt the chocolate to temper it, how they avoid chocolate bloom, and whether they use marble slabs or just steel to spread out the caramels and meltaway centers for slicing. You may think these would be legitimate questions, if a bit technical, to ask on a tour of a chocolate factory, but these guys were just acting sneaky. They had all but no interest in what they saw on the tour. All they wanted to know was what wasn't on the tour because they are trade secrets--things like exactly how the drum agitates to get the chocolate-covered peanuts evenly covered with chocolate.
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