Podcast
Episodio 6: Purdys Chocolatier
¿Se lleva bien el chocolate con el agua? ¿Por qué se agarrota el chocolate? Obtenga respuestas a estas y otras muchas preguntas relacionadas con el chocolate en el episodio de hoy.
Presentadores
En el episodio de hoy, Rachel McKinley, maestra chocolatera de Purdys Chocolatier, en la Columbia Británica, le hará las delicias más golosas. Rachel es maestra chocolatera de Purdys Chocolatier, en la Columbia Británica. Rachel es la chocolatera independiente número uno de Canadá y se encarga de crear nuevos y deliciosos productos para la empresa. Dice que el agua y el chocolate no son muy buenos amigos, pero que donde más importa el agua es en los centros de los dulces de chocolate.
Transcripción
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (00:00):
I'm Zachary Cartwright. This is Water In Food.
Rachel McKinley (00:02):
Typically, I've used water activity in product development, and you need to monitor the availability of that water. There's a lot of ways to reduce variation, but obviously, you can't change what you can't measure. Where water matters a lot more is in the centers of confection.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (00:18):
Water has been called the luck of the planet by Daniel Boorstin, and its impact and significance are evident everywhere in the foods that we eat. Every year, billions of dollars are spent by food manufacturers to move water in and out of food products. As a food scientist, I am on a mission to understand how this can be done better. Today's episode is sure to tickle your sweet tooth as we're joined by Rachel McKinley. She is a master chocolatier at Purdys Chocolatier, based in British Columbia. As Canada's number one independently owned chocolatier, Rachel is in charge of creating delicious new products for the company. She says that water and chocolate aren't very good friends, but where water really matters most is in the center of chocolate confections. Let's hear what Rachel has to say on Water In Food. Well, hello, Rachel McKinley. Thank you for being on Water In Food. I'm excited to have you here. You're our first master chocolatier to be on the show, so I'm excited to learn about you and your background and what you do. So why don't you introduce yourself and tell us how you got into making chocolate?
Rachel McKinley (01:26):
Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm Rachel McKinley, and I'm the master chocolatier at Purdys Chocolatier in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. And I got into making chocolate when I was doing my undergrad in microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Manitoba. I'm not a very abstract learner, and so when I started cooking really intensely and trying to figure out how food worked, it really sort of solidified the biochemistry that I was studying, and helped me to understand the concepts a lot better. And it kind of applied to general food, and then I started buying magazines obsessively, and things like that. And one of the things I bought was a Bon Appétit magazine with a make-your-own Christmas gifts section. And I made some chocolates that year, truffles, salted caramels truffles, and they were so delicious, and they were also the ugliest chocolates on the planet.
Rachel McKinley (02:22):
And I started to learn about tempering chocolate, and none of the resources I could find were very accurate, and I just went on this rabbit hole of obsessively trying to figure out how to do this right. And so I started studying and I took a class online at a place called ecolechocolat.com, and I just started obsessively going after figuring out how chocolate works. And very soon, I was just completely obsessed, and sort of the rest is history. It's a long history. If you want me to go into more detail, I can. [Thank 00:02:52] you, that was 20 years ago almost. Well, 17 years ago. So yeah, it's been a while.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (02:59):
Time flies, and even this year has flown by. I can't believe we're here in December, but it sounds like your background is similar to mine. I was a biochemistry student, and to really understand biochemistry, I had to turn to food, and I got into winemaking and wine microbiology for my undergrad and graduate studies. So maybe in the future, we will have to team up and do something with wine and chocolate together.
Rachel McKinley (03:29):
Yes.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (03:30):
But what types of chocolate are you producing now, and who are your target consumers?
Rachel McKinley (03:36):
So I work for a chocolatier, and so the difference between a chocolatier and a chocolate maker is a maker is someone who buys the cocoa beans and makes it into a chocolate that you then use to make other products, and a chocolatier buys the chocolate from the chocolate maker. But my primary role right now is to create new products in the chocolatier space, and I really love that. It's creative and delicious and exciting. And our target audience is Canada. We are Canada's number one independently-owned chocolatier. We have over 80 shops spread across Canada, from Vancouver Island to Ottawa and the very Eastern edge of Ontario. Yeah, so that's our target, is we want to be Canada's most beloved chocolatier.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (04:26):
It sounds like you're well on your way to be that. And when you are making these chocolates, where is water important to your process? Is this something that you're monitoring regularly?
Rachel McKinley (04:38):
Yeah, absolutely. So water and chocolate itself aren't really good friends. So chocolate itself is a very dry food, and it has a very, very low water content, very low water activity. And in fact, if you add water to it when you don't intend to, you completely ruin it, because what happens is you dissolve the sugar out of it that's in solution, and it becomes gritty. And that's called seizing, and that's not something any chocolatier wants to experience. Where water matters a lot more is in the centers of confection, so things like caramels, marshmallows, jellies, places like that where you've added some water either through the addition of cream or butter or fruit purees, and you need to monitor the availability of that water for obviously microbial growth and then also water content for consistency of your product.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (05:31):
And with that water, are you measuring the moisture content, or are you looking more at water activity?
Rachel McKinley (05:37):
So in general, so I work for a company that's 113 years old-
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (05:42):
Oh, wow.
Rachel McKinley (05:42):
... and typically, we've done things very traditionally without a lot of measurement a lot. And we're just moving into the phase these days of trying to use it more. So typically, I've used water activity in product development, particularly for a category that's called ganache. So ganache is a basic mixture of chocolate and cream. Sometimes there's added liqueurs or fruit purees, things like that. And to create something in that space that's stable, you really have to monitor the water activity. And so historically, that's pretty much all we've used it for in our process, but I'm working towards adding both the more comprehensive water activity tracking and more comprehensive moisture content tracking. Because one of the things that happens is we cook things over an open flame, and that causes different rates of dehydration, and then it can cause inconsistent product. So if we can measure the water content, we can create better consistency. Yeah, so kind of in flux right now. It's in an evolutionary phase, if you will.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (06:51):
And so you're really adding that to your process just to focus on the variation and reduce that variation. Is that correct?
Rachel McKinley (06:59):
Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of ways to reduce variation, but obviously you can't change what you can't measure, so measuring is really important.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (07:07):
Are you, are you using water activity to look at moisture migration? So you mentioned the center of chocolates being different. Is this something else that you look into?
Rachel McKinley (07:18):
Not really, because in chocolate, when your chocolate is properly tempered and it creates a shell around a center, let's say you coat a caramel in properly-tempered chocolate, that chocolate actually creates a really great barrier against moisture, so provided it's been handled properly. So it's not hugely a concern. More likely in the confectionary space, particularly with chocolate, you're more likely to have fat migration before you have a lot of water migration. So we haven't really dug into that too much yet, because fat migration is just a much more unstable part of the process that we would tackle first.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (07:57):
Which are your favorite products that you're currently producing?
Rachel McKinley (08:01):
Oh, goodness. I love anything with caramel. I think that caramel is one of the most beautiful and fascinating things that there is out there. Just when you cook proteins and sugars and water together, and fats to create caramel, you're creating thousands of different flavor compounds to create something that has just the most unique texture and flavor profile. Yeah, anything with caramel and nuts is just really right up my alley. I have to do a production tasting where we've sampled something from every production run during the week and we check it for quality and for ways to improve, and when the nutty, caramel-y things show up in that box, I don't just take a bite. I usually finish them, when I should actually... And it's usually my breakfast on a Thursday morning. So yeah, not the best for health probably, but delicious nonetheless.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (08:58):
It's great for your taste buds. I think I'm maybe in the wrong food industry, but that sounds amazing.
Rachel McKinley (09:07):
Yeah, so our caramel recipe is original. [inaudible 00:09:10] Purdys since 1907, so it's had a long time to be perfected.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (09:15):
Wow. I might be bugging you for some samples later. As you go through your production process, are there any types of seasonal adjustments that you need to make to that process, and is this based on things like sales and holidays? Or how do you determine when to make those adjustments?
Rachel McKinley (09:33):
Yeah, that's a really great question, and it actually all has to do with water. So a lot of the things that we cook, like I said, we cook them over a gas flame, and usually in copper kettles, so there's a lot of evaporation that happens. And depending on the humidity... Vancouver's in a temperate rainforest, and the humidity outside in the winter can be very high. And if some of that for whatever reason creeps into our building, it can change the relative humidity in our kitchen, and then we have to change how we cook. We have actual summer and winter temperature zones that we use to cook final products too, and we change it over when the relative humidity reaches a certain point. [Terrible 00:10:18] at remembering that kind of thing. That's what books are for, and notebooks, and work orders and scattered operating procedures.
Rachel McKinley (10:26):
And then the other one that we have is a lot of our products require cooling, and we have water-cooled tables of various shapes and sizes that help to cool the product at a particular rate. And those are cooled by just general city water, and so if the water is cold in the winter time, it takes a longer time for those products to cool. So we have to adjust the cooling time. So that's not so much water activity in and out of the product, but it's the flow of water in and around, mostly around, the product to cool it down. So that's also a critical factor. Yeah, so we have seven different tables that are cooled with water, and adjusting them for summer versus winter is... We can't adjust them. We have to adjust our behavior.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (11:15):
It sounds like you have a really good control over your process, and this probably comes from doing this for so many years, having that history, so it's really interesting that you're able to adjust according to different seasonal variations and changes in relative humidity. Besides seasonal changes, how has your company responded to challenges associated with COVID-19? How has this affected your supply chains, your channel partners, and maybe your ability to maintain your goals?
Rachel McKinley (11:50):
Yeah, that's really interesting. So supply chain has been a bit of a challenge, because a lot of our products, our ingredients particularly, come from Europe. So shipping changed a lot at the beginning of COVID-19, and just the way that things were traveling around the world changed, and so we had some delays in ingredients particularly. And so we just had to adapt by scheduling what we could when we were able to depending on what we had, and making what we could at the time and then catching up later. The biggest change has been forecasting, because it's really hard to tell what sales will be like from our customers. Almost all of our shops are in shopping centers, and so... Each area, each province of Canada is mandated differently by their own provincial health authority, so shops in Ontario might have different mandates than shops in Manitoba, than shops in BC.
Rachel McKinley (12:45):
So managing that and how each region of shops respond has been complicated, and diverting product away from shops when they're closing or back to them when they'll be opening has been a bit of a constant struggle. But then also, you base your annual sales on certain figures from the prior year, and we're actually constantly upgrading our forecast to produce more so we can keep up with our customer demands. So that's great news for us, but it's complicated on all levels, and it's been a really wild ride.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (13:25):
Yeah, I think a wild ride might be an understatement for all of us this year. So with the holiday season coming up, are there any new products that you're excited about?
Rachel McKinley (13:35):
Yeah, definitely. So we launched a brand new truffle this Christmas called the Candy Cane Truffle, and it is a white chocolate shell with a dark chocolate and mint ganache, and it's decorated with red pinstriping on the white shell, so it looks candy cane-esque. And I'm really excited about it because it's a new technology for creating the decoration, and it just looks so stunning, and I've never seen anything like it out in the market. So those ones, if you're interested in them, you should run and get them quick, because they are going to sell out this year. We made a limited number, and they're selling like hotcakes. And then more generally, we just launched an extension to one of our core lines, which is our Hedgehogs, which are a milk chocolate and hazelnut center. But we launched it with other shells, one in gold chocolate, which is a caramelized white chocolate, and one in ruby chocolate, which is a new chocolate in the market in the world.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (14:33):
Well, all of that sounds amazing. Somebody listening to this podcast, what's the best way to find your chocolates? Is it by going to your website, or what else do you recommend?
Rachel McKinley (14:45):
Yeah, purdys.com is the best way, for sure. We have a really robust shipping system, and we ship all over. And otherwise, all of our shops, our physical shops, are all located in Canada. So if you're here, you can Google your nearest Purdys, but if you're in the US you can definitely order online from us.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (15:03):
Great. Well, all of that sounds really tasty. I'm really looking forward to trying some of these chocolates and ordering some myself, so maybe I'll treat myself for the holiday season and put something together.
Rachel McKinley (15:18):
Awesome, as you should.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (15:21):
Well, we want to thank you for being on Water In Food. You gave us a lot of good insight into why water is important to your process. Do you have any final comments before we wrap things up?
Rachel McKinley (15:33):
Just thanks for having me. This has been a pleasure.
Dr. Zachary Cartwright (15:35):
Yeah, of course. Thanks again for being with us. I'm Zachary Cartwright. This is Water In Food. Find this podcast on Apple iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
