Q&A with a physicist turned chocolatier

As a sophomore physics major in the early 1990s, Clark Goble once played hooky for a week. He and a couple of friends drove around 10 hours from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, to Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, he says, they got a staff directory “and started calling group leaders.” Goble ended up with a handful of job offers, and he paid for the rest of his college studies by working at LANL.

Goble graduated in 1995, and a few years later he went into business with a college friend, Art Pollard. For an archaeology major, Pollard has an impressive physics record: During high school he worked at a university nuclear reactor, and in college he worked on the Topolotron, BYU’s pinch fusion facility. Pollard says his dream was to go into plasma physics, but when funding for the field bottomed out, he changed course, developing an interest in searching and retrieving text.

That new direction led the pair to start a software company, Lextek International. Later, following a passion of Pollard’s, they founded Amano Artisan Chocolate , which in the three years since they began selling chocolate has won numerous awards. Chocolate by Amano—so-named because in Italian it means both “beloved” and “by hand"—is available in some restaurants, online, and at the company’s warehouse store in Orem, Utah; a 2-ounce bar sells for $6.95.

Goble told Physics Today how physics figured in his path to becoming a chocolatier.

PT: What did you do at Los Alamos, and how did you choose which job offer to accept?

GOBLE: I wrote code for a combination database and data analysis system, and after that I was doing laser holography of nuclear explosions. It turned out it didn’t work because the plasma densities got so high that the laser would not penetrate to give you adequate holography. But how could I turn down working on nuclear explosions? I had always wanted to work on big science that looked like something out of a James Bond movie!

I had clearance and worked close to TA55, which is where all the nuclear secrets are.

PT: Why did stop your formal studies after the bachelor’s degree?

GOBLE: I sort of calculated out how many years it would be before I got a job, and I decided to work in the real world. All my friends who went on did eventually get professorships, by about the time they were 40. My dad is a physics professor, so I knew what it was about.

PT: How did you and Art Pollard happen to start a software company?

GOBLE: I went rock climbing with a friend a few times after college. It turned out his dad’s property management company had been vandalized, so I came in. It beat laying sewer pipes, which I had been doing for a few months. I basically repaired all the accounting systems. I did a lot of programming.

Art and I started a small computer software business on the side. Once I quit working for [my other friend’s] family’s business to work full time with Art, we finished our text indexing software. We were going great guns. I was all set to buy a Porsche, and then the dot-com crash came and all our clients went bankrupt. We were lucky and didn’t go under. Our biggest customer is Adobe. If you search or index anything, I wrote all that. We still have the company, but we have employees.

PT: So how did you get into chocolate?

GOBLE: We were out in San Francisco with some clients, and we did a tour of a chocolate plant—I don’t want to say which one. Art decided he would like to try to do that. The [software] company paid to have him go to a confectionary school in Germany to train in chocolate making. We wanted to do it in the traditional European way.

PT: What does chocolate making entail?

GOBLE: The basic process is pretty simple, but getting it to work well is pretty difficult. It took us over a year to get it right, and in that period we threw out a lot of chocolate.

You roast the beans. You separate out the chaff, which is the shell on the beans. After that you grind it up, down to about 15 microns in size. The tongue can detect down to 20 microns. You want it just below what the tongue can detect, but not too small, because then it gets really gooey and gummy and affects the flavor. So you are trying to reach this magic point of about 15 microns. You have to worry about the spread in particle size. The machinery is finicky, so you don’t have total control.

The step after grinding is called conching—and it’s probably the most mysterious step in chocolate making. Basically, you aerate the chocolate to take out the volatile chemicals—a common one is ascetic acid, things like that. This effectively gets rid of the bad taste. You may run the conching machine for hours or even days, but we have found that the difference between good chocolate and great chocolate can be just 30 seconds.

The next step is tempering, a thermodynamic process to bring all the chocolate to one stable state. It’s part of the molding process. You have to worry about fats separating from solids. Most of our headaches have come from tempering.

PT: How does your physics background figure into your IT and chocolate work?

GOBLE: We ended up finding antique equipment and hand restoring it ourselves. And we built a lot of electronics. That is where the lab work in physics comes in.

For example, the melangeur—a giant, 6-foot bowl that has 1300-pound granite rollers to grind the cocoa beans. I don’t think it had been opened since it was made in the 1920s. It had clumps of grease the size of your fist. We had to grind the bowl down and repaint it with the paint used to paint bridges. We had to pop the spindle the rollers rotate on. [The spindle] was worn down, so we took it to a machine shop where the guy welded more metal to it and reshaped it. Taking the machine apart was a nightmare. We had to use dry ice on one side to shrink it and hit the other side with a blow torch to separate the pieces.

The melangeur gets the cocoa to a peanut-butter consistency. A roll refiner, with multiple steel wheels, gets it to 15 microns for the final sizing. There are tools to test the particle size, and the range of particle sizes.

We also did a ton of library research looking for papers on chocolate making. We wanted to understand the chemistry really well. It’s less understood than people might think—there are still a lot of mysteries to chocolate making. It’s a scientific mindset, a lot of basic problem solving—that is what science is fundamentally about. For a lot of manufacturing, that ends up being more helpful than people might imagine.

All images courtesy of Amano Artisan Chocolate.