Death is Semisweet by Lou Jane Temple Read Free Book Online Page B

grow cacao trees though. So the chocolate manufacturer blends their nibs, then the nibs are ground under heat. The stuff is then called chocolate liquor.”
    “Is it alcoholic?”
    “No, and don’t ask me why its called liquor, it just is,” Stephanie said as she went over to the sink and washed some chocolaty popcorn chunks off her hands. “The next step is a big one,” she said dramatically. Even she was getting a little impatient. “This is where they put the chocolate liquor under hydraulic pressure and extractthe cocoa butter. The other part that’s not cocoa butter is called cocoa solids. Drizzle that ganache on these, Jackson Pollack style.” She pushed a baking sheet of brownies Heaven’s way. They already had a sheen of milk chocolate frosting on top.
    “I’ve got it, liquor becomes butter and solids,” Heaven recited as she drizzled her dark chocolate ganache over the tops of the brownies.
    “But the chocolate would still have a gritty feel to it, if you tasted it at this stage. You have to refine it, which is where these big steel rollers grind the particles real small. Then it’s conched.”
    Heaven knew if she didn’t bite, Stephanie would be disappointed. “Conch, like the sea animal they make fritters out of?”
    “Rodolphe Lindt—Lindt still makes chocolate—invented this machine that was shaped like conch shells. It smoothes the chocolate in these troughs, back and forth, back and forth. I saw them when I went to Switzerland.”
    “Oh, so you took part of your divorce settlement and went on a chocolate tour,” Heaven said teasingly.
    “I had to know about this stuff, didn’t I? Now listen, we’re almost done. The conching also evaporates the acids and makes the chocolate smoother. And it’s done under heat. Everything’s done under heat. Now the chocolate has to be tempered. It has to be cooled down then heated back up again. Hot, cool, hot. That stabilizes the cocoa butter crystals that are left in the chocolate so they won’t turn the chocolate grainy again.”
    “Whew, are we done yet?”
    “Yes,” Stephanie said solemnly. “Then it’s put in these ten-pound blocks and away it goes, to candymakers. That’s an industry term for anyone who does the thirdtier work, producing actual chocolate confections. Everyone from Godiva to me is a candymaker.”
    Now, Heaven thought. Surely now. “And this is where Foster’s fits in to the picture?”
    “Yes, even someone as big as Foster’s doesn’t do their own second-tier production. I think only Hershey’s in America does both, oh, and also someone around San Francisco, and maybe one someone else.”
    “Steph, when you were growing up, did you ever talk about Foster’s, or was it a forbidden subject?”
    Stephanie was scooping chocolate popcorn into clear bags, weighing them as she filled them. “You know, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t forbidden but we didn’t talk about it either. Sometimes when we’d be at a holiday celebration, Mom or Aunt Carol would say,‘I wonder what they’re doing over on the other side of the tracks,’ some crack like that. But it always made my grandmother uncomfortable and so we didn’t tease about the brothers if she was around. We didn’t eat Foster’s chocolates either.”
    “I had one more question I was going to ask you on Sunday, before we were so rudely interrupted. How’s the company doing? Do you ever hear anything about it from your grandmother?”
    “Why do you ask?” Stephanie replied with a definite chill in her voice.
    “Oh, they asked me to be at this press conference on Friday and I just wondered what it was about. I know they’re going to talk about the New Year’s Eve thing but the person who called me last week, you know, some PR girl, said they had a big announcement to make. I just thought you might know.”
    Stephanie started cleaning up her work area, wiping everything down with bleach water the same way Heavendid at the restaurant. “I’m sure I