“Chocolate making is the ultimate art… being able to make chocolate from cocoa beans is the most important thing.”
This is the opinion of Willy Ferrier, a Lyonnais sculptor with a very particular medium: chocolate. This video from France24 takes you behind the scenes of the French capital of chocolate, the gastronomic mecca of Lyon. In addition to Ferrier’s impressive yoda-like mastery of chocolate design, you’ll get to learn how those at Voisin make old school praline chocolate, which spends 18 hours being “conched” in vintage churning machines. At Bernachon, chocolate is a family business through and through, from grandfather to grandson, cocoa bean to final product. Think of owner Philippe as a kind of real-life Charlie, inheritor of a vast estate of flavors, over which total security must be enforced.
Not even those who work there can resist the allure of the chocolates, it seems, as the video shows one Voisin employee picking a treat off the conveyor belt. “It’s our quality control,” she explains with a smile.
