By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
In between their busy schedules and course work, some Princeton University students have found another way to fill their time: Making chocolate bars.
A student club, called the Institute for Chocolate Studies, is made up of 17 students who take pride in their craft. The low budget operation works out of the university bake shop below the Rockefeller/Mathey College Dining hall, located on campus.
”We can go from bean to bar in a weekend,” said club founder Greg Owen, a confessed “little bit of a chocolate snob” who has not touched a Hershey’s in years. His goal is to begin selling the bars on campus.
Teams of students start working on Friday through the weekend on making the chocolate, all handling a different element of production that involves about eight to 10 hours total.
On Saturday night, two students were busy taking the “nibs,” or innards of the beans, and putting them through a juicer that turns it into cocoa liquor, a pasty substance. Later, that goes into a mélanger a converted rice grinder when it is mixed with sugar.
Due to the limitations of the equipment, students are only able to make up to five pounds of chocolate; the bars are the size of an iPhone.
”Right now, we’ve just been making them for our own experimentation. But the end plan is to distribute them on campus. We’re in talks with (university) Dining Services about selling them in the campus convenience store,” said Mr. Owen, a computer science major from California.
As a student group affiliated with the university, the club is a nonprofit. That means the candy when it’s sold can be sold to cover the operating expenses. Beans run about $10 a pound.
He described the flavor of the dark chocolate as bitter, as the students do not add cocoa butter or vanilla to change the flavor. He said he is a fan of dark chocolate and thinks the product is good.
Mr. Owen, a native of Palo Alto, said he loves cooking and baking. As a high school senior, he was given an entire month to do an independent project, which he decided would be making chocolate.
”I’ve always been interested in chocolate,” he said. “And I always had this kind of idea that it starts off as a bean and becomes a bar, but I really didn’t know what any of the steps in between were.”
Last semester, he contacted fellow students who contacted fellow students to see if they would be interested in joining a chocolate-making club. Ming-Ming Tran, a sophomore from Princeton Junction who is studying chemical engineering, got involved from the start.
”Like after the first day, I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to major in chocolate engineering instead.’ This is so much cooler,” she said.
There was some instruction involved; Mr. Owen credits a website, www.chocolatealchemy.com, as a critical resource for the club.
”Pretty much everything we know, we’ve gotten from them,” he said.
The local Health Department also has done an inspection of the chocolate-making process.
”We clean all of our machines every time we run them, we wash our hands, wear gloves all the time,” said Mr. Owen from the bake shop Saturday.
Though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has something like it, Mr. Owens’ club is the first of its kind at Princeton.
”This wasn’t intended to be a business,” said Mr. Owens to the backdrop of the grinding noise from the juicer.
To hear him tell it, making chocolate is a therapeutic break for students to get away from the rigors of their academic work and do something with “your bare hands.” His hope is that the club lives on past when he graduates.
”This,” he said, “gives you a chance to sit back and work with your hands and make a physical product. And that’s really cool.”
