Volo Chocolate: The Sweet Life
Volo Chocolate: The Sweet Life
Burned out from the restaurant industry, chefs Jeff and Susan Mall discovered a new passion and turned it into a thriving artisanal-sweets business.
By Carey Sweet // Photography by Rob Brodman ( Updated )
Jeff Mall is tinkering with his cocoa bean crusher, prepping a batch of chocolate in his commercial kitchen in Windsor. He checks the top bin, a plastic grape-harvest lug from which hand-sorted, hand-roasted beans pass into two Champion juicers to be crushed. The beans flow through food-grade PVC pipes and into a vacuum-hose wind tunnel powered by a Shop-Vac, where they’re winnowed to separate roasted cocoa nibs and bean-hull discards.
