• Los Angeles Times , Wednesday, July 16, 2008 11 AM

A new crop of American bean-to-bar chocolate makers are building their own factories -- and sometimes their own machinery -- and tracking down cocoa beans to transform them into bars of chocolate for eating and for making confections.

There's no mistaking these chocolate makers for traditional chocolatiers, who create confections such as bonbons and truffles. Instead of enthusing about ganache, they're wont to talk about cacao genetics, or the advantages of a roller mill versus a ball mill during chocolate refining, or the stability of certain types of crystalline structures in chocolate.

The result is an envelope-pushing variety of chocolate, some of which is on par with the chocolate from Europe that connoisseurs have long considered the standard. "We haven't even seen how great chocolate can be yet," says Colin Gasko, owner of Rogue Chocolatier, who launched his Minneapolis company in November.

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