THE FIELD TRIP

On Wednesday, Jan. 25, Phoebe and I took Faith, Abby, Bede, and Gilbert on a field trip to the Bedré chocolate factory. The excursion had been planned by Phoebe’s Yahoo group, Oklahoma Natural Parenting Homeschoolers. Quite a few families participated, and all the children seemed to have a good time, so the event must be judged a success.

It was educational, too. At least, I learned a few lessons.

Frankly, none of us knew what to expect. All we knew was: this was a chocolate factory, and they offered public tours. Since chocolate is a topic in which our offspring have a demonstrated interest (sometimes bordering on devotion), we hoped it would be a good introduction to the world of industry, commerce, and free enterprise. It was all that.

And yet, I have to say it was a disappointment. I had hoped to be conducted on a tour of the facilities there. But the only two rooms open to the public are the gift shop, and an empty narrow hallway behind the gift shop.

I had hoped that the tour would show, or at least explain, the process of making chocolate. It did not. We did see (through a window) some chocolate-covered potato chips being made, but the chocolate itself was already mixed. I honestly don’t know if any chocolate is made by Bedré Chocolates, or if it is only molded, poured, packaged, and sold there.

And even the pouring and packaging which we did witness were not explained in any detail by our tour guide, who doubled as the cashier at the gift shop. She gave a brief speech about the kinds of candies they sell, and went back to work.

I had also hoped to get some good photographs. I even bought new batteries for my camera for this very purpose. But photography is not allowed at Bedré Chocolates.

And finally, as long as I was hoping for stuff, I hoped for some free samples at the end of the tour. There were none. In fact, there weren’t even any reasonably priced samples. (Edit: Phoebe tells me she thinks there were free samples, but we just didn’t get any.)

In retrospect, if I had known we were just driving the kids to a candy store, I could have taken them to the Russell Stover on Northwest Expressway right here in Oklahoma City. They would have seen just as much industry, commerce, and free enterprise, and I could thereby have saved about two hours (and maybe 20 dollars).

HISTORY

To repair the regrettable lack of any contextual information about the manufacture of chocolate during our field trip, I shall give a cursory overview here.

The “cocoa bean” is not, strictly speaking, a bean. It is the seed of the cacao tree, indigenous to South America but cultivated in tropical climates worldwide. Each bean yields two substances essential to chocolate: white fatty cocoa butter, and brown bitter cocoa solids. These two ingredients, plus sugar — and optionally, milk and vanilla extract — make the divine food we call chocolate. (It was Linnaeus who named the cacao tree Theobroma, Greek for “God Chow.”)

Though the Aztecs and Mayans had used cocoa as a foodstuff — and also as money — they never made chocolate. Solid chocolate was invented in Turin, Italy, in the 18th Century, and chocolate-making methods were perfected in Holland by Conrad van Houten, in 1828.

GETTING THERE

The Bedré factory is in Pauls Valley, about an hour south of Oklahoma City, at 2001 West Airline Road. There are no directions or map on their website, so Phoebe used the Internet to get precise directions, and wrote them down in big red letters. So this was my itinerary as I drove our student body to the Land of Chocolate:

But just about where Pauls Valley should have been, we hit a snag. There, right in front of us and rushing at us at high speed, was an exit for “Airport Road.” I couldn’t take a picture at the time, but it looked something like this:

Airport Road? But my directions specifically said to exit at “Airline Road”! I asked Phoebe: “Are you sure it was Airline Road?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, should I exit here, or keep going until we see Airline Road?”

“I… don’t know.”

Fortunately, in the nick of time, advertising resolved the dilemma for us. Right there by the Airport Road exit, a billboard advised us: “Bedré Fine Chocolates Exit Here.” Thank God we live in America, where advertising is a Constitutional right.

So I exited at Airport Road, and dutifully headed east, as my now somewhat discredited itinerary demanded. We drove generally easterly, as the rustic road took several turns, passing rustic homes and rustic farms, rustic barns and a rustic airport. We searched the rustic scenery in vain for any clues to the existence of a chocolate factory.

After six rustic miles, I spotted three rustic men standing in the parking lot of a rustic “Solid Waste Removal Company.” I asked them if they could tell me where a chocolate factory might be. They looked at each other. One finally said: “Well, I’m not sure where it is from here…”

In case you haven’t guessed yet, it turns out that our destination was in fact west of the interstate, and not, for instance, east. Once again I drove the rustic but now familiar contours of Air-something Road, up to and past the junction with I-35, and finally, with much relief and only a few minutes late, we reached Bedré Fine Chocolate.

Most important lesson learned today: Do not trust the Internet.

WHAT GOES ON THERE

As I mentioned, we were allowed to look through a window into a room where candy is made. The room was very clean and white, and we saw white-coated women and girls working at gleaming stainless steel machines. None of these machines was described to us in any detail, but I shall describe them here.

The candies being made during our visit were chocolate-covered potato chips. The process of covering potato chips with chocolate is technically known as “enrobing.” At one end of the assembly line was a girl feeding potato chips into an enrobing machine. I believe it was a Tempa 420, made by A.E. Nielsen, a Danish company specializing in confectionery equipment. This is what a Tempa 420 looks like on the showroom floor…

…but of course when we saw it, it was in operation. Rows of potato chips were being transported via conveyor belt through a constantly churning brown ooze of dripping molten chocolate. The chips rolled out the opposite end, each one enrobed in a half-ounce of chocolate. After enrobing, the chips rode through a long “cooling tunnel,” which occupies most of the length of the room.

The cooling tunnel works by gently circulating air past a cooling element in the center. The tunnel has to be long, because the cooling must be done gradually, to avoid damaging the chocolate.

“OUR NAME SAYS IT ALL!”

Bedré Fine Chocolate is an economic enterprise of the Chickasaw Nation, “a Native American company producing fine chocolate in the very heart of Oklahoma,” they say. (Any objective cartographer would have to agree that Pauls Valley is significantly south of the heart of the state, but here poetic license must be granted, as “the very prostate of Oklahoma” would not project the correct image.)

The name “Bedré” (pronounced “beh-DRAY”) “simply means ‘better’” according to the Bedré website, which is wrong. In truth, “bedré” does not mean “better,” nor does it mean anything at all in Chickasaw, or in any language. It is a made-up word.

The Danish word for ‘better’ is bedre, with no accent over the e, and it is pronounced quite a bit like the English word ‘better.’ Our chocolatiers evidently coöpted the Danish word but changed the spelling and pronunciation to give it what they thought was a more sophisticated cachet.

YES, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHOCOLATE?

I bought a five-ounce package of the chocolate-covered potato chips (they come in canisters, like Pringles) for seven dollars. I had hoped to photograph them to illustrate this post, but they disappeared before I could take their picture. This photo, from the Bedré brochure, is an accurate depiction:

I also bought a half-pound of chocolate-covered roasted coffee beans (delicious), and a box of assorted “meltaways,” which are molded chocolates filled with gooey centers. We took these comestibles home, along with four inedible (but irresistible) chocolate-covered Gleesons, which we will keep forever as a souvenir of our visit to Pauls Valley.