Location: French Creek State Park, PA
Today we felt like a sell out. None of this handcrafted, small batch artisanal chocolate. We went right to the industrial behemoth -- Hershey's Chocolate World!! Oh NO!
I remember being about 6 yrs old and visiting here with my family. My memory was driving down this quaint street with big Hershey kiss lampposts. I also remember taking a tour of the real chocolate factory. Afterwards, my folks bought a ton of chocolate. They put it between them on the front seat. My brother Gary and I hung over the front seat and stuffed our faces with chocolate until we were sick. Great memories.
Today's Hershey's is nothing like that (except for the eating chocolate till I was sick part). Now it's a huge amusement park, theatre, sports complex, train trolley, and chocolate extravaganza candy store.
Ned, getting ready to embrace the chocolate onslaught.
The first thing we did was take the fake chocolate factory store. It's now an amusement ride, complete with singing cows, animated chocolate bars and fake equipment making chocolate.
Here's our ride...let's do this!
Think of this attraction as riding "It's a small world" at Disneyland, but with animated talking chocolate bars explaining the process. Ned particularly enjoyed the pumped in fake chocolate smells. I was laughing too hard to notice.
After this warm-up, and getting our free Hershey bar, we signed up for the Chocolate Tasting Experience. We weren't expecting much, but we're actually pleasantly surprised.
The class started out with how cacao is grown and chocolate is made. Very factual, interesting and felt a lot like the beginning of our chocolate classes. Nice job Hershey!
The oddest thing about the class is that dark chocolate was not only down played, but expected to be a bitter, unpleasant chocolate to eat. Go figure.
Here's Ned tasting the nibs. The facilitator actually warned everyone to only eat a tiny bite. Ha! We roast them and sell them in 12 oz bags. Hershey's is definitely not playing to the dark chocolate crowd.
Here's us proudly holding our Hershey's Palateer certificate.
A cool feature in the class, was that as everyone tasted the chocolate they voted on a real-time touch screen what flavor they were experiencing. The results were displayed on the screen at the front of the class. Loved that! I'm going to try and find a way to plagiarize that for our chocolate classes. Stay tuned as I put on my techie hat and figure that out.
We opted not to take the "make your own bar" chocolate experience. We got that down. However, I did get a kick out of seeing what things little kids were putting on their chocolate bar. Red, white and blue sprinkles anyone?!
If the chocolate tasting wasn't enough we topped things off with a Hershey's Special Dark Cappuccino and a cookie. Yum!
Believe it or not, Hershey's actually had a theobroma cacao tree growing in the middle of their Food Court. Well done Hershey.
We decided to leave the amusement park, chocolate world craziness and go into downtown Hershey. Good choice. We found the best part of exploring Hershey Chocolate - it's the Hershey Museum called The Hershey Story.
Here I am reliving my experience of 50 years ago and feeling a bit sick on all the chocolate I've eaten. Time for more chocolate!
This museum was awesome!!! It was all hands-on. You got to experience what it was like to work in the factory during the early 1900's.
Here's Ned roasting beans.
Here I am experiencing what it was like to push a 900 lb. bathtub full of chocolate. (Minus the chocolate).
Ned trying his hand at demolding the chocolate bars.
(In reality, I think Ned has demolded about 20,000 bars in the 3 years we've been in business. He had this down.)
This museum did a nice history of Milton Hershey from caramel maker to philanthropist. I have a lot of respect for what he accomplished. His school for underprivileged kids continues today. Listening to the students personal testimonies was quite moving.
I also really enjoyed seeing the old packaging and
the vintage posters.
We continued East thru Pennsylvania driving thru the Amish country. The farms, barns, buggies and rolling hills were so beautiful. We came into the town of Lititz. Oh look there...the oldest hard pretzel making company in Pennsylvania! How could we pass this up!
As luck would have it we were just in time for the late afternoon tour. Here's Ned making the most perfect pretzel ever. So jealous!
I have a very distinct memory of taking a pretzel making tour when I was younger. I think this was the same place, in the heart of Amish Country.
Ned getting his second certificate for the day. A very productive food science day it was.
Great tour. Hard to believe the amount of hand labor involved it took to make pretzels. This company used the same hand labor process until the 1950's. Kill.me.now. The room temperature was well into the 100's, people had to hand twist 60 pretzels a minute and they started at 2:30 in the morning.
Dinner this evening? Wine & pretzels. Not my healthiest eating day.
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