MayHawk Insights Library

MayHawk Insights 10 Crystal Structure and Tempering Chocolate — Part One: The Science The Six Forms of Cocoa Butter Crystals in Solid Chocolate and the approximate range of temperatures showing the melting/cooling points of each. Form VI is created from…

MayHawk Insights 09 The Ghost in the Machine Hand-sorting cocoa beans at The Studio “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” — Archimedes Chocolate is not just a reflection of the…

MayHawk Insights 08 Vanilla — What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What It Should Never Have Been Vanilla Plantation. Plantation worker holding harvested vanilla pods. “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of…

MayHawk Insights 07 Milk Chocolate — The Legal Definition, the Drift, and What Was Lost Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Wrapper Designs 1915 to 1980. “A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” — Will &…

MayHawk Insights 06 Form Over Function — Why Good Design Matters Even In Chocolate This is a chocolate bar made by MayHawk, using a customised chocolate mould. “Good design makes a product useful.” — Dieter Rams What is Good Design?…

MayHawk Insights 05 The Chocolate House — Deadbeats, Actors, Politicians, & Gamblers Map of London 1642. Approximately 400,000 people lived in London at this time. “…to a Coffee-house, to drink jocolatte, very good; and so by coach to Westminster.” —…

MayHawk Insights 04 Laboratory Chocolate and the Future of the Cacao Belt The biomass of cacao, cocoa powder and cocoa butter, can now be grown in bioreactors. ‘Chocolate’ grown in a laboratory is now a real commercial alternative. It will…

MayHawk Insights 03 Criollo, Forastero, Trinitario. The Genetics of Fine Chocolate. Plantation Worker tending to a Criollo Cacao Tree. “This is one of the disadvantages of wine: it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.” — Samuel Johnson, 1778 How…

MayHawk Insights 02 Theobroma Cacao — The Tree at the Beginning of Every Bar A plantation worker harvesting cocoa pods from a cacao tree. “All food is the gift of the gods and has something of the miraculous, the egg…