Zurich and chocolate

 Dear Gentle Readers

I apologise for not updating the blog lately, we've had a busy couple of days, which I will explain later.

Zurich is only  a 30 minute drive from Lucerne so we ventured to a lookout overlooking Zurich when we arrived. Seems like everyone else had the same idea.

This was the view from said lookout. We were too footsore to take another sojourn into an Old Town so we just rested up here.

Here's Victoria resting.

And here's me doing the same. With our busy schedule we seldom get time to just sit and relax.

Zurich, like Bern and Lucerne, has fountains everywhere with the obligatory statue. The water is fine to drink, I know because I tried it.

But the main reason we came to Zurich, besides catching our flight to London, was to visit the Lindt Chocolate Factory. Here you can see the largest chocolate fountain in the world and yes that is real chocolate flowing down. Our guide said there was a tonne of chocolate in the fountain and no, we couldn't taste it for health reasons.

Our lovely young Swiss guide regaled us with much information about chocolate manufacturing. Here she is describing how and where the cacao pods grow. They are sourced mainly from Ghana and South America.

It is quite an involved and labour-intensive process. Here are the coca pods. The seeds become the chocolate mass and the surrounding pulp becomes the cacao butter.

Here are the seeds after they have been extracted from the pods and dried. There is still a lot of processing to be done before they become chocolate.

They are cleaned, pressed and ground into a coarse powder then heated and ground even more. 

Mr Lindt pioneered this machine which took the final mix of chocolate, sugar, cocao butter and heated and rolled it to make it into the final product. When he first started using it, the results were not satisfactory as he only ran the machine during the day when he was at the factory. One Friday night he forgot to turn the machine off and it was left on all weekend. When he returned on Monday, instead of the chocolate being burnt as they feared, it was the smoothest and tastiest chocolate they had ever produced. Quite by accident, Lindt had discovered the secret to producing melt-in-your-mouth chocolate.

Nowadays they have big automated production lines to do this but the principle is still the same. It is amazing how many things have been discovered by accident.

Then it was time to see the chocolate fountains. They had three, one with dark chocolate, one with milk and one with white. We were given spoons and told to help ourselves - as much as we liked. I have to confess I did try all three several times, but the milk chocolate was the best.

One surprising revelation was that all three varieties have the same amount of sugar in them, they only vary in cocao mass and cocao butter. So the next time someone tells you dark chocolate is good for you, you can enlighten them to the truth.

Several more sampling stations brought us to the end of the tour and "chocolated out". We departed for our hotel near the airport, dropped our bags and drove a few miles to the nearest laundromat to wash our clothes. This one was far simpler than the one we found in Milan with instructions in English as well as Swiss-German. Then it was back to the hotel for tea and then to pack and organise for the following day's flight. This is why I have fallen behind on the blog because by the time this was all done, we were exhausted again and just fell into bed.

Tomorrow, London.