Children make their own chocolate during lightning training

Photos: Jean Shriver

Schiedam – In cooperation with JINC, De Bonte Koe provided light training to seven primary school students. This makes you want more, according to De Bonte Koe and JINC. From now on, you will visit the school every month to get such training. Part of the training is making your own chocolate.

A slice of bonbon on the table in front of you. Cut a circle or a heart with a dice. Then dip it with a fork through liquid, milk, or dark chocolate. While your bonbon is cooling, garnish with a piece of white chocolate. The cooled chocolate is placed in an elegant cardboard box with a De Bonte Koe bag around it. Like true chocolatiers, they wear a white coat and blue hairnet. Two hours later, the coat was taken off, the net took off and they were the primary students of OBS De Globe again.

Before heading back to South Rotterdam with their mentor Shirin dos Santos, they can pick bonbons to go from their tall display case full of bonbons and bocce. The kids won’t allow themselves to be told a second time and despite the great choice, they are very quick at it. “Give me that zebra.” The zebra doesn’t just look good. “Mmm very tasty,” she said after the zebra finished. “I ate the ones with marzipan, so you should have tasted it,” says her classmate. They are now sitting on a bench at Lange Haven. After all, they still ate homemade chocolate, before they went on the tram with their teacher. How many chocolates were left in the box when they got home? We will never know…

Kids go home wiser after a two-and-a-half hour course in lightning. At 9:30 in the morning they began touring the production area at De Bonte Koe. Watching and listening is great, but doing things on your own is even more fun. It turns out that wrapping a piece of chocolate in a wrapper is not at all so easy. After some practice it worked fine. Almost all the kids have finished the Play Store. But in a real shop wearing special gloves, picking chocolates with pliers and putting them in a box, then weighing, pushing and packing neatly, it’s very fun and educational. Especially if your fellow students on the other side of the table are your customers.

After the lemonade break, there was an hour and a half to make your own chocolate. Chocolate maker Ronald Dean Hollander, who has worked at De Bonte Koe for twenty years, has become a patient teacher. They all ate chocolate, but only one of the seven students ate bonbon. Now they have to make it themselves! Den Hollander started at the beginning. Show the cocoa fruit and then the cocoa beans that pop out. He said it was roasted and then ground very finely. “Just taste it; This is one hundred percent cocoa chocolate. No one likes it. “What are you missing?” As in unison: “Yes, of course.” Ronald: “Then taste this …” Yes, those granules – cocoa with added sugar – turned out to be very tasty. Techniques such as table setting or tempering were then discussed The children learned that “tempering is a hard word for melting chocolate and then bringing it to the right temperature.”

Someone had to stir it with a spoon. “from?” “I,” he was one of the fastest boys. “I can see him flourishing. He is usually very quiet, but now he is always on top. This is what I think is beautiful,” said Miss Sherilyn dos Santos. One of the girls indicated that she wanted to become an interior designer in the future. You can already see The artistic side is in the chocolates that are decorated.’It smells great here,’ another girl said, ‘and I find it educational too.’

Everything ends, including the lightning training at De Bonte Koe. Chocolate factory general manager Mara Bergot made a fitting conclusion by summarizing the children’s occupations at a company like De Bonte Koe. The chocolate maker was the first to be mentioned, but the shop assistant was also mentioned spontaneously by the children. “But we also have packers, managers, social media people, and marketing people,” Bergot said. “Oh yeah, don’t keep chocolate in the fridge at home,” Den Hollander offered storage advice.

Training courses are organized by JINC Rotterdam at companies in the region. The aim of these trainings is to allow children in socially and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods to gain experience and work at an early stage to improve their future prospects.

For De Bonte Koe, it was the first time students from an elementary school had been received for training in lightning. “We are celebrating our 30th Anniversary. We recently started celebrating the opening of a chocolate vending machine in Hoogstraat. We also started these quick drills because of our Anniversary, and will continue to do so. It is fun to do and we see the social significance of it. From now on you will visit the school every month – in collaboration with JINC Rotterdam,” says Amy Klein, co-owner of De Bonte Koe.