Couverture

Overview

Couverture is a bean-to-bar craft chocolatier theme — single-origin bars, inclusion bars, seasonal releases, and professional couverture chocolate sold by the block to pastry kitchens. The persistent background isn’t a flat brown gradient: it’s a hand-written, zero-dependency WebGL2 shader that renders a genuinely glossy, folding chocolate surface with real specular highlights and Fresnel rim lighting, and every interactive tool on the site runs on real, published chocolate-science data.

1. A real tempering-curve visualizer. Select dark, milk, or white chocolate and see the actual 3-stage professional tempering curve (melt, cool/seed, work temperature) plotted, with the real cocoa-butter crystal-polymorph science explained — why milk and white chocolate need lower working temperatures than dark, and what’s physically happening at each stage on the way to the stable, glossy, snappy Form V crystal.

2. A real bean-to-bar process timeline. Fermentation through molding, each stage with genuine published duration ranges and what’s actually developing at each one — flavor precursors in fermentation, real (and genuinely gentler-than-coffee) roasting temperatures, and why conching duration varies so widely by desired quality.

3. A real cocoa-percentage recipe calculator. Enter cocoa mass, added cocoa butter, sugar, and milk solids and get the real resulting cacao percentage — using the actual industry-standard definition printed on packaging (cocoa mass + added cocoa butter, as a percent of total weight), not a common misconception.

The signature GPU background renders a folding, glossy chocolate surface from a hand-written WebGL2 fragment shader: a domain-warped height field drives a real per-pixel normal map, which drives genuine Blinn-Phong specular highlights and Fresnel rim lighting — and it visually tempers as you scroll, reading dull and matte near the top and settling into a tight, sparkling, glossy sheen by the bottom, the same real stages the tempering tool explains. 16 demo bars across 4 categories and 8 real cacao-growing origins, with real sourced chocolate and bean-to-bar photography.