Thought of the Day

“Don’t get seduced by complexity.” The Ruzz

Getting rid of that husk. After roasting your cocoa beans, you need to remove the husk. You have basically 3 options.

1) Hand peel. I STRONGLY don’t recommend this. A lot of work and sore fingers.

2) The Champion Juicer with the bottom plate removed will crack beans nicely.

3) The Crankandstein Cocoa Mill was built to do this job.

You choice then is between 2 & 3. The Champion lets you use one less piece of equipment, but creates more dust and hence waste.

“A person is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”

“How do I roast my cocoa beans?”. Well, I can fill pages and pages, make it sound very complicated, technical and impossilbe. In reality, 20-30 minutes at 300 F for a pound or two of beans in an oven will do quite nicely. That simple. Only experience will tell you what a under roasted, properly roasted or over roasted bean smell like.

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”—Theophrastus

“Which cocoa bean should I buy or start with? Don’t I want the best Criollo?” If you are just getting into home chocolate making, frankly, don’t sweat your choice. All the beans I carry will make a fine chocolate. That is my job. Criollo has a big name, but many people don’t seem to like the delicate nature. Forastero will give a great deep chocolate flavor, but may be a little one dimensional. If in doubt, choose a Trinatario that sounds good. You won’t go wrong.

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.”—Erich Fromm

The first step in making your own chocolate is deciding what you want it to taste like. It sounds obvious, but if you don’t know where you want to go, it’s much harder to get there. “Well, I want CHOCOLATE!” you say. Fine. There is a varieties of flavors. In other things you eat, do you like smooth and delicate or bold and aggresive. Think along those lines. We will talk about cocoa bean choice next.

“Do one thing you fear every day.” unknown

Sometimes a particularly acidic cocoa bean smells very acidic during the refining process. This is good and what you want – the extra acidity to be driven off. You have not necessarily underroasted.

“Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it.” unknown

On that subject, I often get the question “Do I have to use all that equipemnt? Can’t I just use (fill in this or that random appliance)? That pat answer is that I have tried and failed with a LOT of equipment and currently list what I know works. Will other equipment work? Maybe or maybe not, I don’t have a crystal ball. But if it is common (blender, meat grinder, etc) the answer is probably no, or more specifically, I could not get it to work.

“If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.” – Will Rogers

I have been asked many times if you can make chocolate from cocoa powder. The basic answer is yes. But you should ask yourself what do you want? Cocoa powder has been processed heavily to get the cocoa butter out. The resulting chocolate would probably be less than stellar.

Should you want to try it, substitute a mixture of 50% cocoa powder and 50% cocoa butter for the comparible amount of cocoa liquor in recipes. You will still need to refine to further refine the cocoa powder and any sugar you add.

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”—Theophrastus

Cocoa Mass
Cocoa liquour
Cocoa liquer
Cocoa licor
Unsweetened “baker’s” Chocolate

These are all the same thing and can be used interchangeably. They are all ground roasted cocoa nibs.

“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” – Aldous Huxley

You may find this lose numbers helpful in formulating recipes.

You will lose 4-6% from moisture when roasting cocoa beans.
You will lose 10-15% from husk waste.
The Champion will retain about 6 oz of cocoa mass.

“If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.”

Oy, it’s been a few days.

When first mixing your ingredients in the Melanger, try to have everything nice a warm – cocoa butter melted, nibs warm, sugar warm, bowl and rollers warm. Note – WARM on that last one. Hot may cause the center nylon assembley to fail – don’t ask :( Suffice to say, I, the Alchemist, am without a refiner for a little while.