Taste Target
Organic cacao from Bolivia’s Alto Beni region. Bold chocolate fudge, sweet dates, roasted cashew and pistachio. We can't stop eating it.
Roasting Notes
Profile Drum Roasting: The profile I used for this is 11:30/13:25/17:25 @ 258 F or in slope notation, 12.3/10.4/6.5 @ 258 F. This translates to coming in pretty hot and heavy but then slowing down a bit shy of 212 F. Under 2 minutes in the development phase brings out the huge chocolate. After that, you want to turn the roast down quite a bit. A classic default profile is often 10/8/6. This is 12/10/6, meaning you are finishing this roast at around half the speed at the start and you need to do this to keep the EOR temperature from getting too high. Much beyond the upper 250s and you court bitter nut notes. I want to caution about just doing 'long and low' as seems to be a thing. If you do that, you run the pretty high risk of not developing the flavors that are there, and in that case you could well be left with the dreaded boring chocolate. We did a roast where development was a little over 2.5 minutes and the chocolate was noticeably less exciting.
Behmor: Due to the cold start of the Behmor, you can just set it on the 1 lb setting with 2.5 lb of cocoa and go. When you begin getting aromatic notes, somewhere around 4 minutes left (14 minutes elapsed of the 18-minute start), drop the power to P3 (50% power) and continue roasting for about another 6-8 minutes, waiting for the aroma to either decrease or get sharp. This is all, of course, if you don't have a thermocouple in the beans (Modifying your Behmor). If you have that, you can follow the profiles above.
Oven Roasting: I've been experimenting a lot recently with a less fussy way to oven roast and I find this procedure works pretty well. It is moderately predictable and repeatable and, although not as dynamic and controllable as a drum roaster, does a good job. You will need an IR thermometer. Roast 2 lb of beans. Preheat your oven to 350 F. Place your cocoa beans in a single layer on a baking sheet and put them into the oven. Stir the beans at 5 minutes and check the temperature. Continue roasting until the surface temperature reads 205-215 F (it may well vary across the beans). At that point, turn your oven down to 10-15 F above your target EOR, in this case 260 + ~15 = 275, and continue to roast, stirring every 5 minutes until approximately 255 F. Again, there will be variation, but the beauty of this method is that turning the oven down makes it difficult to over roast. If you do find your roast is progressing too fast, adjust accordingly, starting at 325 F and/or changing your target to 265 F. Overall, you may well roast 30-40 minutes. The important part here is to get good momentum going in a hot oven and then basically coast to finish.