iguana | Making chocolate from cacao beans

I got it into my head at some point that it'd be fun to try to make chocolate from scratch, and so last month Emily and I got hold of some cocoa beans and found some guides on the internet. Here's what happened!

Roasting, blending, and conching

Beans

Most guides on the internet recommend Chocolate Alchemy for beans, and their prices look reasonable compared to the pack we bought (Sevenhills Organic Cacao Beans) - however their shipping costs to the UK are prohibitive.

Having opened the pack, the smell of chocolate was quite strong. Ours also had quite a fruity scent to them, which we could taste in the finished product.

The beans themselves have a thin papery shell on them, inside which is the main bean, which is quite crumbly, especially when raw. We tasted the insides of a raw one and the taste was quite bitter.

Roasting

We used about half the beans in the 500g pack and spread them out onto a baking dish. Oven heated to 150°C and in they went.

The guides state that they should be cooked until the acidic smell is gone and they smell like chocolate brownies. For us, that took about 20-25 minutes but we found they still tasted quite acidic after they'd cooled down and we tried another. Next time I would want to keep them in for longer until this was definitely gone - though I wouldn't know how to make sure not to burn them!

Husking

It took a good couple of hours to de-shell all the beans, possibly because they were underroasted, but it was always going to be a fiddly process. You end up with a lot of husks, shown above, which are just thrown into the food waste bin, and left behind are the cocoa beans themselves:

Sometimes the beans will break up into nibs but that's fine too.

Refining

The most exciting part is turning the roasted beans/nibs into chocolate liquor. This involves grinding the cocoa so finely that the cocoa butter in the beans melts and everything turns into an emulsion.

This is where the average kitchen is a little ill-equipped for the process. The various guides we read mostly suggested pointing hairdryers at motorised fruit juicers, but lacking a fruit juicer we decided to see how my jug blender managed.

Not so well, unfortunately:

The cocoa was still in reasonably large particles and certainly wasn't turning into a liquor.

However we were encouraged that after a few attempts in the blender, there was a hint of glossy emulsion below the blades:

We tried my electric hand blender next, which got quite warm itself with so much cocoa to blend, but this possibly helped the process. We were finally getting a liquor of sorts stuck around the blades

When it was done, we had a blob of liquor being kept warm under a reading light:

Apparently it is possible to use a coffee grinder to get similar results, and I suspect that a grinder that could go fine enough would probably work. I'm tempted to get hold of a Turkish coffee grinder (or perhaps something more experimental) to see how that might perform.

Conching

Now we want to add some sugar to turn this into a common bar of dark chocolate. My favourite chocolate is about 70% dark chocolate, so we weighed the cocoa mass, divided by 70, and multiplied by 30 to get the amount of sugar to add. We hadn't lost that much mass through the whole process, which was good!

We used a pestle-and-mortar to grind the sugar down (we used golden caster sugar - finer shop-bought sugar has anti-caking agents in it, which we don't want in our chocolate) and added it to the mix.

Now it's time for conching. This is a process that is used to develop the flavour of the chocolate and improve the texture, which can otherwise be quite gritty.

Again, consumer chocolate is produced with more complex machinery than a regular kitchen could dream of, and the process takes several hours, but we had our pestle and mortar, a hairdryer, and some energy to burn. Point the hairdryer at the pestle and mortar while you conch for your life.

Emily and I took turns in taking our frustration out on about a third of the chocolate mix for about fifteen minutes. It turned from the gritty liquor into something that looks like melted chocolate - which is precisely what we now had!

You can see in this picture the different in texture between the conched chocolate and the unconched chocolate. We didn't notice a particular difference in taste, but the conched stuff was definitely more pleasant texture-wise:

Given that it was about 10pm at this point and that we both had blisters from the pestle, we decided the other 2/3s was just fine as it was.

The last thing left to do was to tip the melted chocolate into a mold and let it set (which didn't take long at all). We could have added an extra step of tempering the chocolate, but we lacked stone slabs, thermometers and goodness-only-knows what else.

And as for the taste? Well, the fruity flavour of the original beans came through, along with, of course, the chocolate flavour. I think the chocolate still had an acidic taste to it, but considering I didn't expect to get anything remotely edible out of the whole process, I was very pleasantly surprised!