How I make award winning chocolate

Decide what chocolate you will make. For a 70% chocolate bar I need 700 grams of cacao nibs and 300 grams of sugar. I will lose some of the cacao weight when I winnow (remove the husks), so I have to add extra cacao to the roast. In order to make sure I yield 700 grams of nibs, I will start with 1 kilo (1000g) of cacao beans. If you want to make an 80% chocolate bar, roast 1100 grams of cacao beans (to get 800g of nibs) and you would add 200g of sugar.

Choose a roasting method. You can roast in your normal home oven, a small oven, a small convection oven, in a small coffee roaster, on the stovetop in a pot or comal (griddle). Anything that heats to above 120c (248f) will work. The best chocolates are roasted in coffee roaster or convection oven. I place my beans on a half sheet pan with wire rack inside to help air circulate around the beans for more consistent roasting. You can also use a perforated sheet pan or a regular sheet pan.

Roasting time and temperature. Every chocolate maker has their own recipe for roasting temperature and roasting time; this is one factor that separates all chocolate makers. With some practice you will figure out if you prefer light or dark roasts. With my Brazilian cacao beans from Bahia I aim to get the beans to reach the temperature between 125c and 135c. When I travel to work with indigenous communities, they roast until they hear the first beans pop; sounds like popcorn, which can be above 140c. There is no simple recipe for all beans. Ecuadorian cacao beans will be a different roast than Venezuelan cacao beans. And a 2014 harvest might be a different roast than 2015 harvest. There is no one recipe that will work for all beans when it comes to high end quality chocolate. A good chocolate maker working with different beans, will have a unique recipe for each bean. Maybe roasting their Venezuelan beans at 105c for 50 minutes and their Belizean beans roasting at 128c for 20 minutes. These are all tests you have to do.

In my convection oven I follow these guidelines:

Low roast: 100c to 120c, 20-60 minutes.

Medium roast: 120c-140c, 15-45 minutes.

High roast: 140c-160c, 15-30 minutes.

This is the temperature of the oven and since my oven is pretty precise, it closely mirrors the final temperature of the actual cocoa beans. Did you catch that? My oven temperature is almost the same as my cacao bean temperature. I use an infrared thermometer to measure the temperature of the beans. When I set my oven temperature at 130c within 15-25 minutes my bean temperature will be the same. This is very important to note. If you place your oven temperature at 130c and hope to get your beans to 130c within 20 minutes, and 30 minutes later the cocoa beans are 110c, then you need to adjust your oven temperature to maybe 150c to get the beans to 130c within your time frame.

There are also other techniques to follow: start at a high temperature, end at a low temp, start low and end high, start with oven off, or oven on. You have to figure it out for your beans depending what appliance you are using. The time and temperature I use in my convection oven would not work for my home oven, my coffee roaster. An infrared thermometer is nice for this step. An important thing to remember no matter how you roast; keep the cacao in motion as much as possible to prevent beans from burning and other beans from under roasting.

When you are finished roasting, remove from the oven and use a fan to help cool them down. A normal house fan can help do this. You want to cool the beans to STOP the roast. Cool them for about 15 minutes then let them sit for a minimum of 6 hours, 24 hours is ideal. The beans continue to release moisture for up to 6 hours after roasting. Do not place in a closed container, you have to let them breath for at least 6 hours. If you place in a closed container, you will see water accumulate then that water will get back into your beans.

Roasting challenging beans – basic things to remember:

• Great roasting cannot correct badly fermented, badly dried, badly stored beans. Nor can you remove bad aromas that might come from the farm or storage facilities: smokey cacao, rotten cacao, moldy cacao, etc.

• All cacao has some level of astringency and acidity. Roasting can help regulate but cannot make it disappear. Good chocolate can have astringency and acidity. It’s about balance.

• Highly astringent or acidic beans can be rested (unroasted) for several years to help them mellow out. Store in breathable plastic like GrainPro bags. It is also possible to rest the nibs or chocolate several months to help mellow out.

• You can make astringent beans into sweeter chocolate to help remove astringency. Like a milk, dark milk, or 50% to 60% dark. The added sugar, milk, and cocoa butter will help deceive the tongue to not notice the astringency as much.

Roasting Vehicles

• small oven

• small convection oven

• small coffee roaster (If money is not a problem)

• Behmor 1600 Plus Customizable Drum Coffee Roaster (I have this as well)

• RK drums

• Selmi Cacao Roaster

• PackInt Roasting Machine

• Jafinox (Brazil)

Cracking cocoa beans. You could crack beans on anything, even a rock. You can also place the roasted beans in a towel and crush with a rolling pin, you can place in a plastic bag and crush with a wine bottle … the goal is to remove the husk from the nibs without cracking the nibs too much otherwise it will turn into powder. If you are familiar with a molino which is used to grind corn, this is ideal for cracking.

In Mexico, women who prepare chocolate for ceremonies or special festivals will spend days hand peeling the beans. This is also another option and it avoids the next step of winnowing.

Winnowing. When you are done cracking, you will be left with a lot of husks with your nibs. The easiest way to separate these is to use a hair dryer. Place everything in a large bowl and point the hair dryer directly on the beans and the husks will blow away. Do this outside. You can also place the bowl near a fan and lift the cracked cacao, the fan will blow away the husks. John Nanci at ChocolateAlchemy.com sells small winnowers for beginners but if you are talented you can build your own with some plastic tubes. You can make chocolate with all the husks and nibs, but it will be more viscous than not using them since they don’t really contain any cocoa butter. Husks are also considered to be toxic unless you have tested them and they have been approved for consumption. Husks will also negatively affect the flavor and texture of the final chocolate. Also, if you will sell this chocolate; most countries have laws against a certain percentage of husks being in chocolate. Always best practice to remove husks.

Cracking Machines

• Crankandstein

• Botini Coffee bean cracker (you can find these cheap in Brazil)

• Manual Grain Grinder (molino)

• Champion G5-NG-853S Household Juicer, White

• Jafinox (Brazil)

Winnowing Machines

• Sylph Winnower (USA) This is what I use.

• Hair dryer

• Jafinox (Brazil)

Pre-grind and fill the grinder. Pre-grinding your nibs is not necessary, sometimes I do it and sometimes I don’t. Adding the nibs to the grinder takes a lot longer if you do not pre-grind. You cannot add all the nibs at once, you have to put them in a bit at time over a few hours. You can pre-grind the nibs in a food processor, juicer, or molino (normally used for corn), a coffee mill, an açaí blender, a Vitamix, etc. If you own a metate, this would be a good time to bring it out. At this point I make sure I have my 700 grams of nibs. If I pre-grind, I can place all my, now called liquor, in my grinder. Let this grind for 24 hours then add the sugar. Final recipe goes until 48 hours. There are risks associated with letting the grinder run this long; the machine may get hot, the electricity may stop and your chocolate can harden, I have heard of machines catching fire – although mine never have. I let my machines run about 2-3 days without stopping but I am checking on them before I go to sleep and first thing in the morning, and several times during the day. You can grind this chocolate anywhere between 2 hours to 60 hours; grind time is determined by the chocolate maker. The more you grind, the smoother/creamier the chocolate will be. But, the longer you grind, the more flavors and aromas escape. Your chocolate will have a very strong flavor in the beginning, but as the hours pass, you will lose flavor and aromas. You are the chocolate maker and you have to decide when you want to stop the machine. Another thing to consider is that very long grind times, longer than 50 hours or so (using this type of machine), may produce gummy chocolate or chocolate with a sticky texture.

Loading the machine notes: if you have one of these baby grinders it is easy enough to place it in a warm area or oven (not to exceed 50C or 120F), and warm the stones for about 20 minutes. If your stones are cold and your nibs are cold, the machine may not grind the nibs, and this can harm your machine. You can also use a hair dryer to warm the stones and you can start with warm nibs. I place my nibs in an oven at 50C/120F, sometimes overnight, to speed up the time I take adding nibs to grinder. Always remember to add nibs slowly. It should take about an hour to load all your nibs into the grinder if you do not pre-grind them. If you are making a white or milk chocolate use the rule of adding ingredients into the machine in order of liquid state; so for a milk chocolate, first add the cocoa butter then the nibs, let them grind a few hours until it all becomes liquid, then add the sugar and milk powder at the same time. You always want to add dry ingredients into wet ingredients.

Sugar. I add the sugar 24 hours after I place the nibs into the grinder. I use organic cane sugar but you can use white refined sugar, raw sugar, coconut sugar, etc. As long as it has a low moisture content. Once I tried to use a type of dark brown sugar sold in the Americas called by different names; rapadura, piloncillo, or panela. The mix was sticky and unworkable. I even tried dehydrating the rapadura for 50 hours before adding and it was a disaster. You don’t have to add any sugar at all. You can make a 100% cacao bar. Or you can make a 95% bar and only add 5% of sugar. You get to decide. Just make sure the sugar is low in moisture. You can also place the sugar in a warm oven, about 50c (120F) for a few hours to decrease moisture in the sugar. Humidity in your sugar can affect the viscosity of you final chocolate.

The longer you allow it to grind, the more the chocolate releases aroma and the more the flavor of the chocolate changes. This is your chocolate. Stop it when you think it tastes great; 25 to 48 hours or grind time is good. Soy or sunflower lecithin would be added right before you remove the chocolate, only add half a percent of the total weight. This will allow it to flow easier and mix better if you are making ganaches or spreads.

Removing chocolate from machine. Dump the chocolate into a container, through a sieve to catch any unground pieces. Make sure to label it. You can leave the chocolate like this forever. It will change flavors and color but it will always be edible. I like to put it in the fridge right away because it is easier for me to temper it later. Or if I am making a test batch of new beans and I don’t want to bother placing it in my molds, I pour it from the machine, through a sieve into a container then place all of it onto a baking sheet lined with silpat or wax paper and straight into the refrigerator for 20 minutes. It will not be perfectly tempered, but it’s good enough for me to taste and see if I want to work with this cacao in the future. I live in Brazil where daily temp is 32c (90f), if I left it on the shelf, it would stay liquid for weeks and the cocoa butter will separate to the top, there is nothing wrong with this, just means you have to temper it well before you use it.

At first, I had a lot of trouble tempering bean to bar chocolate because it is different than other chocolates and can be much thicker than couverture. I had learned to temper with previously tempered chocolate, like buying chocolate chips, and it was quite easy. The bean to bar chocolate that I make has never been tempered. None of the correct cocoa butter crystals exist here. I realized that if I temper twice, I get a better temper. I now remove the chocolate from the grinder, through a sieve and directly onto the marble top. I move it around until it becomes solid then I store it in the fridge, sealed, for about an hour and then in my cool room. This chocolate will be much easier to temper when I am ready to use it.

How to temper bean to bar chocolate:

• Your room temp has to be cool to cold, ideally 20-21c (68f) and low humidity ( less than 50%)

• Melt to 46c (115f) (never needs to go higher than this)

• Cool to 27-29c (83-84f) (if you have “silk” or “eztemper” you can lower to 93f and add your cocoa butter. More on “silk” here)

• Heat to 30/32c (86/90f)

• Test your temper

• Mold

• Refrigerate

• Unmold

• Keep in a cool area

This course is about making chocolate and not tempering because tempering is very complicated. I have a blog post about this here if you need to know more information: 

https://missionchocolaterecipes.com/126591875-tempering-molding-bean-to-bar-chocolate/