Learning to make chocolate

18th March 2021

Ingredients

We’re making a 70% dark bar for our first attempt, so after roasting and peeling the nibs, we weighed them out and added the remaining ingredients in the required ratio. We opted for adding 10% cocoa butter to make sure the chocolate would be easy to work with.

763g cocoa nibs
328g cane sugar
127g cocoa butter

Roasting

For our first roast we tried following guidelines we found online, and we didn’t really know what to expect. This is what we did:

5 minutes at 175C
15 minutes to bring the temperature down to 123C
10 minutes at 123C to complete the 30 minute roast

We weren’t sure whether the beans were ready, but the guide we were using suggested a 30 minute roast so we took them out when the timer went off.

Refining

We were a bit impatient to get the chocolate out of the melanger and try it, so we left it as long as we could stand.

22 hours

Tasting

Considering that this was our first ever foray into chocolate making, we were pretty impressed that the bars were edible. I would even go as far as to say that they were quite nice. There was a good chocolate flavour, although it took a while to develop as you ate it.

Notes

We’re not sure that the beans were roasted well enough, so next time we’ll leave them in the oven longer.