less cocoa butter

21st December 2021

Ingredients

For the first time, we tried a different ratio. We stuck with 70% bars, but with only 5% cocoa butter instead of 10%.

729g cocoa nibs - costa esmeraldas
336g cane sugar
56g cocoa butter

Roasting

We tried to repeat the previous roast, so that we could see how much difference the cocoa butter percentage makes.

27 minutes at 141C

Refining

As it was so close to Christmas and we had other things on our minds, I forgot to record how long the chocolate was in the refiner or when we added the sugar. I believe it was in for around 24 hours and we added the sugar quite near the end, but I don’t have the actual timings.

Maturing

We left the chocolate to mature for 6 days while we enjoyed Christmas, and despite the reduction in cocoa butter, tempering was not a problem at all.

Tasting

The flavour of the bars is similar to the previous batch but a bit of the weird aftertaste from our first attempt with these beans is back. Unfortunately, reducing the cocoa butter didn’t help with reducing the flavour intensity. The bars are very nice, but they’re definitely not the best we can do.

Notes

We think that our main issue is getting the roast right, but our oven is imprecise and the temperature fluctuates quite a lot during the roast. As well as improving our roasting skills, we want a better, more controlled way to roast. We’re considering our options, but we may get a coffee roaster.