a single stage roast

31st May 2021

Ingredients

As we’re still experimenting with the roasting, we went for another 70% batch with 10% cocoa butter:

749g cocoa nibs
375g cane sugar
125g cocoa butter

Roasting

As the perforated oven trays made such a difference to the roast, we went for a single temperature roast this time. We decided to try a lower temperature to make sure we definitely didn’t burn the cocoa beans.

35 minutes at 100C

We weren’t sure whether the cooler roast left the beans slightly underdone, but we wanted to be sure they didn’t burn.

Refining

We noted that the slightly longer grind in batch 3 resulted in a noticeably smoother texture, so we wanted to try a longer refining time for this batch.

28 hours

Tasting

This batch had a different flavour to the earlier batches, it was a little more complex and perhaps a bit fruitier. We thought it was our best batch yet.

Notes

The beans were difficult to crack and peel, perhaps because they were slightly under roasted. We will try a slightly higher temperature next time.