Level: BELOW Novice
Read time: 12 minutes (25 w/ extra rant)
I'm using 2 c coco butter 1/2 c. coconut oil, 1 1/2 c dutch coco powder w 1 c honey...the oils is separating from the chocolate at the end, what am I doing wrong?
I was looking through your website to see if you had any info about making cocoa powder from roasted cacao nibs.
I’m starting a chocolate making business. What equipment do I need and what bean should I use for dark chocolate and which one for milk chocolate?
Hello, we are making chocolate bars and want to us high quality chocolate but dont want to take the time to temper it. What can we add to it to have the tempering qualities like shinny and doesnt melt easy without tempering. Also we are adding a flavouring powder and it makes the chocolate very thick and hard to work with and when it sets into the bar it is bubbly and not as crunchy and hard as it should be what could we add to the chocolate to make it easier to work with and have it set better as well.
I am using coco mass to make high quality chocolate but it isn’t smooth when I combine the sugar. I don’t want to use melanger because it takes so long and isn’t good for business, so I’m using mass. What am I doing wrong?
I’m am starting a chocolate factory. If I use cocoa powder instead of nibs do I still have to conch? How do I make it of smooth quality?
I wrote an article last week. It was kind of a venting rant session for me. Call it therapy. But I started having doubts that I might be just railing at the world and it wasn’t useful or delivered the message I wanted. I’ve been talking this over with a few people and some think what I wrote in the unabridged article was true but also too harsh and they asked me what was the point of my ranting…and that lead me to writing this different version, and putting in a bunch of thought on how to answer that question. I don’t want that writing lost though, so if you choose, you can go read it in all its rambling Alchemist flavor. You can read the original version here The Alchemist Loses His Shit.
Firstly, what I want is to not scare people off or make them afraid to ask questions. We have a LOT of shit going on currently in this world and I don’t want you to have kicked puppy syndrome where you are terrified to approach me with a question because I might call you lazy. I take a lot of pride in being here after all these years to help steward along new makers. That is the core of what Chocolate Alchemy is and why we exist. But…
I need you to make some effort to show me you are really interested in making chocolate, and you’ll do that by not asking questions that are utterly basic or so uninformed that it is obvious you didn’t put in any effort. _Try_ and find the answers to your questions first before writing in. We’ve been documenting how to do this for a very long time and I know the site needs some work but it’s all in there as thousands of people before have found the answers.
If you do the work I will go to the ends of the earth (not that I’m a flat earther – laugh damn you) to help you understand what is puzzling you. If you’re not willing to do the jump that really low bar for me, that’s where we separate the real makers from the dilettantes.
I have no time or energy for dilettantes.
Things have really changed in the last few years as the Bean To Bar Movement has expanded and so many new people with new motivations have discovered it and we now seem to be entering a new phase of craft chocolate making.
Many of the original bean to bar companies have come to realize that even 100 lb melangers are not all that amenable to scaling up and they started discovering what has been known for decades, that chocolate making is a lot of work, and parallel epiphanies were made about why the chocolate making process by industrial companies were broken into a refining phase (ball mills, roller mills, Macintyre refiners) and a conching phase. It had little to do with quality, but instead scale and people started jumping straight into that large equipment…..and encountering all the issues that large commodity chocolate factories had discovered with that jump. It was previously viewed as corporate greed (the use of lecithin, cocoa mass and such) turned out to have valid reasons from the standpoint of product consistency and scale. And there were/are certainly some identity crises going on, wondering if using anything less than whole raw beans disqualified them from being “Craft”.
As the original makers have moved forward, scaling, changing and growing they’ve been replaced by the shift in awareness of the Craft industry by the general public. Make no mistake, I FIND THIS WONDERFUL. Yet. Oh, hell, I’m really going to attempt to not sound like an old curmudgeon bitching about ‘this generation’ and ‘in my days’….but it might.
I find it wonderful that the Craft Chocolate movement has grown to such a degree that large numbers of the general public are discovering it and that they might be able to make their own chocolate. But here is the thing: I’m finding the level of lazy questions has just skyrocketed and since part of my job is answering the questions my stress levels of dealing with them has skyrocketed in parallel.
I get there is a lot of information out there, and some can be confusing or contradictory but you absolutely can tease it apart to get to the answer you are looking for. I guess I feel you need to earn an answer. DO THE WORK. It is not unlike going on a quest and having to prove you are worthy. It is just like going to your teacher to ask how to work out a problem….but you have not read the homework or even attempted the homework, or stopped after the very first question. That shit just isn’t fair to all the students that did the reading, tried the homework and then came in to clarify a sticking point.
There are four different forums I’m on, one for Artisan bread baking another for home brewing, another about making bows and a final one for strength training. The thing they all have in common is a demand that you research the question first, do something to prove you have looked and then ask the question….and if you fail to do that you will get flamed and ostracized for being lazy. In short, you need to prove you are worthy of information that others have worked so hard to have. I have to say sometimes this was hard. I get that, but damn it, it works. You learn and understand so much more when you dig in and at the end of the day I really and truly want you to learn, but like the spoiled kid of a billionaire that has had everything handed to them, you are just not going to appreciate what you have if I just hand it to you. By digging in you are going to discover so much more than you thought you wanted to know and you are going to be better for it. We’re all going to be better for it.
Alright, with all that off my chest, I’m going to go ahead and answer these questions….but with the intent of showing you how you might have found the answers in lieu of writing me. I guess it is sort of my way to teaching you how to learn something for yourself. Learning how to learn as it were.
I'm using 2 c coco butter 1/2 c. coconut oil, 1 1/2 c dutch coco powder w 1 c honey...the oils is separating from the chocolate at the end, what am I doing wrong?
I have search bars all over the site. Across the top it literally says Help/Search. If you type in “honey” in the search feature there are plenty of hits to explain this. The VERY FIRST RESULT is this:
https://chocolatealchemy.com/blog/2018/6/28/ask-the-alchemist-252?rq=honey
Recently, I've been making honey chocolates (1 c cocoa powder, 1 c coconut oil, and 1/3 c honey) to remarkable success. However, my main issue is that the chocolate get soft (Though not melted) at room temperature, and it can get quite messy when someone picks it up to eat if it's not straight out of the freezer. I know tempering can raise the melting point of chocolate, but I noticed on one of your articles that coconut oil doesn't temper well. Do you have any advice on raising the melting point of this chocolate to avoid the mess?
I’m really glad you like what you made. That is what it is all about after all.
What you are making though I don’t consider chocolate. It is a cocoa confection of some ilk. I am not being snobbish. I merely want to set up a definition so we can talk about things. When I say chocolate I’m referring to modern refined chocolate. Here at Chocolate Alchemy the intent is from bean (or nib) to bar. But it is still a shades of grey kind of thing though.
That gets you super close. The next result goes into even more depth.
https://chocolatealchemy.com/blog/2017/8/17/ask-the-alchemist-216?rq=honey
And you get links to even MORE information. So I’m going to say this a gently but as sternly as I can. If you missed the search link, I can forgive that a little…but if you found it and were too lazy to use it then I’m too busy with other customers that WANT to learn.
I was looking through your website to see if you had any info about making cocoa powder from roasted cacao nibs.
Kuddos for noting you looked on the site. That is something. But also shows you didn’t dig very deep. Again, searching for “cocoa powder” there over a dozen articles and a really quick review of them would allow you to tease out pretty quickly that you really can’t make commercial grade cocoa powder at home. And I’ll be honest here (I try hard to always be) I’ve not answered this question directly and it is now on my list, but I stand by the point that the part here that irked me is the seeming assumption powder is made directly from nibs. It isn’t. It is made from the left over cake after extracting oil and I’ve talked about that plenty and when I do, I note the resulting powder will be coarser than commercial powder.
I’m starting a chocolate making business. What equipment do I need and what bean should I use for dark chocolate and which one for milk chocolate?
And this is where I lost it. The very first unkind thought that flashed through my head was ‘who the fuck would start a business without ever having made the product they are going to sell?’. It could have been this:
“I’m thinking of starting a chocolate making business. I think I want to make about 100 lb per week, I can see a few equipment options for roasters and melangers. Could you give me some input of picking the right one?”
If that had been the question I would have dug right in as I have dozens of times because the person had clearly done some work and research. They proved they were serious enough to warrant serious help and not just some flight of fancy idea. Aside from that, the answer to the question is again right on the site, front page, “How to Make chocolate”
https://chocolatealchemy.com/how-to-make-chocolate-the-complete-text-guide
And it immediately starts off with all the equipment you need.
Hello, we are making chocolate bars and want to us high quality chocolate but dont want to take the time to temper it. What can we add to it to have the tempering qualities like shinny and doesnt melt easy without tempering. Also we are adding a flavouring powder and it makes the chocolate very thick and hard to work with and when it sets into the bar it is bubbly and not as crunchy and hard as it should be what could we add to the chocolate to make it easier to work with and have it set better as well.
Again, my first response is <facepalm> I am really sorry (not really) you don’t want to do what every other chocolate maker is doing. Then don’t fucking do it. “ But I’m here trying to help you learn how to learn. I searched for “thick” and found this. https://chocolatealchemy.com/blog/2013/12/12/ask-the-alchemist-58?rq=thick It might not be the perfect answer, but it does hint that adding more cocoa butter would probably help you….assuming you using a refiner and not just stirring in a powder…..which you don’t say.
I am using coco mass to make high quality chocolate but it isn’t smooth when I combine the sugar. I don’t want to use melanger because it takes so long and isn’t good for business, so I’m using mass. What am I doing wrong?
I’m am starting a chocolate factory. If I use cocoa powder instead of nibs do I still have to conch? How do I make it of smooth quality?
See above about starting a business before knowing what the basics are. With just a little bit of reading it would be really obvious that craft chocolate, business quality chocolate, must be refined and starts if not from nibs, then mass, but ALWAYS needs to be refined. It is right there in the Chocolate making 101 steps. If you have not made it that far, I don’t have to time to hold your hand that much.
There, I know, I ranted a lot there, but less than in the first version. I had to get a bit of it off my chest before I started responding with “use the search feature’ as that is kind of a jerk move….but so is expecting someone to give you all the answers without giving it a try yourself. So to that, I’ll leave you with this.
There are no stupid questions….when you have dug in and have genuinely tried to find the answers and still can’t find them. If you have done that and are stumped, or something just isn’t quite making sense, then please feel free to write in and ask and I will do my best to answer your questions. Ignorance is not a sin….but laziness is and if you are going to make chocolate, lazy isn’t something you can be.
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John Nanci