Level: Novice
Read Time: 10 minutes
I got some high quality cacao nips from my local store but the chocolate they made was horrible. How can I make them into good chocolate? They were certified non-GMO and organic. Should I roast them again?
There is most likely a disconnect happening here in that if you made horrible chocolate from already roasted beans, it is a high likelihood the beans were not high quality. For many years, back in the aughts, I didn’t carry any organic beans as they tasted about as good as the paper organic certificate. Just because something is natural and organic and non-GMO and made with hugs and prayers and good wishes doesn’t have anything at all to do with their quality or if they will make good chocolate. Full stop.
Also, no, you should not roast them again. But are you even sure they were roasted? That also could be the issue. Raw and roasted nibs look virtually identical. Raw (and by that I mean unroasted, not raw raw ) nibs tend to have a waxy texture, little chocolate aroma and a green banana type astringency. All in all, so nasty a honey badger might have pause eating them. Roasted nibs are more crunchy, smell of chocolate to some degree and although maybe a little bitter, are rarely astringent.
Next time I recommend getting cocoa nibs that you know can be made into good chocolate. That is why I talk about about the flavors I taste and not about ‘the most purest, most rarest, most bestest, most natural tasting cacao sourced in the most harmonious manner known to man in the most remote and most pristine wilds of remote rain forests’. Yeah, no.
First time maker. We had some issues for sure but the one thing you for sure take for granted is how to work somewhat cleanly, and how to handle liquid chocolate well. We made a serious mess and it was quite a process to get the melanger clean again. So turn that big brain on and dump all your knowledge about working with chocolate and cleaning. Please be gentle with me.
I rather like this question. The answer is basically the same as how to get to Carnegie Hall. Do people still know that joke? If not, the answer is practice, practice, practice. But that isn’t very helpful I know. There is an adage that you need about 10 hours to get familiar with something, 100 hours to get good at it, 1000 hours to be great and 10,000 hours to master it. There is something there though that has been left out. You have to gain those hours with an intent to improving and having an idea what mastery looks like. If you throw 3 balls in the air for 10,000 hours but never try to improve you won’t become a master juggler.
So what are some of the things that will help? Please keep in mind although I’ve made thousands of batches of chocolate, I’ve never considered myself a chocolatier, i.e.someone that uses chocolate to make incredibly beautiful molded chocolates. The first thing is to realize and accept you are going to make some mess. Where the skill building will come in is identifying how chocolate gets into places you don’t want it and then controlling for it.
Let’s start right at the beginning of adding nibs to the melanger. I and many makers don’t routinely clean their melanger stones and bowl. There is a thin coating of chocolate that just stays there all the time. The exception to this is when going from milk to dark chocolate and that is only when allergies are a concern. What I do is heat up my melanger bowl and add my warm nibs to it.
Tip #1: Have a paper towel ready and on the rim of the bowl before you turn it on. It will catch any chocolate before it is flung in a circle around the room. I can’t tell you how many shirts I have with a horizontal strip of chocolate stain across my stomach.
Tip #2: Add enough nibs to the melanger so they self damp. If you don’t add enough they can kick up and out of melanger like a monkey flinging.....nevermind. Add enough nibs. You basically want as many as you can add without stalling the unit.
The next skill can be summed up with ‘be methodical’. It is no one thing really. It is an awareness of the method and knowing, not guessing, what you are going to do next. In addition to chocolate making I can pipe icing, I can weld and I can lay a bead of caulk. What all of those things have in common is that you will often practice the move, making sure you have the room and reach to do what you need so that you are not in the middle of whatever you are doing and you hit a snag, jump and BOOM icing/chocolate/caulk/molten metal is everywhere and NOT where you want it.
When I empty a melanger I know where I am going to put everything. I remove the cap and put it on a napkin or plate. I have the bowl ready to accept the chocolate and I know it is big enough to hold the granite rollers. I have a spatula at hand to wipe down the sides of the wheels and I don’t rush to get the wheels into the bowl. I take care of the drips of chocolate, I make sure none are about to fall and then I put the wheels in the bowl. The part of mess I accept is that by lifting the center assembly out with the rollers my hands are going to have chocolate on them. I’ve found no amount of wiping the center assembly will get it clean enough to keep my hands spotless so I accept that and then treat them like a biohazard, not touching anything else I don’t plan to clean after. Using gloves also can work nicely.
After that I lift the melanger bowl out and pour the content into the bowl I just put the rollers in. Taking my time I use a soft spatula to clean out the bowl pretty well, but I don’t obsess about getting it clean as there is one more step. I reassemble the bowl and wheels onto the melanger and with my paper towel on the rim, turn the machine back on. I methodically use the spatula to get as much chocolate as I can off both sides of the wheels, the wipers and the bottom. The technique I find the most useful is using the motion of the bowl to bring the chocolate around to me instead of trying to scrape clean a stationary bowl. There is an aspect of it that puts me in mind of throwing a bowl on a wheel, how the material moves and flows. Each time the spatula has as much as it will hold I deposit into the bowl of chocolate. The result is a bowl ready to go for the next time with barely an ounce of chocolate in it.
As I mentioned above, many chocolate makers don’t wash their melanger every time. They just cover them or keep them in a closed room and all is fine. Because chocolate doesn’t contain any water you can safely leave the residual in there. It is really no different than those grind your own nut mills and coffee grinders in many grocery stores. Without water, there is just nothing to go bad. If you want to wash it, do it with hot soap and water. No dish washer as some get too hot for the epoxy on the bowl. If you do wash it, make sure to take the wheels off and wash the axles, then dry it all very well before putting it back together. That all said, I’m not recommending you let the melanger stay this bad….but if it does get that bad, just clean it up.
Tempering works the same way. Have a plan. Lay out your molds. Make sure you have enough of them. All the molds we sell have the amount of chocolate they will hold listed. If you have made 2 lb of chocolate, 4 of the 2 oz, 4 cavity molds will work. 4 x 2 x 4 =32 oz and again Bob’s your uncle. Have your thermometer, silk and grater ready and just take your time. I like to put down newspaper under my molds to catch any errant drips. Pour slowly. Don’t rush. Try not to over fill the molds. Allow yourself the luxury of a little drip between each cavity and clean it up after it sets up. I really can’t stress that enough. You are not setting up for a photo shoot. Every instance of every step does not need to be photo ready.
I had a real breakthrough some years ago watching a master temper chocolate. He just didn’t move fast. Every move was planned. There was no race. It was like watching a group of firemen respond to an alarm. Time and again it has been proven that mistakes happen when people rush and they stop happening when everyone slows down. Knowing what you need to do and doing it slowly but correctly is the skill here you are trying to master. There are no cameras. There is no stopwatch running. There is no one you are trying to impress and if you are trying to impress someone, stop it.
A word about the need you feel to rush during tempering. I know there is some time constraint. You can’t allow your chocolate too cool before you can get it in the molds. Again, this is all about planning and set up......I recently timed myself pouring up my silk tempered chocolate. On average, pouring into molds, it took me about 1 second per ounce. For the reasonable metric folk out there, that is about 3 seconds per 100 grams. If you have made a 1 kg batch (that’s a little over 2 pounds you imperial savages), that is around 30 seconds to pour up your chocolate. Even if you take 4 times that time because you are beginner, that is only 2 minutes. Unless you are working in a 50 F room (10 C) then there is no way there is going to be enough time for your chocolate to cool enough to give you issues. And if you are working in that temperature, then work out a way to keep your chocolate warm. Having a bowl of water at 95 F (35 C) that you can set your bowl of chocolate in is great. The improvised incubator will do wonders. When I do 2-3 kg, I often just temper it in 1 kg batches to keep myself from rushing.
The last thing I’ll leave you with is that making a little mess is not a sin. Hell, making a huge mess isn’t a sin. What you need to know is that chocolate IS messy. Making is messy. I’ve been in many chocolate factories and while they are working, especially at a tempering machine, there is chocolate spread around. Yes, the professionals make a mess. There are a few hyper OCD folks out there than can dig a muddy trench in a 3 piece suit and not get a speck of dirt on them but most of us mere mortals are going to mess up the area a little (or a lot). The key is to start and end clean but in the middle, pristine is going to go away while you are working. Bakers spread flour. We spread chocolate around. Accept it and just know you are not doing anything wrong.
I hope that helps a little. If you read this and have more questions, hit me up.
We are roasting in a combi oven, (saw your notes online for roasting) would you be able to help while we dial in the roast? The oven is programmable/wire rack, so any advice on setting up temperatures and timing.
Sadly I can’t any more than I have in our Roasting guide. I really wish I could but ovens are fundamentally not roasters. Ovens allow you to set a maximum temperature. Good drum roasters allow you to control how much heat you are giving the beans and allow you to see what temperature they are.
I want you to picture driving a car with no speedometer and the only speed control you have is a maximum speed and pedal to the metal. Your task is to accelerate to 30 mph in 1 minute, to 45 mph over the next 3 minutes and then go to 60 mph in 5 minutes, and it all has to be smooth and continuous. Is it possible? Technically, but it is going to be HARD. And after a ton of practice where you mostly have it down, you need to hitch up a heavy trailer to it so your weight is 2-3 times what it was and do it again. You have to learn all over again. Oven roasting is basically a go cart and you want it to be a real car.
That is what you are asking me to help you with because you don’t know where to start. Sorry, but I don’t either. My car has a speedometer, full gas control and brakes. Mind you, I can’t really teach you to drive, but if you know how to drive, we then both have a common language and set of experiences to work from. We can discuss acceleration, and throttle and braking. In short we have the same controls and more importantly the controls we need to drive at the speed we want.
I really wish I had more to offer other than reasons I don’t know how to help.
I’m new to making chocolate and recently purchases roasted nips. We spent over an hour picking out small bits of husk. Shouldn’t the nips have come without any husk? I was reading on some forum and people say it will wear down my melanger.
Some husk is ok. What we produce and sell is completely acceptable. Yes, you may see some husk and it won’t affect your chocolate in the least. I know it isn’t visually appealing but it is flavorless in small amounts. I’ve made chocolate with husk on purpose and until it reached the 5% by weight level, it was undetectable. What most winnowers produce, including ours, leaves 0.1 - 0.5% husk.
In cases like this, if you don’t desire to take my word for it, then I recommend you do a study yourself. Make a chocolate with some amount of husk. Make exactly the same chocolate where you have picked every little scrap out. The taste them blind. I recommend having someone else set up the samples and I personally like setting up at least 5 mixed samples. Include 2 of one, 3 of the other and see if you can tell them apart with 100% accuracy. If you can, bravo, you have your answer and are probably a better taster than I. If you can’t, then there you go. Your extra work is for naught and some ideal of purity for purity’s sake. As I’ve said before, Duck purity.
I have been successfully making silk for tempering using your sous vide method of holding cocoa butter at 92.4 F for no less than 24 hours. I usually go 36 hours. I was wondering if one could make "dark silk" out of cocoa liquor. It seems reasonable to "assume" one could, but I also think there is probably a very good reason that I am missing, that one shouldn't travel over to the "dark side."
Oh, another fine question and you are not the first to ask it. I personally asked it. Because of what I know of chemistry (being retired chemist and all) and crystallization, even before I tested it, I suspected it would not be possible. Crystallization is a notoriously delicate business and Silk is a very specific cocoa butter crystal. It needs a very specific temperature and no agitation plus enough time to arrange itself just so. Impurities in this case matter (no Duck Purity this time) and dark silk would only be dark because of impurities. Those impure dark bits would get in the way of the crystal lattice forming. It is that simple and what you were missing, namely that you need pure cocoa butter with no impurities to make silk.