Just a short little article today. We are getting ready for Monday’s Profile Roasting Seminar.

Level: Novice

Read time: 4 minutes

I found cracked cacao nibs in the health store. Do I need to roast the store brought cocao nibs. Can I put raw cacao powder + cacao butter + sugar in to melanger? Instead of cacao nibs, If I put cacao powder in to melanger, instead of 24 hours, can I get smooth texture in 5 hours? Raw organic cacao powder is already fine powder. Instead of cacao nibs, cocao powder would reduce overall running time of Melanger right?

Instead of whole cacao nibs, can I buy cracked cacao nibs from health store and put it in Melanger
Instead of cracked cocao nibs can I buy raw cacao powder from health store and put it in Melanger

My goal is reduce running time of Melanger? Running Melanger for 24 hours would produce some heat which in turn releases some chemicals from Plastic parts of Melanger.

How do Ancient mayan made chocolate? Practically 24 hour grinding by hand is not possible for Mayans

 

I think you really need to ask yourself why you are making chocolate and what is the all fire rush?

For me it is about the process.  It is about the journey and the control I have over ingredients and the resulting chocolate.

That means I don’t understand wanting to reduce the refining time when you will end up with a subpar chocolate that you really had very little control over.  Cocoa powder is very heavily processed and I’ve made chocolate with it and at best it is one dimensional and flat.

Buying random nibs at the store where you don’t know how they were roasted nor anything at all about their flavor is just begging for bad chocolate.  In all likelihood they are also going to be very stale and just give you a flat chocolate at best.

This is one of the main reasons we give so many flavor notes and are always roasting fresh beans.

Flavor aside, using the cocoa powder isn’t going to bring your refining down to 5 hours.  It is the sugar that is the harder of  the two items and requires the 18-32 hours to refine.  It might reduce your refining time a couple hours but it might not even do that. 

Chemicals.  I’m going to respectfully put out there that unless you have actual data showing how Delrin leaches into a fat system under various heat/time profiles then I think your fears are completely ungrounded.  I very much respect not wanting plastic actually in your food but at the same time the ones used are food grade and have been tested for just such leeching properties and found acceptable.  If you have that concern then run a couple through away conditioning batches to take care of any surface leaching and move on.  If any leaching is going to occur it is not going to be an ongoing process as long as you keep under the 150 F documented limit set out in the manuals.

Finally to my knowledge there is no evidence the Mayans made chocolate that we would recognize as chocolate.  All evidence I’ve seen points to them using it in drinks which do not require 24 hours of grinding.

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