Level: Apprentice
Reading Time: 12 minutes
—-I am opening a chocolate factory and want to make the best chocolate and know price is very important to sales. What is the cheapest bean you have? And can you turn them into nibs for me so I don’t need to buy so much expensive equipment. They must be fair trade.
—-Drum roasters are so expensive. They are only a drum, motor and some heat. Isn’t there a cheaper alternative? Couldn’t I roast in a pan like they do where they make the cocoa beans. Would you tell me how to do that? Should I use low or medium heat?
—-I'm seriously considering taking a 'next step' in my Chocolate Making journey. This would be roasting my own beans. I'm proceeding with baby steps. I have a line on a good quality used Behmor. I also just watched you winnow using a hair dryer and it looked like it worked well. My only missing piece is cracking the roasted beans. My Question: Rather than purchase a Champion Juicer, I'm wondering if there might be an effective alternate (cheaper) way to accomplish the cracking?
—-You would make a ton of sales if you would invent a way to make a melanger for under $100. Why don’t you do that? The market could really use it.
—-Tempering silk butter is the bomb. I buy it from you every year but I wish it didn’t cost so much as it does. Couldn’t you invent something to make it cheaper?
Read All The Articles In This Series:
The Iron Triangle Of Anguish (ATA #310)
All about Cocoa Beans (ATA # 311)
Only a Drum, Motor and Some Heat (ATA 312)
Cracking and Winnowing in baby steps (ATA 313)
Melangers et al (ATA 314)
Tempering (ATA 315)
What an interesting set of questions I’ve been receiving this last year. Well, I am using the term interesting in sort of a gently sarcastic way. I find them interesting because there is a theme of human behavior woven through them. If I had to sum it up, and really, that is a challenge, I think it would be that people have unrealistic expectations, don’t realize it and are very often unsatisfied with what they have. Once I noticed that pattern, I also realized that most people are not being greedy but instead are lacking a critical bit of understanding that informs many if not all of my design projects. It has also steered how I have approached chocolate making in particular since I started cracking the code to homemade, small scale bean to bar chocolate some 20 years ago.
For those of you who didn’t quite notice, each of the questions above touch on one of the major steps of chocolate making.
Cocoa beans
Roasting
Cracking and Winnowing
Refining and conching
Tempering
I’ve of course talked about all of them in the past but I’ve come to realize there are ton of stories there that I’ve never told as I sussed each one out.
With that in mind, I’m going to be combining a bunch of previous information plus some never before shared stories for your information, edification, appreciation and hopefully a little entertainment. I’ll be doing this over the next 5 Ask the Alchemist Articles. This first one though I’m not going to directly address any of the questions but instead lay down that common concept I hinted at above.
Let’s jump in.…
The overarching theme of this series is what I have come think of as the triple constraint iron triangle of building. In its simplest form, when talking about an item or project you want to make, it goes like this.
You can make this thing good, fast, and cheap.....except you can’t have all three. You can choose any two. For those that want to dive even deeper this is also called the Project management triangle. To give you some real world context, consider the following.
Fast food is fast and cheap but isn’t very good.
A 5 star meal can be good and fast but isn’t cheap.
You can make an awesome gourmet meal at home, but it isn’t going to be fast.
You get the idea? People naturally want all three and have a hell of a time really and truly understanding, believing and accepting they can’t have them all and try as they might, one or more constraints are going to suffer. It is not unlike the myth of the perpetual motion machine or its brother, the free energy machine. Both break the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. A machine can’t run forever with no energy input because there is always friction and friction will slow down the machine. There is no getting around it. Clocks can’t run forever without some winding mechanism or energy input. Now there are a couple clocks that at first glance seem like they are breaking the rules but they are not. The Atmos clock is a self winding clock that can run for years. Some have been running for decades and show no sign of stopping....but...and there is ALWAYS a but, they harvest energy from the atmosphere via temperature and pressure differences. Likewise, you can’t get free energy out of a machine. You can only transform it from one form to another. Your car burns gas to turn run the motor to move the car. If you stop burning gas, you will coast to a stop due to friction.
There are really so many ways to say this concept and apply it to real life.
You get what you pay for. Something cheap, more likely than not, is going to be near worthless. Something more expensive does not guarantee quality but cheap is never going to be high quality.
My favorite concept is from author Robert Heinlein. TANSTAAFL (pronounced tan-staff-ul). It stands for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch meaning one way or another you ARE going to pay. That payment might be in the form of actual cash, either because you bought something expensive and its quality will give you years of service or because you bought something cheap and had to buy it again when it broke. Another variant of the later option is that the item is cheap and prone to breakage and you pay sweat equity to avoid destroying it when you use it.
And that last concept is worth noting. Sometimes you simply don’t have the cash for something. I get that. What that means is that you have to put in some ilk of sweat equity as payment. One very simple chocolate example is winnowing beans. The two extremes are hand peeling or buying one our our Deluxe crackers. Hand peeling is totally free.....but you will have to devote about 1 hour per pound of beans. The Deluxe cracker and Aether winnower on the other hand is about $4000 but you can load the hopper, turn it on, walk away and winnow 60-100 lb/hour while you are doing something else. One way or another you have to pay for lunch.
There are not just extremes though. It is all a trade off and that’s where the Iron Triangle comes in. There are plenty of tradeoffs you can make which are less extreme. You can go with a moderate priced item that does a pretty good job and lasts a reasonable amount of time but takes a bit of effort to use. Or you trade off longevity for ease of use or vise versa. I have certainly been known to buy a cheap Harbor Freight tool that I expect to die but will get me through the job.
Here is how I always approach it. You have three things you want or need. To get the best of every attribute you have to spend $1. But you only have $2. Go. Divide it any way you see fit.
The final thing I’ll say about this is that the attributes can change. They don’t always have to be good, fast and cheap. They could be:
Aesthetic, durable and affordable
Ergonomic, inexpensive, and available
Features, cost and time to deliver
Really it can be anything...assuming they are real requirements, and as you can see, they are basically variations on a theme. Just remember you can’t game the system except in the fashion that I did up there when I made a conscious decision that longevity was not important...but the reality is I traded that for price. I accepted it was a cheap, single use tool that I would break, or dull or otherwise make useless.
Also, sometimes there’s not a solution. Sometimes you can’t trade between constraints. For example, at some point you may have time or money to throw a problem and it won’t help. Innovation is a lot like this and very pertinent to the chocolate making community. It might be nice that you are willing to toss $50,000 at a melanger that will never need maintenance, can refine 500 lb of chocolate in 3 hours and has Bluetooth so you can monitor it while you are having a night out with Jeff and Elon....but that doesn’t mean the product can be built or that you can get it next week. Even if you could throw $500,000 at it, you simply can’t have it next week.
That brings me to my final point. Expectations. Thanks to free next day shipping from Amazon, offshore manufacturing in excruciatingly high volumes, and $2 apps that do amazing things, most people are completely out of touch how much time, effort and money it takes to develop a new product. I’ll be giving examples in future weeks.
I can’t tell you how much it saddens me to get an email praising all the hard work I’ve put in, all the amazing contributions I’ve given to the bean to bar movement and then have it followed it up with the comment that they just bought something off Amazon because it had free shipping and I could not afford to offer that. I get money is precious...but still. Moving on lest I rant.
Your smartphone may look like it is good, cheap and fast but that ignores the fact that it was built on the backs of many previous generations, has an infrastructure that costs millions or possibly billions of dollars. Yes, it is good. But it was not cheap or fast to produce. Keep that in mind.
That $2 app? Unless it took 10 years to make, it probably cost well over $50K to make. The maker took a huge gamble that they would sell 25,000. Unfortunately what the public sees is a $2 app and assumes because it is so cheap, it must have only cost a couple thousand dollars to develop. So completely not true.
I think that lays it all out and gives a good spring board to start addressing those questions and others in the coming weeks.
Until then, start thinking about TANSTAAFL and how you subconsciously divvy up that $2 you have available for the things you want in something. Consider how you have may have thought that something should be cheaper when you got it the next day and it was awesome and just assumed the seller was being greedy. Yeah, give that some thought.
And please feel free to send related questions and I’ll see if they fit in.