Direct Trade Vietnam is in

Today is all about Direct Trade.  It's been six months coming, but 3 new beans are finally here from Vietnam.  And all of them are big, bold, intensely flavored beans.  Just look how round the displays on all the spider charts are.  They are just big everywhere. Ben Tre - The flavor is big and intense. It is tangy and the deep sharp flavor of raisins and a hefty doses of chocolate.

Lam Dong - Fruit cake.  In so many ways that sums up this bean.  Chocolate aroma with a touch of allspice. I have to admit,  I actually moaned (just a little) with my first bite.

And Tien Giang - This chocolate is high in spice, tobacco and nutty flavors.

And on the chance you missed it, go check out the other new Direct trade bean that is in.

Honduras Wampursirpi.  In particular, check out the Details tab.  I just updated a bunch information about Biosphere and what they are actively doing to support the farmers and communities in the region long term.  I'm really stoked about all they are doing.

Ask the Alchemist #159

Level: Alchemist

Read time: 8 minutes.

Would you have a graph showing the temperatures at which type V crystals melt for different chocolates?

Part two

If you have not read last week’s answer, go ahead and read it.  I’ll wait.

Good.  You are up to speed?  Good.  Let us proceed.

One of the big problems is that different ingredients change your tempering temperatures in different ways.  The more cocoa butter you have, the higher you will be able to take your chocolate.   Similarly, the more sugar you have, the cooler you need to keep your chocolate.  Have a look at these graphs.

Basically, the two changes cancel each other out.  Which makes sense.  If you have more sugar, and the added cocoa butter is constant then you have to reduce the cocoa beans which reduces the overall cocoa butter.  But notice too how the data is all over the place.  It isn’t really predictive.  There is a general trend.  That’s all.  It’s because, as you know, tempering  has a lot going on that affects it.

The method you use be it slab or bowl or machine.  How much you are tempering has an effect due to heat loss.  And your ambient temperature likewise will have an effect for that same heat loss reason.

Look.  I know this isn’t really helping you learn to temper.  And it can be kind of discouraging.  My point in all this is that graphs are not practical day to day.

But the general trends can be helpful.  More cocoa butter gives you a higher temperature.  More sugar less so. To combat more sugar, a little more cocoa butter will probably be a good idea.  Those are the kind of things I want you to be able to think through.

Alright, one more thing.  This last part is about the subtlety of tempering.  In short it is another reason that graphs are not practical in day to day use.   Recall those graphs above?   Notice how although there is a general trend the data’s predictive power really kind of sucked?  That is because there is another variable at work here mucking up the works.

It has everything to do with how much Type V seed you have in your working chocolate and at what temperature you are working at.  Most people who work with chocolate know the word tempering.  They know in general it is a process.  That of making Type V crystals so that their chocolate will have a nice snap.

What many don’t realize is that while you are in the middle of tempering, lots of things are going on.  From what I can tell the generally understood concept is that you are make or adding Type V seed and as long as you are holding it a the right working temperature, nothing is going on.  The Type V is stable and just waiting for you to pour it into molds.

But that isn’t the case.  Double negative alert.  Nothing never happens.

And I bet you have seen this.   You are at the perfect 89 F.  You are keeping it right there.  You are pouring your chocolate into molds.  You go back for the next ladle full…..and the chocolate is thicker.  You check your temperature.  Yep, still 89 F.  Did you get water in it?  What’s wrong?  It was working perfect, now it isn’t.  You rush to finish only to find you last bars bloomed because you had to over work them.

What happened and what could you have done?  The answer lies in the fact that (get ready for it) nothing wasn’t happening.  i.e. something was happening in your bowl even if you didn’t see it.  What was happening was that you set up the perfect conditions (like you want to) for Type V crystals to form.  So they formed and your chocolate got thicker.

What could you have done?

As sacrilegious as it sounds, you need at that point to heat up your chocolate and start destroying some of the Type V crystals.  There really can be too much of a good thing and thick chocolate while you are tempering is the demonstration of that.

But remember, nothing is never happening.  As you heat up your chocolate (say 0.5 F BTW) you start to destroy some Type V.  But recall, you also have perfect conditions to form Type V.  So even though you getting rid of some, you are also forming some.  The key is that those rates are different.

Analogy time.  You are building a stack of blocks in the back of a moving van.  That is your job.  You can’t stop.  Soon the stack gets too high and they can’t moved around without them falling apart (i.e. molding up with streaking because the chocolate is thick).  So you need to some else to take some blocks off while you keep building (because you can’t do nothing).  So Bob (your uncle) starts to unstack blocks on the really tall stacks while you keep adding more on.  He is removing, you are adding.  As long as he doesn’t work faster than you (you don’t get the temperature too hot) all is fine. There are plenty of stacks for you both to work on.

Now here is the key.  When do you put Bob to work?   If you put him to work too early (have too warm a temperature) tearing down blocks, while your stacks are small, it might be he would not let you form any at stacks (Type V) at all.  If you put him to work too late your stacks are too big and unwieldy (the chocolate is too thick).

This is why tempering  temperatures vary too.  They are time dependent and also vary depending on how big your stacks are.   Your goal is to find the sweet spot where you are building and Bob is tearing down while you have a bunch of stacks that are not too big.  Sometimes you have to heat things up to make Bob work faster, sometime you need to cool things down if Bob is out pacing you.

This is why tempering machines  (AT THE RIGHT TEMPERATURE) work so well.  They are working in that sweet spot.  Building and tearing down at just the right pace.

Let’s bring this all together now.  You can see now why those temperature points were all over the place and at some points even higher when they should have been lower.  It was related to how long the session was and how much Type V was there initially.  A temperature that would ruin your temper at the beginning (say 90 f) might well be needed by the end because you have crystalized more Type V and need to reduce amount some so it can remain workable.

Basically maximum or optimum tempering temperature is a moving target and simply cannot be plotted on a 2 dimensional graph.   You might get somewhere plotting 3D like this:

But in reality you are probably going to need something with 5 or more variable to do it justice

I don’t think so!

My suggestion is just live with knowing it’s in the high 80’s to low 90’s and go from there. It’s what all those graphs boil down to anyway.

Good luck and happy chocolate making.

The queue is current empty.

Send in your Ask the Alchemist questions to questions@chocolatealchemy.com

Ask the Alchemist #158

Would you have a graph showing the temperatures at which type V crystals melt for different chocolates?

I get this or some variation of this question once a month it seems.  It is totally understandable.  It would be really great to know that if you have a 60% chocolate, you look it up on a chart, and find you can always take it to exactly 87.6 F without having it bloom later.

Unfortunately it is also completely impossible to produce for a lot of reasons.

There three main reasons.

• Different cocoa beans contain different amounts of cocoa butter
• Different cocoa beans contain different types of cocoa butter
• You have no good way to know those exact amounts.

What this means is that a 60% chocolate made from beans from Peru will have a different amount of cocoa butter (what is getting tempered) than a 60% from the Ivory Coast.  The former bean may have 50% cocoa butter but the later 57%.  That right there will change the maximum tempering temperature.

Different amounts of cocoa butter change your tempering temperatures.

But even if we get rid of that variable it still will not help us.  Let’s say we are told the cocoa butter percentage, and press out single origin butter to add back so they are the same amount, then you still can find that the 60% chocolates have different maximum melting points.

The reason is that all cocoa butter is not created equal.

I have to resort to a bit of basic chemistry.  In its simplest form,  cocoa butter is made up of three parts (fatty acids).  Each part can be one of 7 different fatty acids (although 3 commons ones are used 95% of the time).  The longer the fatty acid, the higher the melting point.

Look at the three examples of what cocoa butter can be made up of.

Notice the difference?  How as you go down, the parts get longer?  As that happens the melting point goes up.

That fact right there, coupled with having no way to find out just what combination you cocoa butter has defeats us if we try and build a graph.  If you cocoa butter has more of the first type, you melting point will be lower than if it has more of the third type.

How much lower?  Probably about 2 F.  Which is why there is always a range when giving tempering instructions.  ‘raise to 87-89 F’.

On the other hand, if you are talking about just one bean and different percentages of sugar and cocoa butter, now that can be graphed.  But you have to do it yourself for it is unique to your recipe and cocoa bean.

And I am going to talk about that next week, and why in reality if you do it you may find it less than helpful.  Stay tuned.

And always

Send in your Ask the Alchemist questions to questions@chocolatealchemy.com

Two new cocoa beans from Ecuador

http://shop.chocolatealchemy.com/products/ecuador-2015-puert-quito-organic http://shop.chocolatealchemy.com/products/ecuador-2015-pequino

Both are brand new beans that I've not had in before.  Lush chocolate and nutty flavors.  And very clean.  Check them out.

Ask the Alchemist #156

If one buys the oil expeller for making cocoa butter, which bean type would you recommend that might counteract to a small degree the astringency/metallic taste that I am getting with my chocolate.  I realize there are other factors that are contributing to this taste, most probably, but I thought it might be a place to start.  I was not thinking of making single origin chocolate, just a less sharp tasting chocolate and thought the cocoa butter might be one thing to address. 

This is not the direction I would take for addressing that flavor you are getting.   Especially since it is only a small degree of off flavor.   To my knowledge, there isn't a lot of chemistry that goes on with cocoa butter. Or at least once it is formed.

Generally speaking, there are three broad ways to affect the flavor of chocolate.  Not a lot different from maths.  You can add things.  You can subtract things. And this is where it kind of isn't a perfect analogy; you can alter them.  This third way is what you are asking about and is also what I was referring to as chemistry that goes on.

You know about adding flavor.  You put in some vanilla and you taste vanilla.  It does not change any of the other flavors.  Sometimes with enough it masks other flavors.  But it does not remove them or counteract them.

You know about subtracting flavor.  During the first 12 hours in a melanger lots of acids leave a chocolate.  You can smell them.  They are leaving.

Then there is the chemistry.  When you roast you actually make chemicals that we recognize as smelling and taste of chocolate.  We didn't add the chocolate flavor no did the removal of other flavors uncover the chocolate flavor.  It was created.

But of course taste isn't that simple.  And really there is a forth way to alter the flavor, and probably closer to what is going on.  And one of the reasons I associate chocolate with alchemy.  It's mysterious and magical...and frustrating at time in the way it can't quite be predicted.

The alchemy is our perceptions.  There is no one chemical that smells or tastes like chocolate.  Really.  What we think of as the chocolate smell isn't one chemical.  What you smelling is a unique combination of sweat, cabbage and beef.  When they are combined we no longer notice or can even recognize those individual aromas.

If you are having trouble wrapping your head around that, look at this picture.

What is the color of that cocoa pod?  If you say yellow, you are both right but also wrong.   You computer screen does not display yellow.  It can only display unique combinations of Red, Blue and Green.  RGB. Sound familiar? I'll grant what you are seeing looks like yellow.  But in reality it is a combination of red and green.  Cabbage and beef as it were.  But you see yellow.  You smell chocolate.

The whole point of this is to say taste is very complicated.  And also not absolute.  What you taste can be very different from what I taste.  I personally don't have a tendency to taste that metallic taste you mention.  Or at least, it does not taste of metal to me.  It tastes more of tangy acidity.  It is down to this complex dance of our receptors and how our brains put it together.

The best analogy is being color blind for certain colors.  If you show the above image to two people who are red and green color blind respectively, the red color blind person will see a green pod and the green color blind person will see a red pod.

I am going bring this back around.  And please know I am making this next part up as an example only.  It most likely is totally not accurate, but it gets the point across.  I propose that what I taste as tangy acidity is the yellow pod.  Not a stand alone chemical, but a combination of two.  Red and green.  You on the other hand can only taste one of the two chemicals and the result is the red pod for you - metallic astringency.

With that in mind I think you can see there isn't anything concrete I can tell you to do with 100% accuracy that will change how you perceive that flavor.  Maybe adding a certain cocoa butter will combine with it to make it seem to go away, but most likely I doubt that will be the case.  And in any case I'd have to be psychic to hazard a guess.  The combinations are just to immense.

And the photos point out another issue.  None of these tastes exist by themselves.   Let's pretend the purple in the right photograph is a particular flavor you love in your chocolate.  But you hate the red.  So we do figure out a way to add green to it so that your pod is yellow.  Success!  Right?  Sure, we fixed the red pod and now it is yellow...but that wonderful purple you so adore is not green.  And maybe the green is ok, it isn't purple.

This is pretty close to what happens when you alkalize your chocolate.  It massively reduces bitterness and astringency, but it also lays waste to all the other subtle flavors in your chocolate leaving you with a pretty bland, one dimensional chocolate.

There is a ton more I could say about taste, taste perception and the like but I fear the dreaded information overload and deer in the headlights syndrome. So let's circle back to things you can try.

I can offer a few things.  And unfortunately they come with the disclaimer that I don't know enough about your chocolate or how you roasted it.

Experience tells me metallic astringency can come from over heating your beans.  Scorching them.

But it can go the other direction and come from under roasted beans.

And without knowing how you roasted I can't tell which if either it is.

Finally, it can just be the bean and no treatment will change it.  And this is what I find the majority of the time.  That no matter what, you are going to taste metal when I taste tang.  In that case, your only option is to pick another bean.

As for adding your own pressed butter.  Sure, give it a shot, but at only 5-10% of the recipe, it is the last thing I would try, not the first.  It could well add a flavor to your chocolate but my gut feeling is that it isn't going to miraculous alter that one flavor you don't like.

Ask the Alchemist #155

What would you say is the most sought after type of bean right now between Criollo and Trinitario? Also, where would be the best country to source these beans from?

This is sort of a trick question.  I am pretty sure it was not meant that way, but it is one nonetheless.  It makes too many wrong assumptions.  “do you still kick your dog?”  How do you even answer that if you never kicked your dog or don’t even own one?  In court, I think it is called asking a leading question and they are not allowed for a reason.  They introduce bias.

And the answers, when given are not at all useful.  But I’ll do it to try and make the point.

The first part is easy.  Criollo is by far the most sought after type of bean.  And except from an idle curiosity point of view, I have no clue why you are asking.   Why do you care?

It is sought after because people think it is inherently better.  And because it is the least common.  Pretty much pure supply and demand mentality.  The really funny part about though is that as soon as it becomes readily available, the desire to have it drops.

Many of the beans I carry from Peru are Criollo.  And sure, they sell fine.   But they sell well despite being Criollo, not because they are Criollo.   “Criollo” makes the first sale.  The taste and quality keep people coming back.  The Oro Verde  is a nice fruity beans that is clean and chocolatey.  And it is Criollo.  Those that buy it because it is Criollo are often surprised that ‘it isn’t any different’ from any other fruity bean that is clean and chocolatey.  What I mean by that is that they have put the Criollo up on a pedestal and are disappointed that being Criollo does not in and of itself make it special.  .

It is ‘special’ because the farmers took care harvesting it.

It is special because it was fermented well and evenly.

It is special because it was handled well from start to finish and had good potential to start with.

It is not special because it is Criollo.

It is special because it’s natural potential was cultivated and realized.

And those that taste it expecting something different (I’m never sure what they are expecting) are invariable disappointed, and 9 times out of 10 tell themselves the story that ‘it must not REALLY” be Criollo and continue on with their holy grail search.  They have introduced bias into their evaluation because of false, unfounded expectations.

And speaking of holy grails.  Let’s talk Criollo Porcelana.  That rare of the rare, super special of the special.  There is rarely a week that goes by that I don’t get asked if I can get some.  Hugely sought after.

About 6 weeks ago the question stopped coming in.  Why?  I am carrying Porcelana.  And it had VERY brisk sales for about 2 weeks…..and now I still have a couple hundred pounds selling at a moderate pace.  Why?

Once something is found, quest finished, end of story.  Why?

Because although it is a nice bean, people have found that other beans are more to their liking.  Being called Porcelana may even have worked against it, setting expectations so high that no bean, no matter how good, could attain the god like status it was granted because of it’s name.  A real pity too as it is a nice bean.

Ok, I’ve beat that horse quite enough I think.  Next question.

Where?  Which country?

The semi sarcastic yet very real answer is those countries that have Criollo.  That would be the Americas.  The issue here is again it is the wrong question.  “Countries” don’t make a bean good or bad.  Genetics, handling, farms, weather, fermentation, drying, people etc make a bean good or bad and that is independent of country.

Maybe the better question is ‘how do I find good Criollo?’ And better yet, ‘How do I find good cocoa beans?’

The short answer is there is no one answer.

I evaluate dozens if not hundreds of beans a year.  I don’t evaluate them on their pedigree, country or certifications.  Sure, those many come into play AFTER I determine if it is a good bean, but that is it.

I make chocolate from the samples and evaluate them.  Blind.  If they pass muster, then I look at those other very important pieces of data and weigh if they are worth offering to you. Are they organic?  Are they fairly traded?

The key here is that a beans quality and taste are what are important to me.  Not it’s ‘type’.

And so I recommend the same to you.  Don’t look for a type. Don’t look for a country.  Look for a cocoa bean that makes a chocolate that you love.

Keep an open mind.   Look and taste different beans.  Evaluate them for what they are, not what you want them to be.  And should you determine you don’t like one, for heaven’s sake don’t write off any entire country or type.  It makes as much sense never dating another person with brown hair that is from Chicago because you once didn’t get along with a brown haired person from Chicago.

That pretty much sums it up.

Don’t discriminate.  Don’t prejudge.  Keep an open mind.

Those are good life rule and work very well for chocolate too.

Ask the Alchemist #154

Now that you have a cocoa butter press, have you experimented with different ways of making chocolate (to improve flavor/texture/etc...)?  While I realize that "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".... My mind is now spinning with thoughts of things that could be done during the process... pressing butter out of the liqueur before putting it into a melanger to refine/conche...  Doing something to warm/process the butter to change its flavor before reintroducing it to the cocoa "powder"... different ways to introduce the sugar into the butter and/or powder?   

Well, the first answer is that no, I have not yet experimented with this.  I am actually in the middle of a long series of oven roasting tests.  So far I have 10 different combinations of roasting beans and nibs in a conventional oven.  More on that later.

For those that are missed the 'press' that is being discussed, it is the Nutrichef oil expeller that works on cocoa beans and gives your own cocoa butter.

What can be done?  Well, given we are limited to a Melanger, I think some of our options are limited by the necessity to have a flowing product.  You could press some cocoa butter out, but you still need to maintain 30-35% fat, so even with a 70% dark chocolate, you are already there and can't remove any cocoa butter.

I am glad you mention 'just because you can, doesn't mean should".  We CAN process our chocolate more, but I'm not sure we should.  It's one of the big reasons I constantly make it known that I don't find you can make a good chocolate from cocoa powder.  It was been processed too hard.  But there is also no reason not to try.  This is fresh cocoa butter and powder and is 'processed' more gently than others by nature of the small scale.  I will certainly try making a batch recombined.  For science's sake.

What does come to mind though is a cocoa powder, cream powder chocolate.  At 72% fat in the cream powder, you have the ability to get that chocolate flowing again.  That is now on the list too.

That all said, I think the first place to start is making your own butter, and using it in 5-10% amounts in your existing recipes and seeing if it makes a difference.  I know it can make a radical difference in a milk chocolate where there is 30%.  Time to play people!

Finally, I will mention that the resulting cocoa powder is not as fine as commercial powder.  But it is pretty fine (straight out it is coarse, but a quick run in a whirly blade grinder gets it fine).  And I've been using it in mochas (it mixes nicely with hot water), hot chocolate (ditto with hot water and sugar) and quick mole spicing (I sprinkle it on sauteing chicken and add a little chili sauce).

So, what do you folks want me to test?

Ask the Alchemist #153

"As I understand it, when one fills a mold, the chocolate, which is at working temperature, contains predominantly Type V crystals.  As its temperature drops, what keeps the undesirable crystals from forming?"

Nothing.  I bet that was not the answer you were expecting.  Of course, I will explain.  It actually allows me to dig a little deeper into what is tempering.

I’ve mentioned before there is something called degree of temper.  It is a measure of how much your chocolate is tempered.  To review, many think of chocolate temper in a binary sense.  It is either tempered or it isn’t.  Off or on.  0 or 1.  Tempered or bloomed.  And that is a handy model.  But it isn’t the whole truth.  It is more like a number line.  Negative numbers are bloom (crystals other than Type V).  Positive numbers are temper (lots of Type V).  And there is even a zero where there is no crystal structure at all.  Like glass.  It is what we call amorphous.

The higher the number, the greater the temper.  That means that there is more Type V crystal.  If you follow that train of thought that means for some tempers there is something else.  That something else is Types I-IV.   So, see, that is what I mean by ‘nothing’ keeps those ‘undesirables’ from forming.  They do form.  But only in small amounts.  So maybe there is a  better question.

Why don’t those undesirable crystals cause bloom?

Scaffolding.   Seed.  It is the same mechanism that lets seed tempering work.  Namely that if given no direction cocoa butter will randomly form.  If you give it just a little direction, it will stack up appropriately.  So if you have Type V in there, that is the scaffolding that the rest of the cocoa butter will build upon.  In the most technical sense there is some Type IV in there in the tiny spaces that there is not Type V seed.  That ratio of V:IV is degree of temper.  The more IV there is, the softer the temper.  At some point that I don't know, the type IV disrupts the framework of the Type V and you get bloom.

In essence the Type V out competes the undesirables.  With seed the Type V hits the ground running as it were and uses up available cocoa butter to build more Type V.  If everything goes right, it’s is all used up by the time the temperature is low enough for Type IV to start forming.

Since we are talking seed, picture this as a garden.  If you prepare a bed you can either direct seed a plant or transplant a growing seedling.    Experience tells you the seedling will do better.  It has a head start.  The seeds have a tougher go as they have to out compete the weeds.  If you don’t weed then the weeds can win and your seedling dies and your chocolate blooms.  But if you can get your seedlings established and healthy with will use up the nutrients (think free cocoa butter) faster than the weeds and win the race (to mix metaphors).

So your goal is to nuture a good crop of Type V so it can ‘grow’ into healthy tempered chocolate before the Type IV weeds can take over.  You do this by starting with a good amount of seed (seedlings) and keeping the temperature high enough so Type IV can’t form (weeding).

Finally, it is worth noting that sometimes there can be too much of a good thing.  Just like you can have too many seedlings in a given area and you need to thin them for the betterment of the whole area, it is possible to get too much seed in your working chocolate.  If you have been working with your chocolate a long time (it’s all relative) and you notice it thickening up, then that is what you are seeing.  Too much seed.  You need to thin.  And you thin by heating the chocolate up a little bit (just 0.5-1 F for instance).  And just like thinning kills some of the plants you actually want, that heat will ‘kill’ some your Type V.  The result will be that the chocolate will thin back down and you can keep working with it.  You are not destroying all the Type V.  You are just selectively thinning.

There you go.  Tempering as gardening.  I hope that gives you a bit more of a peek behind the curtain.

Three brand new products

First and foremost, I want to present the NutraChef 'cocoa press' oil expeller.  You can now make your own cocoa butter at home at the press of a button.  I tasted the most amazing milk chocolate made with some fresh pressed Madagascar cocoa.  The caramel notes were amazing and fully due to the single origin butter, as it was totally missing from the 'control' made with the natural cocoa butter we offer.

The next new product is a variation on whole milk powder.  This is Heavy Cream powder.  So, instead of milk chocolate, you can make Cream Chocolate.  At 72% butter fat, you can add it directly to an existing dark chocolate recipe without adding any extra cocoa butter like you would with a milk chocolate.

Finally, a new origin.  A lovely base note cocoa bean from Trinidad and Tobago.  The taste that comes through for me is dried mission fig, date sugar and toasted pecans.

Might I suggest a Single Origin Trinidad Cream chocolate?

2 lbs Trinidad and Tobago roasted cocoa, winnowed to 24 oz.

5 oz Trinidad and Tobago home pressed cocoa butter (results from a 500 gram batch)

1 lb Heavy cream powder

1 lb sugar

This should be unlike ANY chocolate you have ever tried.

New Products on the way

No Ask the Alchemist today.  The queue is empty. Mind you, I thought I was setting a new record this week for submissions, but somehow things have become confused.  All the messages were general questions to me.  Do you ship here?  Can you ship this out today?  Do you sell tempering machines?  Where can I buy a Champion?   To clarify, question@chocolatealchemy.com is for 'in depth' questions generally about the chocolate making process.  Not like the above.

So, have I really answered everything you want to know out there?

And to give you something to look forward to, three new products should be available tomorrow.

• Whole cream powder
• A deep, chocolatey bean from Trinidad
• An electric oil press so you can make your own cocoa butter.  I've been having quite a bit of fun testing it out.

Stay tuned and get those questions in.

Ask the Alchemist #151

1. I have learned (the hard way) that not all cocoa butters are created equal. In fact, there seems to be a huge variation in quality, with some CBs having a very metallic taste. What is the reason for this variation in quality and what causes the metallic taste? Bad storage?
2. Is there any substantive difference between “cold pressed” CB and regular CB?
3. Does CB go bad? How long can it be stored at room temperature?
4. Have you ever tried to press CB from your own beans? Is there any cost effective way to do this?

That is very true.  All cocoa butters are not equal.  Just like cocoa beans, roasts, chocolates and everything else.  I honestly don't know what causes that metallic taste, but I have found it across the board regardless of type, roast or age.  My educated guess is that it is related to what variety of cocoa bean it comes from.  In the absence of other chocolate flavors, that metallic flavor makes me think of bitterness and astringency.  Which leads me to think it is most likely the choice of source beans.  Generally speaking, high yield beans like CCN-51 produce more than average quantities of cocoa butter.  They also tend to be more astringent and don't produce fantastic chocolate, but the butter can be 'cleaned up'.  But only to such a degree.  The result can be that off taste.

Cold pressed butter.  My opinion is that there is no substantive difference.  I've heard theories about higher nutrients, enzymes and other fully unsubstantiated claims.  But I have yet to see one single piece of real data that backs up any of the claims.  The only difference I have yet to see is that as it is usually produced from raw beans, there is very little chocolate flavor, and the yield is significantly lower, so the price it higher.

I have never seen cocoa butter go bad.  It is pretty much that simple.  I guess it could if it was held in a liquid state for a while.  In that case it would oxidize or turn rancid, but you would have to work at it.  The triglycerides in cocoa butter are made up of medium length fatty acids.  This makes them naturally very resistant to rancidity as usually only short chain triglycerides go rancid.

Yes, I have tried pressing my own cocoa butter.  Mostly it has been a failure.

I have tried straight up pressing of nibs and liquor and fully failed.  I recovered nothing.  Screens clogged or broke.

I've tried mixed liquor with water and trying to get the butter to separate.  Nope. Didn't work.  I even tried tossing various laboratory techniques at it, like salting out.  Still nothing.

I had some success mixing a little water to make the chocolate seize and then letting the cocoa butter drip out.  You can read about it here. I was about to get about 12% recovery from a LOT of work.

But I have had recent success using an oil expeller press.  I'm actually getting comparable recovery to traditional pressing.  About 30-35% based on the original weight (50% would be perfect).  Go look around at oil expeller, but remember you heard it here first.  If all goes right, I may be offering one up for sale.  The only downside so far is the time it takes.  Namely 150-170 grams in 30-40 minutes.  Stay tuned for a full report.

And don’t forget, you can always, submit YOUR questions for  Ask the Alchemist to:

question@chocolatealchemy.com

.

Ask the Alchemist #150

A lot of bean-to-bar craft chocolates only two three ingredients: cacao beans, cane sugar, and sometimes cocoa butter. Industrial chocolate, on the other hand, often contains cocoa butter, but also vanilla, and soy lecithin. Could you briefly explain the role of these ingredients? How do they impact the taste and/or texture of the chocolate?

I was asked this question, and a number of others in an interview recently.   And it is now out.  So, head over to 37chocolates to read the answer to this question and a number of others.

And don't forget, you can always, submit YOUR questions for  Ask the Alchemist to:

question@chocolatealchemy.com

Porecelana and Guasare available

I have a couple bags of the incredibly rare (and unique tasting) Venezuelan Porcelana beans in.  Tangy lemon/lime. There is also a larger amount of rich Venezuelan Guasare in - personally my preference is for this one, with it's lush, sweet nutty notes.

Go check them out.  I actually did a three way roast level evaluation for the Porcelana.

Ask the Alchemist #149

I heard you are getting some porcelano in. How do I roast it? I know it should be very light because it is puree Criollo, but I’m lost after that. I don’t want to ruin it.

First the bomb. Yes, I have some Porcelano in that will be available next week. Next, if you roast it very light your chances of ruining it go WAY up.

Let’s talk about assumptions, pre-conceived notions, patterns, extrapolations and the fallacies of trying to use patterns we think we have found to make predictions. It’s human nature. I get that. But it’s a nasty trap to fall into. It is a variation of ‘correlation is not causation’. What that means is just because you see a pattern, “My knee hurts. The last time my knee hurt, it rained,. It must be about to rain” doesn’t mean that the two facts are related.

The variation I tend to see is slightly different than the knee pain one. It is usually associated with around general cocoa types, their availability, worth and how to handle them. It usually goes like this.

There are three types of cocoa (not really true, and part of the problem, but moving forward). Forastero, Trinatario and Criollo.

Forsatero is the most common accounting for around 85-90% of cocoa grown.

Trinatario is next about 10-15%

Criollo is the most rare in the lower single digits.

Next, there is a general trend we see in price. Forastero is the least expensive, Trinatario and Criollo are more expensive.

And similarly, painting with a broad brush, there is a general trend of cocoa quality is Forastero at the bottom, Trinatario next and Criollo at the top.

Finally, when you roast cocoa, there is a very generalized trend that emerges.

Criollo 235 - 270 F Trinatario 250 - 285F Forastero 260 - 310 F

And what we now have are three groups of data that appear to reinforce one another and that is a very powerful thing in the human mind. It makes us want to draw conclusions and predictions where they don’t exist. The ‘conclusion’?

“Forastero is the cheapest bean, of the lowest quality and roasts the hottest”. Therefore, (trumpets sound), “Criollo is the most expensive, best quality and must be roasted very cool”.

I cannot tell you how often I hear this. It is so ingrained. And so very wrong.

Forastero is the cheapest NOT because of its poor quality but because it is produced in the most quantity. Basic economics. Supply is high, so price is low (again a not quite true premise, but helpful in this case). Notice I never said Criollo is more expensive than Trinatario? I’m will to wager though that is what you thought I said. Your brain forced the pattern. I only said it was the rarest. The same goes for a lot of Forastero being ‘bad’. If only 25% is bad, then just by the nature of there being so much of it, the ‘bad Forastero’ out numbers all the other non-Forastero.

And there it is. The issue. Rarity and how it does not relate to quality (or roasting). Porcelano is the rarest of the rare. Therefore the logic goes, since it is the rarest it MUST be the best and MUST be roasted to coolest…..and it is totally wrong. It doesn’t work that way.

There is a range of roasting for Criollo of 235-270 F. It is because each bean is different. It is NOT because there is a pattern in the pattern. It does not mean that the more pure the Criollo is the cooler it much be roasted. It’s just an empirical observation from roasting Criollo over the years. If you look again at the temperature ranges I gave up there you will see they all overlap in the 260-270 range. Roast any bean to 260 F and you have a better than not chance that the roast will be fine. Any more fine tuning than that and you are asking for trouble.

Back to the original question and the assumption:

I know it should be very light because it is pure Criollo.

By now you should see how wrong that assumption/conclusion is. The only thing you can say is that it is rare. And that is just because it cross breeds easily, is a low producer and isn’t as hardy as many cacao trees. That’s all. Just because it is on one end of one parameter (availability, i.e. it’s rare), does not mean all its parameters are shoved over to one end of the graph.

I’m going to repeat this.

Porcelano is rare. End. Stop. That doesn’t mean it is the best, must be roasted the lightest, has the most antioxidants, will give you the best endorphin rush or anything else. It just means it is the rarest.

Ok, so the rant is over.

So how do you roast the rarest of the rare of cocoa beans? You certainly don’t want to roast it super light because it is super rare? Right? Right!

Might I suggest you treat it like any other bean. Hrm, I bet shooting for 260 F would be a GREAT place to start. Maybe take it a little more gentle because it is Criollo, but note, I said a LITTLE. Not “a lot” because it is Porcelano.

It is already starting out a little light on the chocolate flavor as it isn’t Forastero, so you want to encourage those flavor developments by giving it a good solid roast. Develop those flavors. But nice and easy. At the end of the day, enjoy the chocolate for what it is. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that because it is rare, and because it is sought after that it is because it is going to be the best chocolate ever. Those are all unrelated items. Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t be. You won’t know until you try it and decide for yourself. Because, after all, that is all that counts. Do YOU like it.

And that brings up the final point. It is very possible you WILL want to roast it light. That you like the bright snappy flavor, the low chocolate level and that too is perfectly ok. Just don’t think you have to.

New cocoa beans

We are kicking the new year off with three new beans. First, the brand new one, and maybe my favorite of the bunch (since I just finished writing up the review, it is of course the last chocolate I ate, so of course it is my favorite).

Peru FT/Org Norandino 2015/16 - There is orange marmalade, molasses and dried pear competing for dominance.

Madagascar Sambirano Valley Organic 2016 - We ran out briefly last year.  This is the newest crop.  Still a powerhouse.  This year instead of raspberry, it is virtually exploding with cherry and raisin.....

Uganda Org 2015 - There is an undeniable roundness to the flavor profile this year.  Very base and solid chocolate.  I find an inherent sweetness that contributes to the perception of a full flavor.

And lastly, I want to remind you of one we put up last month.  Honduras Wampusirpi.  We are down to the last bag, so get it before it is gone.

Honduras Wampusirpi 2016 Direct Trade/"organic"    The first aroma I get is of soft leather, like a supple piece of deer skin.  Buttery almost.  With that comes along flavors of bright dried fruits.  This just might be my favorite bean from last year and this lot is imperceptible in it's differences.

Potential down time

We are doing some admin updates to the site today and it may or may not go down from time to time.

Ask the Alchemist #148

What recipe should I use?

This is a follow up from all the possible combinations and permutations that are possible when making a batch of chocolate. Clearly you can’t make all 7 billion combinations. You can’t even make 70 really. But what you can do is go about it systematically and zero in pretty quickly upon what you like. And the best part is you will hopefully learn along the way what various changes produce in a finished chocolate.

What I am going over here is not for everyone. If you want to make a good chocolate, that is pretty straight forward. But if you want to experiment, and learn to dial a bean in to your tastes, this is how I do it.

First you have to choose a bean. I have around 30 beans. It’s overwhelming, I know. But in short order, you can winnow it down to a pretty easy selection. Go by your own preferences in foods. I love meats, nuts and savory flavors. I also like deep bold flavors. Look for descriptors like, well, nutty. And savory. Nicaragua, Honduras, some Ecuador, Tanzania. The corollary to that is staying slightly away from fruity and acidic beans. Dominican Republic, Madagascar, some Guatemalan. I don’t like hoppy, citrusy ales. Nor light fruity drinks. And if you drink coffee, that is a great indicator. Sumatra? That’s earthy and Ugandan is going to be up your alley. Bright Kenya? Madagascar. I think you see the pattern. You know your tastes.

Roasting. That is critical. The current trend is to not ‘over roast’ your beans. And on the surface, I agree. In practice, unfortunately, the result is I am dealing on a weekly basis with people that are terrified to fully roast a bean and the result is under roasted beans that are overly acidic, over astringent and lacking in good chocolate flavor (that is developed from a full roast). So here is my suggestion. Plan to roast twice initially. Once specifically light, once significantly longer. The whole point is making them radically different. So, using the Behmor 1600 as an easy way to talk about profiles, do one roast with 2.5 lbs of bean on P1 for 15 minutes. The second one you are going to take to 20.5 minutes. Yes, 5.5 minutes difference. Cocoa can take it. The idea that a bean can go from ‘perfect’ to ‘ruin’ in under a minute is in my mind totally crazy.

Now onto the recipe. What do to? Well, what do you like? Clearly you are making your own chocolate because you or someone you love likes chocolate. Start there. You can reverse engineer virtually any chocolate bar. If it is 70%, that mean the cocoa nibs plus cocoa butter equal 70%. On average, 50% of the cocoa nib is butter/fat. So if that bar says 35% fat (50% of 70%) then you know they didn’t add any cocoa butter. If it says 40%, you know they added about 5%. And the rest is sugar.

So, take that recipe and your light roasted nibs. 65% cocoa nibs, 5% cocoa butter and 30% sugar. Weigh out your ingredients. This is where we start to go kind of crazy. Put your cocoa and cocoa butter (if you are using any) into your melanger.

And add HALF the sugar. Let it run 24 hours.

Take some out (just a couple tablespoons) and then add the rest of your sugar.

Let it refine another 24 hours. Remove about half of it, and add another equal portion of cocoa butter and let it run another hour. Remove a tablespoon or two sample and let it run another 24 hours.

Remove the chocolate and repeat this with your fully roasted nibs.

At the end of this you will have 8 different chocolates to try that are pretty different – all from 2 roasts. You will have:

1) light sugar

2) “target” chocolate

3) Extra cocoa butter chocolate

4) Extra long refined chocolate.

You (and friends?) should sit down and taste them. Mostly just judge whether or not you like them. Don’t try and rate them or anything fancy. Maybe put them in order if you can. What should become apparent pretty quickly is that the majority are not ruined. Under roasting didn’t ruin it. Over roasting didn’t ruin it. Extra time maybe helped one or the other extreme roast in an unexpected way. Who knows. The main thing here is that you have 8 chocolates and patterns that should help you try the next batch of chocolate. And you didn’t have to make 8 separate batches.

What you should gather from this ‘data’ is what sweetness level was your favorite. The ‘light” was good but the standard too sweet? Split the difference. How about the roast? Maybe split the difference if you can’t decide. Did the extra cocoa butter add or detract? How about the extra time? My bet there is either it had no effect (i.e. relax about how long you refine) or slightly improved the ones that you didn’t like as well.

That’s it. For the next batch try and keep as many things as possible the same, tweaking only the really obvious ones so you can go back and compare. And of course plan out your own changes along the way and turn that single batch into 3 or 4 or 5 different versions. Very quickly you will find YOUR favorite recipe for the bean you picked. And that last part is worth noting. If you finish all 8 chocolate and dislike them all, there is a good chance you don’t like that bean, not that you did anything wrong. Pass it around and see what other people think.

Happy chocolate making.

Ask the Alchemist #147

I am planning to open a chocolate making business. I’m trying to come up with the perfect chocolate that stands out from the crowd. What recipe should I use?

I can’t tell you.

I’m going to tackle this one with math. And I’m going to try to walk a line between utterly absurd and merely impractical.

Let’s get utterly absurd out of the way (except there are SO many fun ways to be utterly absurd). Let’s talk absurd roasting. You can roast beans anywhere from 5 minutes to 60 minutes. And even in that I am trying to be reasonable. You could roast 5 hours but I’ve never heard that so I’m not including it. In those 55 minutes, there are 3300 seconds. You need to take them to some final temperature. Staying with the absurd (but safe!) let’s say your range is 150 F – 300 F. My thermometer has 0.1 degree increments. That means I have 1500 temperatures I can choose from. That means (by multiplying the two numbers together) I have 4,950,000 possible roast combinations. Nearly 5 million ways I can roast. And that is keeping the ‘utterly’ absurd ‘reasonable’ still since I didn’t even bring up HOW we are going to go from room temperature to our final temperature. Technically there is an infinite ways to get from one temperature to another, but that isn’t practical to help you understand. I’ve talked a bit about profiles in the past. That just means the shape of the curve if you plot temperature vs time. Here is a picture of a few curves. They are start and end at the same temperature and do it in the same amount of time, but they look different in graph form and will produce different tasting beans (and thus chocolate).

If we just say it has to be one of those, the choices go to 15 million. Absurd enough? I think so.

Now let’s talk ‘reasonable’. You want me to give you the perfect chocolate recipe? Ok, what are our options? At the basics, we have these options.

1) Bean

2) Roast

3) Recipe

Pick a bean. I have about 30 choices.

Next it needs to be roasted. I’m going to suggest we use the Behmor since it has 5 pre-defined profiles. Without getting crazy, there is still the decision to make of how long to roast. Let’s keep it to 1 minute increments (even though it goes down to 15 second increments). I have had good tasting roasts from 14 minutes to 22 minutes. So that gives us 40 choices.

I really hate to do this but it does make a difference in how the Behmor or any roaster roasts. How much are you going to roast at a time? 1.5 lbs on P3 for 18 minutes will give you a different result from the same profile and time if you roast 2.5 lbs. If we pick ¼ lb increments, that is 5 choices there.

What formulation? Well, we need a percentage of cocoa beans, sugar and cocoa butter. At this point the permutations start getting out of control even when I try and keep them reasonable. From a calculation standpoint, let’s look at how much sugar to add. Reasonable is 20% to 40%. As much as I want to increment that at 5% and give us 5 choices (20, 25, 30, 35, 40) experience tells me it’s more like 2%, so that is 11 choices.

To add cocoa butter or not? I’m going to really keep this simple and say it’s either none, 5% or 10%. 3 choices.

So what does that give us for possible chocolate recipe choices?

30 beans x 40 roasting profiles x 5 weight choices x 11 sugar percentages x 3 cocoa butter percentages.

And keep in mind I tried really hard to keep this reasonable and grounded.

198,000 combinations. And you want me to pick ONE? How about if we par it down to really basic.

30 beans x 5 profiles (go with the Behmor defaults) x 5 sugar percentages (5% increments) x 2 cocoa butter (0 or 5%)

There are still 1500 combinations!!! And you want me to pick for you the ONE that stands out from the crowd? Not possible.

And how about sugar type choices. Or cocoa bean blends. Should you mix the beans before or after roasting? Then there are different cocoa butters. Lecithin? Milk? Vanilla?

There are currently about 7 billion people on this earth. I would not be surprised if couldn’t come up with 7 billion different ways to make chocolate. I mean, we didn’t even address refining times (24-72 hours – 48 options), temperature of refining (105 – 145 F – 40 options),

There are 12.17 BILLION combinations right there. And I didn’t even break a sweat.

Look, I’ll admit many of those would seem identical. I’m just trying to make a point and explain why I just can’t hand you the magic perfect chocolate recipe. And also why you will never make a chocolate that will appeal to everyone or stand out like a shining beacon of chocolate perfection. There are just too many choices. It’s just numbers. It’s why you didn’t win the recent Powerball lottery (I’m assuming the winners are not reading this).

And we didn’t even talk about that what is great to me isn’t great to you.

Which leads me to my advice. Don’t try to please everyone. You can’t. You can only make the chocolate that sings to you. If you do that, those that like what you like will find you. I’ve seen it over and over. Be passionate about what you make and your passion will be infectious.

That all said, I’m going to make this a two part answer. Next week I am going to talk about how to practically dial in a chocolate recipe without doing thousands of batches. Stay tuned.

As always, submit YOUR questions for  Ask the Alchemist to  question@chocolatealchemy.com