While ordering my cocoa beans from a supplier, I came across a couple of unfamiliar terms known as 1. Bean count 110/100gm and 2. Fermented bean percentage 85%. Kindly shed some light into this topic and please let me know if these are acceptable values for making good quality chocolate.

Depending how long you have been with the Chocolate Alchemy maker's family (yes, if you are reading this, you are part of the CA family), this may be an "at last, they are back" announcement or something you have never had the opportunity to experience. In either case, for me it is really exciting. It has been nearly 10 years since I have had beans from Venezuela and over a decade since I had the one from the Cuyagua region.

After last weeks in depth conversation about roasting cocoa in a coffee roaster, I wanted to, nay, needed to take it a little easy this week. There are a bunch of pretty simple questions that don’t really merit a full long winded response but in that there are no stupid questions (that is NOT a challenge folks) I still want to answer them. It also helps clear a little of the back log.

If we can roast cacao with our Diedrich IR12 that would solve everything.

It has been too long since we have had either a new bean or crop in and today I'm happy to announce both.

Sometimes when I break a piece of chocolate, I see white spots inside which I think is little pieces of silk which hasn't melted.

A warm welcome and hello the new year everyone. I’ve quite a bit to let you know about so I hope you can take a few minutes to dig in.

This year, #AmIRight?

I was told that here are my tempering options:

• Cocoa Butter

• Cocoa Silk

• Powdered Cocoa Butter/Silk

Ruby chocolate anyone?

Well, now that we have a good and prominent link up showing how to submit questions to me (hangs head in shame) so many are coming in it seems a good time for a pretty simple speed round

Do you have a recipe for or experience with making candied whole cocoa beans? I ate some in Costa Rica that were really good and I’d like to make my own. It’s definitely not rocket science, but I botched my first try and my second attempt wasn’t very good, so figured I’d check to see if you had any experience with it.

This is going to be a little rambling with a little of this and a little of that. I’ll get to the Ask the Alchemist after a couple announcements.

How much vanilla extract should I add to my chocolate?

I’m always thrilled to offer a new product., and this case I mean REALLY new. This is reminiscent of when, some 15 years ago, I first offered cocoa beans by the pound when they were not available ANYWHERE else.

Thanks for all the great blog posts on roasting, and specifically the Behmor. Thanks to Uncle Sam and tax returns, it's time to upgrade from oven roasting to the Behmor.

I wrote an article yesterday. 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.

Just a whack of product updates

I have been making your milk chocolate using your suggested 25% blend of cocoa, sugar, milk power, and cocoa butter. I'm curious what the best way would be to try different percentages without messing up the end product?

I am a recent convert (2wks) from my coffee to brewed chocolate, and I don't ever see myself going back. I live in an apartment now, so for the winter this would be strictly oven roasting. Can you be truly successful in a basic oven roasting method?