Daily musings and writings from the Alchemist
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Ask the Alchemist
I know you don’t like chocolate roasted in an oven. There are lots of chocolate out there that have won awards and roast that way. I’m having trouble figuring out how to roast in my oven. The chocolate is only ok or bad. What roasting profile should I use? Can you tell me what temperature I set my oven to and for how long?
Today we have two questions related to Brewing Cocoa and I find one of them really interesting from an assumption standpoint.
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.
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.
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.
I was told that here are my tempering options:
Cocoa Butter
Cocoa Silk
Powdered Cocoa Butter/Silk
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?
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.
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?
I’ve read, re-read, and re-read again your articles and blog posts (Ask the Alchemist 200-205) on roasting. As much as I’d like to have all the proper equipment, there’s only so much I can do on a budget in a small apartment with limited storage space. For the time being I’m trying to oven roast. The engineer in me understands momentum, ramp (slope), and I’ve been trying to apply your Drum Roasting profiles to at least have similar concepts with Oven Roasting ... trying to go into the various phases appropriately.
I am new to chocolate compound coatings and I have been learning a lot from your website. I am making a chocolate compound coating, though it’s mainly geared towards chocolate. The recipe is as follows:
“I see you have beans from a couple years ago. Are they still good? I would prefer fresher beans.”
“I spend so much time sorting my beans and lose probably 20% because they are different sizes and some are not fermented well. What really clean beans can you recommend?”
This may seem a little irrelevant at first but hear me out:
Now I'm studying the book called "INDUSTRIAL CHOCOLATE MANUFACTURE AND USE" 4 th edition by S T BECKETT. and I'm having some doubts in this page which I given below, can you explain what is DHHM and what exactly the figure is saying.
