Chocolate Making
I will try to use this blog for longer posts that wouldn't really fly on facebook. To begin:
Chocolate Making
The other week my brother harvested some cacao from our backyard here (that's right, you can grow cacao in the backyard in Hawaii. How cool is that? Super cool.)
We started by opening up the pods and taking out the beans
Fresh cacao beans are purple inside with a thin layer of fruity white flesh between them (visible in the picture). The flesh is good, kind of mango-y tasting, but there isn't much of it. The beans are very bitter and a bit astringent. They taste nothing like chocolate at this point.
After the seeds are out of the pods they are traditionally fermented. Some of the yeasts and bacteria for fermenting cocao are naturally occurring; some people recommend adding yogurt. We added a dab of kimchi, which has similar bacteria (and all we had on hand. Don't worry, it didn't make it taste like kimchi.)
We allowed the beans to ferment for about two days. Then we spread them out to sun dry, which makes roasting more even.
They took a day in the direct sun to dry. Then we put them in the oven to roast. Roasting directions vary widely– generally, cacao is not roast nearly as hot or as long as coffee. 250 degrees and a half hour seem to be maximums. Most recipes advise starting at the highest temp and slowly working your way down. Overall, the goal is for the beans to start smelling like chocolate, and get pretty dark on the outside. Ours weren't quite dry when we put them in so they were in for about a half hour, half of the time at 250 and half at about 170.
After roasting, the shells come much more easily off the beans. Peel the individual beans.
They beans are much darker now and have a dark chocolate-y smell.
Next, for simple at-home chocolate, we blended our beans in a coffee grinder. This brings out the natural oils and creates a sort of bitter cocoa slurry.
We added sugar (powdered) to make it sweet.
This paste can be put into a mold or just stuck in the fridge. It tastes a lot like dark cocoa.
This is my first time ever making chocolate. A lot of direction came from my brother who has a bit more experience, but even he was unsure about some things, like fermentation and roasting time. All things considered it came out pretty well.
