How to Make Your Own Chocolate

Chocolate is a food that is simultaneously ubiquitous and mysterious. Chocolate is everywhere - in cakes, in candies, in beverages. Yet few people really know how chocolate is made. Even fewer have actually set their eyes on a cocoa bean, much less a cocoa pod.

Chocolate manufacture requires six steps.

· First comes fermentation and drying. The beans are harvested from the pods, and allowed to naturally ferment over a period of two days to two weeks. Heat kills the delicate germinating seed, and natural yeasts grow to develop complex flavors. The beans are then sun-dried to preserve them for shipping.

· Next, the beans are roasted. Cocoa beans are roasted for the same reason that coffee beans are.

· Cracking and winnowing follow roasting. This step is purely mechanical, to separate the valuable nibs from the worthless shells.

· After this, the nibs must be refined. The tongue can perceive particles larger than 30 micrometers in size, so extensive grinding is needed for a good mouthfeel.

· The raw cocoa liquor is then "conched," a lengthy process which drives off the rest of the acidic flavoring compounds.

· Finally, the finished product is tempered to give the chocolate good gloss and snap.

Step 1: Equipment and Ingredients

The ingredients:

· Cocoa beans.

· Something to sweeten the chocolate such as table sugar, brown sugar, "raw" sugar, etcetera. Don't liquid sweeteners unless you want to end up with a chocolate paste.

· If you are planning on tempering the chocolate by seeding, you'll need a small amount of tempered chocolate.

On the equipment side, you'll need:

· A food processor or spice grinder (blade grinder)

· A baking sheet (perforated, ideally).

· A hairdryer

· A bowl.

· A mortar and pestle (for smaller batches) or a stand mixer (for larger batches).

· If you're planning on tempering the chocolate by tabling, you'll also need a slab of marble, granite, or other smooth nonporous stone surface, and a pair of scraping tools.

Step 2: Roasting the Beans

The basics: you want to start roasting at a high temperature, to make the shells nice and hot. This sterilizes them, the encourages the bean to separate from the shell. Eventually, you need to decrease the heat so that the beans don't burn.

Roasting the beans seems to be much more of an art than a science, especially without a "real" roaster. You want to wait for two things - first, the beans will crack and pop. This indicates that the bean has separated and breached the shell, which will make removing the shells much easier in the next step. Second, keep an eye (a nose?) on the aroma of the roasting beans. At first, the smell will be very vinegary and acidic - when your kitchen starts smelling like brownies, that's when you know they're done!

Step 3: Winnowing the Nibs

Now that the beans have cooled, the outsides (hulls) need to be separated from the insides (nibs).

There are two ways to do this. You can always peel each bean by hand, thrown away the skins, and keep the nibs for yourself. This will take a long time, but you lose very few nibs.

The other, faster option is to imitate the way these separations are done industrially - we'll crack the beans up and blow air on them to separate the thin papery outside from the dense tasty inside.

Place the cocoa beans into a plastic bag, and crush them up with a rolling pin, cast iron skillet, or other similarly heavy object. Don't be too gentle! Crack them beans!

Pour the mixture into a bowl. Next, gently direct the hairdryer towards the bowl. Agitate the cocoa mixture, either by stirring it with your hands or by shaking the bowl. If you've got the hairdryer at the right distance, the cocoa bean skins will fly out of the bowl, leaving the nibs behind. Check the nibs out to make sure all the skins are gone.

Step 4: Refining the Cocoa

The next step in the process is to grind the roasted nibs into a smooth, uniform mass. You want to take the nibs and "refine" the cocoa solids into the smallest possible size particles that you can.

First, we need to refine the desired sweetener. To do this, figure out how much chocolate you want to end up with (about 100 grams is really the maximum that my grinder can handle), and work from there. A 100 gram batch of 60% dark chocolate will require 60 grams of nibs and 40 grams of sugar. Add the sugar to the spice grinder and grind it until it's a superfine powder.

Add in the nibs.

If the chocolate needs thinning, small amounts of cocoa butter can also be added. Try to keep the total amount of additional cocoa butter below 10% of the total weight (no more than 10 grams for a 100 gram batch of chocolate).

Step 5: Conching the Chocolate

Conching serves two purposes. First, it helps to drive off undesirable flavor compounds developed during fermentation and roasting, and it helps coat the cocoa solids with fat to reduce the viscosity of the molten chocolate.

In an industrial setting, chocolate is conched for several hours. Since we're conching our chocolate by hand, this is, for lack of a better term, impractical. Still, even 10-15 minutes of conching will help un-harsh your chocolate's mellow.

First, heat up the mortar and pestle, either by placing them into a warm oven for a few minutes, or with a hairdryer. Add the chocolate from the spice grinder, and grind away.

Step 6: Tempering the Chocolate

Tempering the chocolate is optional, but recommended.

To table untempered chocolate, you need a stone slab and scraping tools.

Melt the chocolate to be tempered to at least 110 F, to melt all of the cocoa butter crystals.

Take about two thirds of the total batch and pour it onto the marble slab. Fold and agitate the chocolate with the scrapers, ensuring that no lumps form. Agitation encourages the formation of form V crystals to the exclusion of others.

Eventually, the chocolate will take on a thick, sludgy consistency. When it does, re-mix it into the remainder of the batch. At this point, you can pour the chocolate into molds.