Two friends of mine have been roasting cocoa recently and one of them, Marko Luther, has produced quite delicate and delicious bars of artisan chocolate, some of which were sold in a Parisian popup store last year. The other, Jan van der Weel, has recently brought along a thermos flask of the most delicious hot chocolate I've ever tasted.
So I wanted to try it as well. It looks like I won't pursue it much though.
The roasting is easy enough. I bought 500g of raw cocoa nuts and put them in the oven at 120ºC for 30 minutes. After cooling I peeled of the hard outer skin and while I was doing that, most of the beans crumbled. I know I can use the broken bits, the nibs, but it's not easy to make sure all the skin is absolutely separated so I just threw away all cocoa nuts that were broken.
This yielded a little less than 150g of roasted cocoa beans. My plan is to put them in the blender and mix with hot milk.
The alluring sweet smell of cocoa beans and the surprising ease of roasting could pull one into serious small scale chocolate making. But as one is drawn in by fascination, more machinery is needed, like a better way to peel the nuts and a
conching machine to roll the paste for 2-3 days into an ever more subtly sweet substance, then getting the exact right temperature at which the tasty chocolate crystals are formed.
I find it interesting but I hesitate to delve too deep into it. I might become a person munching chocolate for a hobby / craft, which is a bit pathetic maybe, and fattening for sure.
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| 500g of raw cocoa beans |
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| One cocoa bean, raw, slice, close up |
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| In the oven, 120ºC, 30 munutes |
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| Roasted |
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| Peeled |
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