How Bean to Bar Dark Chocolate is Made?
Who doesn’t love chocolate? Chocolate is a main ingredient in the majority of desserts, including cakes, sweets, and so on. However, few people understand how chocolate is made, even fewer people have ever seen a cocoa bean, much less a cocoa pod.
Making your own handmade chocolate bars from per-fermented and dried cocoa beans allows you to avoid beef gelatin, emulsifiers, preservatives and other undesirable chemicals while still maintaining control over the process.
Pods from the Cocoa Tree are broken to extract the beans with the pulp surrounding them and are then left to ferment. This takes a few days and is where the majority of the flavor development occurs. This fermented and dried beans are used here to make the chocolate bar.
A brief explanation of the chocolate making process at home, from fermented bean to bar. To get the finest taste from the bean, each stage in the process is crucial. The steps involved in homemade chocolate recipe includes roasting fermented and dried coco bean, grinding, conching, tempering and molding.
1. Roasting The beans are hand-sorted before being roasted. Roasting is another stage in the flavor development process. Roasting also kills off any remaining bacteria from the fermented coco beans. The cocoa bean shell separates from the bean kernel during roasting and is removed in the first stage. The beans are then cracked into small pieces and are called cocoa nibs.
2. Grinding A melangeur is usually used for grinding the coco nibs into fine paste. But for those making chocolate at home can even do the grinding process in a mixer. The process turns the nibs into a cocoa mass, which contains cocoa solids as well as butter.
Unless you're a chocolate expert, you've probably never heard of conching. You'd be able to tell the difference if your eating chocolate wasn't conched since it would be rough and uneven.
3. Tempering To achieve the best form of chocolate in terms of stability, type, and size, the chocolate must be tempered. This means the chocolate should crystallise at a temperature lower than 32°C.
You can do hand tempering at home if you're working with small amounts of chocolate, and you'll need a granite counter top for this. We recommend using the tempering machine if you want to make more than 5 kg of chocolate each day.
4. Molding This is the stage when the home chocolatiers may show off their creativity by using interesting patterns and unusual mould forms. You've made it to the finish, and now you must wait overnight, unmold the chocolate, wrap it, and give it to your loved ones. Enjoy!