They Said It Couldn't Be Done (Chocolate, Part 3)

As a recap, we opened up the pod, pulled out all the slimy white things and put them in our home-made fermentation tank, let them ferment for a week, then put them in a tray to dry. After two weeks of drying the beans, we decided they were ready for the next step.

 What I read about roasting was about as specific as everything else I read about making chocolate. You put one layer of beans on a tray and put them in the oven for 5 minutes to half and hour or so at somewhere between 200 and 450 degrees, and generally you'd like to get them hot first and gradually less hot. With those clear instructions, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees, put the tray on the top rack for 8 minutes, stirring the beans after 5 minutes, and then lowered the temperature to 275 degrees and let them sit for another 12 minutes. Then I pulled out the tray and set it on the stove top to cool. 

 Some of the instructions suggested that if you have done everything right, you should experience a warm-brownie smell during this process. Of course, that would depend on everything else being done right in the first place. They said fermentation requires a mass of something like 25 pounds or it won't work. If the fermentation doesn't work, the results won't be anything like chocolate. Then they said if you don't sun-dry them properly, the chemical reaction won't be able to complete and you won't get chocolate. So much that could go wrong!

They said the timing and temperature of roasting is an art. I'm not sure what the roasting is supposed to do, but it should produce the smell and make the shell stuff come off pretty easily. We definitely noticed a warm-brownie smell during our roasting process.The shell stuff came off pretty easily. After you peel off the paper-like shell, the resulting brown thing is easily separated into a bunch of little pieces that we chocolate experts call " nibs". And the bottom line is, I guess, it's chocolate. I tasted one of those little pieces. It's unsweetened dark chocolate magic!

In our case, the whole pod had 49 beans. Three of them, upon drying, were little flat empty things that looked about like a corn flake. A couple, while not flat, seemed a bit anemic. The rest were pretty much like this one: a little package of pure chocolate goodness. So we take all these remaining good beans that have been fermented, dried and roasted, and open them up to reveal all the very interesting nibs. A cool thing about this is that after you do it, for the rest of the evening your fingers smell like chocolate.

So, here we are with about 1/3 of the beans done and you see there is a little yellow bowl of CHOCOLATE sitting next to the tray. Apparently if you have a lot more beans, you don't really want to go through the hassle of opening them all by hand, so you put them in a bag and mash them all with a rolling pin for a while until the nibs are separated from the shells. Then you use the old hair dryer trick to blow the chaff from the nibs. I might do that later. We'll see. Then once we are satisfied that we have pure wholesome clean nibs, we will begin the process of making sweetened milk chocolate or something like that. But that's quite another topic for yet another chocolate blog post, someday in the future.

Meanwhile, we have attempted to go beyond still pictures and bring you some actual video of bean shelling. If it works, here are two videos:

They said it couldn't be done, but we have chocolate here!