Homemade Milk Chocolate (ft. 48 Hours In Ecuador)

milk chocolate do you actually know how it's made because i've found that most people actually have no idea i mean do you know where a cashew comes from did you know it's this weird little thing that hangs on top of a fruit there's so many foods out there where people just don't even think about where they come from but that's why i'm here today and i'm going to show you exactly how all of our favorite candy is made but to start this stuff right here is no good now we're gonna make it ourselves but first let's go grab some cacao pods the fruit where chocolate comes from oh one thing we forgot to mention we're actually flying all the way to ecuador to pick up the cacao pods ourselves we do it big here so i'll see you in ecuador [Music] so we are in fact in ecuador now we touched down late last night so i didn't want to film anything but we're getting a quick cup of coffee right now [Music] here we have the omita domites like a mexican tamale it's made with corn and with cheese it's sweet and it's a very common to have it here for breakfast or for lunch wow i usually have it for breakfast for lunch for dinner for a late night time i love it so much quick little last stop for some coconut water then we're at the canal farm and how how long until the cacao farm 15 minutes we're almost there perfect okay let's drink some coconut water wow that's awesome oh thank you thank you so much so we finished the coconut now they're going to open it up so we can eat the flesh on the inside thank you so much [Music] this reminds me more of me and then right there is manny it's messed up start with the flower you hit the small pod it's one week so this is the stage one we have six stages this is stage one this is stage two over there if you if you can take a picture you see the stage every day we harvest in the morning and wow now you see the big the size this is 50m [Music] can i can i open it sure but if you could look like that is that okay take a picture you see now you can taste it for you nick manny here you have the pulp you have the bin and you have the husk from the husk today we prepare the flour the pulp it can be the pot freeze pulp or a septic pulp and from the past we can take the liquid and make the juice okay and inside we have the bean so good yeah you see the bean it's not fermented it's purple so when we talk about the ruby now you can understand the color is natural as you continue to grow you get those massive big thick boys back there that's cool we are here right now in ecuador like like we said we started out in boston we're gonna make some milk chocolate but this here is my good buddy oh dead who is it fair to say you're you're willing you're well you're basically willy wonka right yeah the reincarnated willy wonka exactly i actually have a a picture here i lost my hair i got older do you see any resemblance well anything here i lost my hair i mean they told me that cacao actually grows your hair but i don't know i ate too much probably he is the modern day willy wonka you didn't believe me the chocolate doesn't grow on trees the chocolate is a fruit i wanted to take you here to the farm in ecuador where we can really see there's no chocolate bar on a tree it's a fruit actually an unbelievable food delicious it's going to describe it so many colors you know always what's weird to me is that this this looks right but it's not yet not going to see when it does i would think that's right but in the middle of the the process of ripening yeah then it's becoming red and yellow and there are different varieties of cacao you know that creole or here in in ecuador they call it arriba nacional it's a very very expensive cacao look different than this one for that also many different types of chocolate flavors nuances of the taste anything you need to know about chocolate he's your guy don't open it with your hand oh i'm so ready to karate chop it you can try it but we will take you to the hospital did you see the difference oh wow look at all that the size you see the stop man go ahead you can take a little bit it's okay yeah you won't be fine you're fired the moment you cut it from the tree it's like the umbilical of the mother starts fermentation [Music] now when you eat it here you can see the evolution why human beings are so close to the monkey that's the closest you can see this the closest evidence of a monkey he's eating the whole seed the whole thing what's in your hands i love i love cacao i love it four hundred dollar bar because they make it from this chocolate bar from these spots look ah this is a disease oh okay yeah tom brady is throwing this one to a dead in the super bowl that that could be that that should be a commercial it's actually like a football a little spiral the flavor of this is i can't even begin to describe it right off the trees it's like a little bit gooey but it's almost like a carbonated taste and texture with like citrusy sweet almost a little lemony i don't even know how to describe it but it's incredible look at that amazing crazy to think that this turns into chocolate right [Music] it's too bad it's too bad yeah so they have three massive farms here there's fields literally just go on forever and it's just tree after tree after tree all super packed together you have this perfect little cute building in the middle of nowhere right and then all these massive massive companies that all of us know and eat all the time they're all using this to make chocolate yo got the cut the cans first yeah yeah yeah [Music] what are you doing [Music] this is la chola farm it belongs to mars this is where m m's come from look at that entrance sign right there biggest cacao pod ever so if you look back right behind me this is a whole water reservoir often times if the the guy that runs the whole city towns water isn't paid he'll just go and turn off the switch he'll just turn off the knob and then you're stuck with that water so they have all these backup supplies now we're gonna see that second stage of the process where they're fermenting and they're drying because that's when you're getting closer to the actual final product that we all know chocolate so the way they keep the trees going because they're harvesting 25 000 pods or more a day on each farm right here you can see this is an old tree this is 20 years old right here okay and you have all these pods and they're still small but they're growing and then you already have the second one that they're having grow off the side of it and what they'll eventually do this is brand new what they'll eventually do is they'll chop this tree off after they harvest all the pods off the tree right and then they'll pull this one up and this will be the new tree and then a new one will come out of this tree and keep going so that's the way they keep the cycle going which is really really cool so we finally made it to the drying process here and now it smells like chocolate and here's where we're going to get closer and closer to chocolate look at this all chocolate oh wow they smell really fermented wow look right down here now it's all laid out they've taken the seeds out of the cacao pods and they're all really slimy and gooey and this is how we've been eating them the whole day so they lay it out at the start of the process and this is when they begin to ferment so now look at the gradient over here so we have the lighter color as it starts to come out and then if you slowly look up it starts to get darker and darker and darker is that as that fermentation process happens it's amazing so eventually it's fermented right and then you have this you have these dried beans and they're hot and they're hard right and that's when they pack it up in these big bags right here and this is what would get shipped to a factory like mars that's going to go ahead and take these and make chocolate out of it so that's that process and you can see that if i pick up a couple of these here and i crack this one open just like this inside here i'm going to have cacao nibs which you may have seen on top of a smoothie or something like that but this ground into a fine paste is what would eventually make a chocolate bar crazy right he pretty much goes back and forth and moves the cacao around that's [Music] amazing so this is a storage facility with all the the strides sorry many just fell down but this is where they would store all those seeds that are about to ship out that's a big palette i've never seen a palette that big oh wow oh my god it's crazy tower of cacao this is okay is it the video then i have to kill it i'll tell you something they collect them and bring them to the collecting center which is here this is unbelievable this is insane [Music] it's a beautiful bright purple seed right some people eat it raw like this guy monkey man over here you know and if you want you can eat this just like an ice cream mug you know we're not going to taste a whole lot if you're just licking it but all right everyone i just wanted to go to a quiet place here to debrief a little bit i know that was a crazy crazy day we have quite literally been here since 8 a.m and it's been the entire day right now we're headed to dinner right now there was so much more to this farm than i actually thought there would be and actually think about the final product right think about a chocolate bar sitting on the shelf in a store and suddenly we found ourselves in this massive massive oasis of cacao everywhere i just want to take a moment to kind of almost debrief and think about just the experience that we had just to see the kind of behind the scenes behind those mysterious walls of all this stuff that ultimately makes it into one of the most common products you could possibly think of in the entire world no one's really ever shown anything like this behind the scenes so i'm really happy and i'm really fortunate that we got to do this so we can't take any of these home in our bag because it's illegal but i am going to ship some of these back home and we're going to make chocolate but we literally just came to ecuador so i want to say thank you to all you that are watching cause you're the ones that make this kind of thing possible i mean you are the reason that we were literally just able to fly come to ecuador from boston now we're going back home and we're making chocolate doesn't get more homemade than this so we'll see you back in boston yes i did just get back from ecuador we really did just go all the way there and come right back to this kitchen and look i brought some beans and more importantly some pods with me unfortunately i couldn't take the pods on the plane because they just weren't letting us on with them but we shipped 18 pods right behind us so they got here perfectly in time man these boxes are big to start let's take off this lid here i know that every time we get to cacao pods they're really well packaged because they're actually quite delicate now when we open these things up inside each wrap will be one of the pods from the exact farms that you just saw because of shipping some of them are going to be cracked like this already but if i go inside you all now know what cacao should look like and the fact that it's really juicy and slippery like that means it's nice and fresh i absolutely love the fact that they're all different colors shapes and sizes they really are beautiful and looking at all these already makes me really miss that incredible incredible farm we visited now that we've opened that first box let's remove the second lid i find it just so incredibly amazing somewhat magical one might say at how incredible these things are who could have ever thought that this is what makes chocolate fortunately it looks like most of the pods were okay in transit so at this point we're ready to crack a bunch open and begin that fermentation process now after we finally removed all these cacao pots from their protective casing from that shipping i want to take a really quick moment to show you all those colors again we have some of those beautiful orange yellowish ones then perhaps my favorite are those rainbow ones with green yellow orange and red on them and of course we have some of those deep red ones that have some darker black spots on them but now it's time to have some fun and open all of these up so that we can begin the fermentation process that's gonna take us about a week first things first it's time for some karate chop action here we go oh cleanest cut yet look at that right down the middle perfect shock all the way through the whole pod that right there is a karate chop and i'm not even gonna do any more because that's the best i can do now i'm gonna crack this bad boy open it does look like i messed it up a tad bit by hitting it too hard but it looks absolutely gorgeous let me get a paper towel real quick bro what are you doing you're fired you just ate half the pod spit it out at this point i'm gonna use my knife like a normal person to open up the rest wedging them all open such that we can easily take off these seeds and start fermenting so give me a few minutes while i crack all these open once we've gotten all of our alien-like pods open and separated i'm gonna go ahead and put these all on a big tray and then it's time for perhaps what is my favorite part squeezing them all out just take a listen we just want to take all of the seeds out and put them on our tray here so that they can then sit and ferment for a week and this is what ultimately will give them those flavors that we all expect in chocolate now it's true that if we just roasted these seeds right away in our kitchen the entire room will actually smell like a chocolate bar but fermenting actually develops things it brings out the flavor that you're otherwise not gonna have as we separate off all these seeds we're gonna leave behind the stem in each of our pods which we really have no need for right now however all this stuff behind me i'm gonna toss in my garden as compost try to get some flavor in there as well once we finally squeeze these all into our tray it's now time to spread all of these out and set these aside for a week to ferment i'm gonna be keeping a really close eye on these for the next week to make sure that there's no mold that develops and i'll try to update you to make sure you're looped in as well after about a week of fermentation the seeds have changed quite a lot unfortunately during the process some of them started getting a little bit of mold at one point so i rinsed them off with a little bit of alcohol put them back and they seemed to be fine now the first thing you're hit with with these is this overwhelming smell of alcohol that really fermented aroma that we smelled on the farm in ecuador the other part of this is the fact that they are really gooey you can see that when i open up these gloves there's just all this goo there and again that's the same thing we saw at the farm in ecuador at this point in time it's time for the roasting process so after mixing these around just a little bit i'm simply gonna lay them out flat and toss them in the oven and at this point i'll roast these bad boys at 300 degrees fahrenheit until they're a deep brown color and have been fully roasted [Music] not on my flip-flops what are you doing and finally at this point they are all fully roasted now these seeds right here at this point smell like a perfect mixture between vinegar and chocolate and i know that sounds really strange but like we talked about before that's how you get that flavor and now that these seeds have all been roasted it's time for what's gonna be the most hands-on part of what we're doing today which is breaking all these seeds open and getting those nibs out now we're gonna put all these cacao seeds into a bag because crushing them up in a bag is gonna be a lot better than trying to individually crush them all on our cutting board what's gonna happen here is this when we crush all these open together we're going to be separating the shell and then what's inside all these beautiful cacao nibs which will be used to make chocolate now it's time you get a rolling pin and pretend that what's in this bag is someone you really don't like i'm pretty good with a rolling what pin you doing at this point we smash [Music] and now after we've been smashing for quite some time we'll pour the contents back onto our tray and as you can see here we've got a nice mixture of shells and nibs at this point in time we'll take a quick pause and i'm going to separate out all the nibs from the shells all right cut the hamster sir yeah all right um you're going to separate all these out real quick i'm going to take a bubble bath really fast all right all right are you still filming dude you're fired yeah yeah all right don't film me don't tell me at this point after about an hour of separating all these counters out we have our roasted nibs in general i'm sure some of you have seen these before they often put them on top of things like smoothie bowls acai bowls that kind of thing but we all actually know them from being liquefied into chocolate liqueur which is ultimately transformed into all the chocolate bars you know and love now we're ready to start grinding and i'm super excited because we have a real stone grinding machine here with us right now just before we roast i want to show you a perfectly peeled cacao bean here it's beautiful and looks just like a dinosaur egg so this right here is the whole bean without the shell and then when i crush it we have all those nibs i am very excited about this machine right here because this is a stone grinder these beautifully polished stones on the inside are going to go for hours and hours to grind those cacaos into the perfect perfect smooth chocolate that we're looking for before i put anything in there watch these spin for a minute now it's finally time i'm gonna start dumping these cacao nibs slowly into here and let them start to grind up but this machine is really loud so i may not be able to talk while i'm doing it to start we're going to let these grind for a little while to let the first small bath start to get broken up then we'll add more we've been letting it go for about five minutes now and this is what it looks like again i've turned off the machine because it's really loud but if you look in for a second it's almost like we have a slightly rough peanut butter consistency right now but for now i'll fire it back up and continue adding dips i've turned this off again because of how loud it is but at this point we're going to add those last cacao nibs into our machine here as we can now get from the bottom that chocolate has become even softer and smoother and we're slowly getting to the point that we could add our final flavorings and then turn it into a bar for now i'll turn it back on at this point once it's almost a liquid we're gonna start adding our sugar the sugar is gonna have to go in bit by bit so that it slowly sort of melts and combines itself into that chocolate now finally we have this beautiful liqueur here it's a really soft smooth beautiful consistency at this point as you can see here from my rubber spatula let's take out a nice big scoop of this chocolate and just look at that chocolate we have just made this from cacao pots once our chocolate's finally done mixing i'm going to tilt the machine all the way over so that it can slowly drizzle into our chocolate mold i'm slightly skipping a step here by not going through the whole process of tempering the chocolate but you'll see that we'll get a smooth chocolate bar with a nice crack regardless once we let all that chocolate flow into this beautiful mold here we'll let it spread through our chocolate mold this looks incredibly good at this point we'll run a bench scraper across all the chocolate making sure that our whole bar will be perfectly level and once we've cleaned off all these edges we'll set it aside to cool now for our milk chocolate bar we're going to go ahead and sprinkle in a little bit of milk powder across our cacao and let this blend again and now we'll pour in our milk chocolate and repeat the same process that we did with the dark chocolate bar once we've given that chocolate some time to rest here it is this is my favorite part of the entire process the classic moment of truth as you pull back the mold as you can see we have a beautifully smooth bar of chocolate here it's got a fantastic shine on it and the thought of having this come all the way from cacao pods from ecuador is really really cool we certainly did take one or two shortcuts throughout this process primarily in the name of just moving this along but i'm really really happy with how this turned out and now it's time to make sure that we get that nice classic snap here we go our milk chocolate also looks absolutely gorgeous and i have to say i'm really proud of how this came out but there's only one way to know how truly good this is so here we go first you must let that chocolate melt slowly on your tongue and let it slowly melt with the heat of your mouth once that beautifully soft cacao and cocoa butter begin to melt across your tongue you'll begin to pick up all those flavors this chocolate is not surprisingly absolutely delicious it was such an incredibly fun trip and i hope you learned something about how all this stuff works i mean it really is crazy that most of us have no idea where any of this kind of thing comes from i'll try to think of more examples that we can go and show you firsthand to really give you an insight into where some of your food comes from but i'll first pause to say one quick thing that i'm really excited about before we close things out i want to take a moment to give you a great offer and before you go this is not a sponsorship this is purely me having talked to blue stripes the company that so kindly brought me on this trip and i asked them to pick out all my favorites and make a box that you could get so they are quite literally offering this to you at the cheapest price possible i'll have a link in the description below but if you click that link and enter promo code fly cacao f-l-y-c-a-c-a-o you'll get 20 off this will be 35 plus shipping and what's insider one of each of the types of the cacao water that they have one cacao pod which i imagine will be quite exciting for a lot of people and some of these chocolate hazelnut bars that are absolutely delicious it's basically just a healthy candy bar again i really wanted to put something together to give you what i experienced on this trip and this will give you virtually all of those flavors fresh from the farm in ecuador now i know it's been a long video but to finally close things out i want to first say a big thanks to everyone who did help make this trip possible because it was quite a production and now i want to encourage you to go down and smash that like button because that's what keeps us going and don't forget to subscribe if you're watching right now and you're already subscribed make sure you hit the notifications icon just take a quick second to do that because you do not want to miss what's coming soon see you [Music] later you

Channel: Nick DiGiovanni

Views: 2,328,191

Rating: 4.9584417 out of 5

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Id: DFpS1WetihU

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021