Making chocolate is a little more disgusting than you would expect

all right today let's go from cocoa pod to chocolate on today's super intensive video i'm not gonna lie although this was a lot of fun it was also a lot of hard work in total the process of going from cocoa bean to chocolate bar took me about two months not because it takes that long to make but because i messed up several times and had to start over as well as having to deal with some camera issues along the way that didn't want me to film however in my folly i learned a lot and i hope to pass what i learned so you don't make the same mistakes that i did chocolate making in general is a very complicated and intricate process but today i'm going to be showing you my very simplistic method of making chocolate i'm going to kind of cut corners and really reduce a lot of the complexity however i have to say even at my with my plebeian attempt at chocolate it still turned out really good i ended up with a bar that was really fruity and had a lot of flavor it was actually very delicious so let's go ahead and begin so chocolate making has more or less four steps we have fermentation we have a kind of drying roasting step we have a grinding step and then lastly we have kind of a heating and tempering and molding step so let's go through this one by one all right step one let's start with our actual cocoa pods now these are them they grow in deep tropical regions and they originate from mesoamerica however i sourced mine from a fruit company that specializes in exotic fruit and and grows them in miami florida now for those keeping track at home i'm pretty sure these are the trinitario cultivars of cocoa however for this video any kind of cocoa will work and you can typically find them online although it's not super cheap so the first thing we want to do is split open these pods very carefully using a knife we can cut it such that we can expose the interior of the cocoa pot now i know inside it looks a little crazy as you can see the cocoa pod is surrounded by a shell and inside are the actual cocoa beans if we scoop the beans out you can see that each bean is surrounded by some fruity pulpy flesh now this stuff is actually edible and is actually very delicious it has almost a citrusy flavor not at all what i expected now what we're actually after is not this fruity pulp but we're actually after the interior of these seeds now if you cut one in half you can see this kind of purpley bit in fact you can eat this it is a little bitter and it has a very faint taste of chocolate but through the process of fermentation drying and roasting we're going to reinforce the flavors of the chocolate so that in the end we end up with this really familiar chocolate flavor now i'm going to collect the beans from four pods just scooping up the interiors and collecting into a bowl with all the beans scooped out it's time to begin the processed fermentation now the fermentation stage is extremely important in the process of making chocolate this is the stage where a majority of the chocolate flavors and fruitiness are actually developed i have to admit the process fermentation of these beans is pretty nuanced and complicated expert chocolatiers have written a lot of stuff about how different stages of fermentation are really important in regards of how much oxygen exposure there is and you know development of acetic acid and alcohol which all play a role in how the chocolate ends up being flavored in the end now despite this channel's name all this is beyond my pay grade so i took a simplistic root for fermentation and honestly the chocolate i ended up with was pretty good so let's just follow my caveman attempt so from our bowl of collected fruit we can go and place them into a very well cleaned container preferably something like this where you can easily monitor what's going on inside i also i had a little glass wait for fermentation so i use this to weigh down the beans although i'm not really entirely sure if this was necessary now the name of the game is we're going to let this ferment for about a week but after about 24 hours depending on how warm it is outside you should start to see the effects of fermentation the beans will start to change color and they'll also expel liquid traditionally these are fermented in giant wooden crate where there's drainage and the expelled liquid can drain away from the beans but for the small amount of cocoa beans it didn't really seem to make a huge difference about once every day or so i would like to open up the container stir it up with a clean spoon and uh specifically i did this on days one three and four fermentation on day four of fermentation i opened up the top of the container and then covered it with a clean towel and we're gonna let this ferment open for two or three more days stirring every day until it looks like this allowing the fermented beans to be exposed to the air really helps kind of bring it to that final step so after the full seven days we're actually ready to move on to the next step now not only does the stuff look funky it also smells pretty funky and a little bit alcoholic don't worry though that's totally normal however due to say under the alcoholic funkiness it will have an ever so slightly chocolatey smell it almost smells like a chocolate liquor or something like that alright so now the next step is to dry these beans out completely traditionally this is done in the sun but the weather outside where i filmed this is cold and rainy so that really wasn't an option for me so i placed my beans into this combo dehydrator oven thing that i have and let it dehydrate for 24 hours after the 24 hours we can pull them out and if you peel the shell off the beans you'll see that there's actually a cocoa bean inside and this is actually our chocolate now we aren't fully there yet because we'll still need to roast it but you can start to see that the color is almost there and if you smell it it will still smell a little bit funky but it will really start to kind of have that chocolatey smell now at this point we're actually ready to roast the beans and there's a bunch of different methods for roasting but again we're just going to go through the simplistic route now for this step we're going to do a two-stage roast now the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna roast the beans in an oven at about 325 degrees fahrenheit or 160 degrees celsius for about five minutes this is gonna just kind of start the roast for the beans after the five minutes turn the temperature down to 275 fahrenheit or 135 degrees celsius for about 20 minutes and i was really surprised how much in this relatively short roasting time really changed the beans this roast really made my whole house smell wonderfully warm and chocolatey and this is the stage where it goes from kind of being funky to full on chocolatey so once we're done roasting we can pull it out of the oven and let it cool completely i let them sit actually for about two hours on the cutting board and just to really make sure that they're completely cooled down now once they are cool we can go ahead and peel the shells off exposing the cocoa nibs inside and it might help a little bit to crack them first as i'm doing here and i'm not going to lie this process was a little time consuming it is very but it's not it's honestly not that bad in total it took about 10 minutes to peel all of them now now some small fragments of shells still ended up in my cocoa nibs and you could either use a hair dryer to blow them away or i just simply pick them out by eye just kind of leaning on the side of not collecting as much chocolate but making sure that there weren't any pieces of shell left over in our container all right so once we have all our nibs ready we are ready to move on to the next step which is to grind them up and turn it into chocolate but before you do it's not a bad idea to weigh the total amount of cocoa nibs you've collected and that'll help kind of inform how much stuff to add later when we're making the chocolate bars all right so to start off with grinding i used a mortar and pestle to break up the cocoa nibs i was able to get a pretty rough grind at first using this method now to be frank if you want to be able to get the level of smoothness of a commercial chocolate bar you need a special piece of equipment known as a conch and these will run you about 300 so you know that's that's kind of out of the budget for for my video here so instead i experimented with grinding these cocoa nibs with stuff i already have this was an experiment so feel free to mix and match how i did this to whatever works best for you now i poured the crushed cocoa nibs into a blender and let this go and i also took this opportunity to add a little sugar this will help balance the bitterness of the chocolate and how much you add is completely up to you i'm more of a fan of the darker side of chocolate so i only added about 20 grams of sugar to the chocolate which gave me about an 85 dark chocolate but if you want to add more or also add milk powder to cut the bitterness down feel free to do that so using the blender did produce a much finer grind however it was constantly getting stuck in the corners and getting kind of really annoying to deal with so i decided i got it somewhat fine i would try to finish in the mortar and pestle again back in the morning pretzel after about 10 minutes of vigorous work i ended up with as fine as i was able to get it which to be frank wasn't too fun now i also know it looks like there's some big chunks here but there's actually just clumps of fine powder that got compacted in the mortar and pestle all right so the cocoa has some natural oil in each of the beans this is the stuff that is known as cocoa butter now depending on how well we were able to grind this down the cocoa butter will actually express itself into the powder and will kind of form a chocolaty liquid however as you can see this isn't very oily and it's actually very dry so we'll need to bolster this cocoa with some cocoa butter so to my 120 grams of cocoa nibs i added initially about 20 grams of cocoa butter but i actually added about 10 more grams later so for a total of 30 grams of cocoa butter the cocoa butter will give us that chocolate bar texture but first we need to melt it so i pop this into the microwave for about two minutes and you really want to keep a close eye on this and just you might be different for your microwave you really want this just to melt you don't want it to overheat once it's melted it should look like this and just go ahead and add into the chocolate and stir it up now we're in the stage of melting tempering and molding the chocolate place the cocoa over a pot of boiling water to make a double boiler this will begin to melt everything together however even after heating my chocolate still looked a little dry so this is when i added that 10 more grams of cocoa butter i mentioned earlier and this really seemed to do the trick we can see here now that we have a texture of something that almost looks like wet brownie mix and that's actually what we're going after now while heating the chocolate we really want to keep an eye on the temperature now that the chocolate is melted we need to temper the chocolate now this is a process where we basically align the crystals that form inside of the chocolate to form a uniform solid heart bar if we don't do this step the chocolate crystals will kind of have a random orientation and we'll end up with something mushy and won't really snap when you break the chocolate bar now there's a million different ways to do tempering some involve using a marble slab and some metal spatulas the easiest way is using something called beta crystals which are just crystals of cocoa butter but for me the most practical way of doing this and just kind of easiest way is just to use a nice piece of dark chocolate from a chocolate bar and this is what's known as seed tempering and this will provide a seed crystal for the chocolate to kind of form around and help align the chocolate so to do this let the chocolate cool down and once it reaches about 91 degrees fahrenheit or 31 degrees celsius add a piece of dark chocolate from a nice chocolate bar into the melted cocoa and just stir it until it's fully melted all right now while it's still molten go ahead and pour this into a mold i'm using a silicone chocolate mold i got online and that seemed to work pretty well carefully pour the chocolate in and it doesn't hurt to give it the old tapatapa to coax out any air bubbles once the molds are filled it's just a matter of letting this thing cool down completely for me i left this in the fridge overnight now the next morning i returned for the moment of truth i think it's beautiful i couldn't have been any happier with these chocolate bars at least how they look now how did it taste well as i said before it was a little grainy but that doesn't really bother me the taste however was fantastic it really had that nice complicated fruity chocolatey flavor you get from a high-end chocolate bar and i have to say it was a really fun process and even though i had some issues it was extremely interesting and gratifying to be able to make my own chocolate bar all by myself i really hope that you actually you know if you have the time and energy and want that you actually try this process yourself you know if you get stuck anywhere you have your own questions i'm buying real means an expert in the topic i can share my experiences with you feel free to email me at my website flavorlab at flavorlab.xyz so if you enjoyed this video please consider sharing it sometimes these longer videos don't get a lot of views and it's always difficult alright that's it for this week if you have something you want me to make for you please feel free to leave in the comments down below bye [Music] you

Channel: Flavor Lab

Views: 10,742,415

Keywords: how to make chocolate, chocolate bar, bean to bar, how to, chocolate making, cocoa bean, bean to bar chocolate, how to make, cocoa beans, homemade chocolate, making chocolate, diy chocolate, handmade chocolate, dark chocolate, chocolate recipe, how to make dark chocolate, chocolate bar recipe, chocolate bar asmr

Id: 1bwhyD7RPVw

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021