Cocoa POD to CHOCOLATE Bar - How to Make A DIY Bean-to-Chocolate Bar at Home

Greetings my beautiful loves! It's Emmy. Welcome back. Today I'm going to

make

a

chocolate

bar, but I'm going to

make

this

chocolate

bar from the

cocoa

pod, the original

cocoa

bean

s that come in the pod. Now, if you missed my episode of Fruity Fruits where I open the cocoa pod and show you the contents and where the

bean

s are located, be sure to watch that video. I'll put a link above and below. So I knew from the beginning that it was going to be a painstaking process and, gosh, I'm not even done yet, and it has been, but I've learned so much.

So let me show you what I've done so far to get to my current chocolate state. So, after opening my cocoa pod, I took the beans that are covered by this kind of mucilaginous bag and put them in a glass jar. So the next step is important to develop the flavor and help remove some of that slime. We will take the beans and put them in a container, cover them and let them ferment for four or five days. Now after the second day I noticed that not much was happening, then I read more about this and learned that the fermentation process should occur around one hundred degrees.

So what I did was: I then put it in my fermentation chamber, set the temperature and let it sit for another two days. So the total fermentation time was about five days. And after five days, I noticed that the beans had taken on this kind of pinkish, reddish hue; most of the white slime was gone and now we are ready to dry the beans. Typically, the drying process is done in the sun and the beans are raked until crisp and dry. So...since I live in New England and it's winter now, there isn't much sun, so I put the beans in my food dehydrator. then from time to time I would give them a turn and they were there for a total of probably two days.

So at this point I only had beans from one cocoa pod, and I didn't know if it would be enough to create a chocolate bar, so I ordered some cocoa beans that were raw, that hadn't been roasted, and then I roasted them at the same time. time than the beans that I had dried myself. Just to make sure I have enough material to create a chocolate bar. So I spread the beans out on a cookie sheet, in a nice, even layer, put them in an oven at two hundred and sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit, and roasted them for thirty minutes.

I then increased the temperature to two hundred and eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit and baked them for another five minutes. So after the baking time, I took out the cookie sheets. So once the beans were completely cooled, we had to winnow them, and that means "remove the shell or shell from the outside of the beans." And at this point, the shell or exterior of the beans should break and come off easily. If you just rub the bean and squeeze it, it should be nice and crunchy, and just fall away from the kernel. cocoa bean, which is the part we want, inside.

This part ended up being a really fun project to do with my kids, I have two kids: ages four and six, and we had a great time removing the hulls from the beans. Emmy: "We don't want the shell, that's hard." "We just want the precious bean inside, we grind it and that will make our chocolate." "That's right! It's the color of chocolate. These come from Peru, the same place Paddington comes from." "He went to England, remember? He went to London?" "His uncle made it, right? His aunt made it." "I think so." Next, we have to process the cocoa seeds, that is, we have to grind them until we obtain a cocoa paste or chocolate paste, and that will be the chocolate liquor that will give that delicious flavor to our chocolate bar.

Below in the description I will put all the videos and links to the references that I used to create my chocolate bar. One of them, of course, is Ann Reardon's (@howtocookthat) channel 'How to cook that'. Where, in her video, she takes raw cocoa beans and also turns them into a chocolate bar. But I found another video specifically for making a small batch of chocolate (@horjerj). He recommended using a small coffee grinder. So what we did was we took our cocoa beans, and first we ground them up, used a little bit of a mortar and pestle, and ground them up so that the seeds were smaller, and a little bit easier for the coffee. grinder to handle.

I like dark chocolate, and I like dark chocolate a little more on the sweet side, so I decided to make a sixty-five percent dark chocolate bar. So the calculation I made was: one hundred grams of cocoa beans, sixty grams of sugar and then nine grams of cocoa butter. So, as you can imagine, the hopper inside the coffee grinder is quite small, so we had to do this in installments of about four batches, so as not to overload the motor. So, the first thing you will do is take the sugar, pour it in and pulverize it until you get powdered sugar.

So add some of your cocoa beans, add some sugar and grind it until you can't grind it any more. You will first get this type of powdered substance and then as more cocoa butter is released, it will turn into a paste. It's also important to stop between grinds and scrape down the sides of the bowl and the top, because you want everything to be very well incorporated. Once we've ground this as much as we can, we're going to add our cocoa butter and I'm going to add 9 grams. Again, we will do this in batches. And at this point, it should look really delicious and "chocolate-like." Next, we will do a conching process.

This is usually done in machines that have stones that simply grind the chocolate for hours, to achieve that really velvety, smooth chocolate mouthfeel. And it's also supposed to release volatile gases and simply improve the taste of the chocolate bar. Now, of course, these contour machines aren't cheap, and I decide to go the DIY route, and use a stone mortar, and just grind it for as long as possible; the longer the better. Even my kids at the time were like, "No mom, we're tapping. We're fine, thanks mom." So I was here, grinding the chocolate. So this is the next step, and this is where I am now.

We need to temper the chocolate. Now, what does tempering mean? If you've worked with chocolate or want to work with chocolate, you've definitely heard of tempering. But it's kind of a mysterious thing. So tempering means if we are going to get the chocolate in the state where we want the cocoa butter crystals to be in their beta state. And cocoa butter has six different shapes of crystals, and the state we want is the beta state. That's what gives us a shiny chocolate bar, which has a really fantastic effect and has no white spots, 'beta crystals', that's what we want.

So how do we isolate those crystals and get them to form inside our chocolate bar? We temper ourselves. So the first thing we need to do is melt the chocolate. Take it to this state where there are no crystals, blah blah blah, everyone is just melted. We then cool the melted chocolate, sometimes this is done on marble slabs, with small scrapers. But the point is that we want to cool the temperature to between 82 and 81 degrees Fahrenheit. This is when the crystals begin to reform. Now we increase the temperature to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. At this point, this little bit of heat is melting some of those other crystals that we don't want.

Again, isolating it to just our happy beta crystals. Now, at 90 degrees, our chocolate is tempered. It will be beautiful, shiny and shiny. We just have to keep it at that temperature. We can mold and shape it, yadda yadda. And then once we cool it to about 50 degrees, we'll have beautiful, crunchy, shiny chocolate. That's at least the idea, right? So there are many different ways to temper chocolate. You can use the seed technique or the marble slab technique. But I have never used "this" technique, and this is the sous-vide technique. Basically, a sous-vide is a water circulator with a thermostat that keeps the water at a temperature you set.

Your food is never overcooked, because it can never exceed the temperature you set it to. It is brilliant. And Alex, the Frenchman (@frenchguycooking), inspired me to use this sous-vide technique to temper chocolate. If you don't know him, he's a lovely guy and has a channel here on YouTube which is very popular. I'll leave the link below in case you don't know it. So after conching my chocolate, I placed it in a plastic bag and then put it inside another plastic bag, because it is very important that no water gets into our chocolate. It will cause the chocolate to seize, become hard and chewy and ruin everything.

So that is the Achilles heel of this technique, we must not let water enter the chocolate. While this is coming up to temperature, it's important to knead it from time to time to make sure everything is constantly at the right temperature. Okay, we're around 122 degrees, now we're going to lower this temperature to 81 degrees, and to speed this up, I'm going to add a bunch of ice. Tempering is a complicated procedure. You have to constantly stick a thermometer in there, and the chocolate is everywhere. This, everything is contained, it's just in a little plastic bag. You don't waste chocolate in your bowls, on your spatula, and the precision is wonderful too.

This has a thermostat, so it would be at the temperature I want. It won't get any hotter because it can't get any hotter. I love that. Let it sit there for a while. Now, we'll increase this temperature to 90 degrees and then we'll be ready to pour it into our mold, which is exciting, because that means we're almost at the end of this arduous *burp* process. Let's go ahead and serve our chocolate. So I bought a small polycarbonate chocolate bar mold. This should be very, very dry and clean. Now I'm going to dry this bag well. And this is also dry.

Yeah! Another thing I was really excited about with this technique is that I can push all the chocolate down into one corner, cut the corner, and then fill my mold. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh man, this looks delicious. Now the texture looks a little thicker. *banging furiously* Sorry for the noise! *more angry tapping* So, actually I'm going to get some more, let's fill this up. OMG, more than one bar, ha ha! Now a little noise. *tap tap tap TAP TAP TAP* So now we're supposed to let this cool to room temperature, I think Alex said it was fifty degrees Fahrenheit, which is even more ideal.

It is not advisable to store it in the refrigerator, because what can happen is that if the chocolate begins to cool too much, condensation can form. And water and chocolate, *no, no*. So I think you can cool it a little in the refrigerator initially, but then make sure you take it out before condensation forms. Okay, I'll be right back and then we'll try this! *TAPS* Now, the moment we were waiting for. Let's unmold the chocolate bar. Pleasant and firm to the touch. Ok, I'm going to... figure it out. Oh yeah, did you see him pitch? Look, I just work it and you can see how it comes off the polycarbonate because you can see through it.

Oh yeah. Come on, chocolate bar. Just let it go. Spin. Oh yeah. Yeah! Ready? Dun dun dun duuun! It's a chocolate bar. And it is wonderfully tempered, wonderfully bright. Oh. My. Goodness. I'm so happy, look at that. You know I get really excited about these little projects, but this one really gets me excited. Look how pretty this chocolate bar turned out. I'm very happy, I think what I like most is this reflective shine. It is the hallmark of good tempering, so tempering is basically controlling the crystallization of cocoa butter, that's all. A couple of air bubbles that didn't pop, so I probably could have punched this a little harder.

I don't see any signs of flowering, which is great. So, all signs of a good mood. Now the final test is to see how well it fits and if you have tempered it correctly it should fit well. Alright. Here we go *boring clicks* Not as crispy as it could be, it didn't make as loud a click as I would have liked, but, the final test, the taste. Let's try. Here we go, itadakimasu! Hmm... Now, it definitely doesn't have the dark chocolate touch that I like, that distinctive crispy, strong snap. And, in terms of mouthfeel, it's not as smooth as it needs to be.

I think it's something like 20 - 30 microns, if you go below that in terms of grain size, that's when the tongue is not able to perceive any type of grainy texture. That's very, very fine and conching usually takes hours. So I definitely detect a kind of graininess, but not unpleasant. However, the taste is absolutely delicious. Mm-hmm, that rich, clear chocolate flavor, which I wasn't sure I could get. I fermented my beans myself, although I mixed in some beans I had purchased, which were raw. Which had also been fermented. Really great chocolate flavor, and I made it as a 65% dark chocolate bar, so there are 60 grams of sugar here.

So, a pretty sweet dark chocolate bar, but that's how I like my dark chocolate. I like a goodseventy percent dark chocolate bar, but my little sweet spot is more like sixty-five. I like it a little sweeter. I think what is really missing is the mouthfeel. I think I detect the sugar granules too. The density of the chocolate bar is a little different. While snapping, in the mouth, it doesn't have as good, "quick then melty" mouthfeel. Hmm. In terms of texture, it is a bit similar to fudge. That kind of sugary, crystalline texture, a little bit there.

MMM. That's what's here. Although the flavor is excellent. MMM. But what I realize while doing this project is that a big part of the chocolate experience for me has to do with the mouthfeel and the texture: that deliciously smooth, silky experience that melts along with the delicious flavors of the sugar. , cocoa butter and cocoa mass. . All of that together, combined with that textural experience, is really what makes chocolate sublime. It's not just the taste. Something amazing, right? I'll still call it a win. I took a cocoa bean, fresh, fermented it, dried it, toasted it, winnowed it, ground it, conched it, added sugar and cocoa butter, tempered it and then poured it into a mold;

I cooled it and then had my chocolate bar. So, lots and lots of steps to making a chocolate bar. So the next time you look at a chocolate bar and say, "Well, I don't want to pay for that," maybe you do, because maybe it's worth it to you to have a really beautifully made chocolate bar. So, big things to Anne and Alex and all the other YouTube channels I used as references to get to this point. I couldn't have done this without you. Thank you all so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something.

Please share this video with your friends, follow me on social media; "I like this video; subscribe; and see you next time. Todoloo! Take care! Bye bye!!!!