How Miami’s Chocolate Master Creates the Perfect Bar of Chocolate — Handmade

you can smell all the aroma that comes out when you crush them which is really nice, all those beautiful

chocolate

flavours,

chocolate

is happiness, it's something you can taste, it really calms your mind and calms your soul, I think for a long time we have grown up with this idea that chocolate is dark or sweet and that's it, chocolate can be much more like wine, like fruits, that's basically how we receive cocoa, the beans themselves are already fermented and dried and the We bring from different farms throughout Latin America. and the Caribbean and we keep them all from a single origin so chocolate is a fruit that grows on trees it comes from the cocoa pod inside you will find a pulpy fruit called bala it has the consistency of soursop and then the flavor of a lychee in our case what we are looking for is the actual part of the seed and that is the cocoa seed that will ultimately be transformed into chocolate.

This variety that we have from Peru is Marañón. It is considered one of the rarest cocoas in the world. it was thought extinct for about a hundred years and grew wild at that time, it actually looks like milk chocolate because about 40 percent of the beans themselves are considered white beans or a caramel colored kind and then in guatemala we also get this variety that has a flavor They are very similar to oranges because many oranges are grown on that particular farm, so each farm and each country and even specific regions have different flavors. We have chocolates that can be nutty, earthy and fruity and all of that comes from the soil where it is grown, but also from the bacteria. which plays a role in its fermentation we will hand select the best cocoa beans for us to use.

We're really looking to put out anything that's not cocoa. Sometimes we have twin pimples like these. What will happen is that they won't. roast evenly at the end of the day we are trying to make a better product than what has been available commercially so for us this is very important you will notice all these cracks inside the bean and that means that when the bacteria got in during the fermentation it really It broke down the cell walls and let all those flavors mix together, so that's what we're really looking for is color, flavor, and cracks in terms of cocoa quality, so we'll palpate it just to make sure it's uniform.

Because we want a uniform roast, what happens when roasting is something called a malar reaction, the amino acids and sugars begin to interact with the heat and it begins to develop the flavors and also the aroma that comes from the cocoa, similar to a kind of toasted. a piece of steak the same thing happens with our cocoa in that process we let it cool generally for a few hours you have the shell which is called shell and the tip is ultimately what becomes chocolate, so many people think that dark chocolate is bitter and the reality is that when it's bitter it's usually over roasted which means it's burnt, that's why we roast it medium, it's lighter, it's fruity, you can try all these different things and when we do chocolate tastings, people you can really appreciate that we have an Ecuadorian that tastes like raisins, we have a Guatemalan that tastes like oranges and then we have our Haitian that tastes super earthy, so we let the cocoa sit from roasting and then we want a fan and that process is just breaking down the bean and remove the shell.

You'll notice that most of the casing comes out and then the tip stays in place because of how heavy it is, so this is the machine we use now. Impact has been monopolized for so many decades so there's really no Equipment that we can use as small craft producers, we have a champion juicer from Amazon and then we have a shop vacuum from Home Depot and the way it works is like If you were crushing it with a hammer, the champion juicer will crush all the beans and instead of blowing air, we have a vacuum cleaner that has the same method when the beans fall, they are crushed as the air sucks in, it will take that shell or shell lighter up to here and then that heavier tip will fall because it prevents the air that blows there fifteen to twenty percent of the bean itself is shell, which in most places becomes garbage, but we don't actually throw away a just piece of shell so one of the big ways we found a home for them has been in beers it produces a different layer of flavor when you ferment beer with it you can actually make tea with it and it tastes almost like this earthy hot chocolate, so we are going to pre-grind it to make it a little bit smoother in our magic machines, the friction

creates

heat and the heat activates the cocoa butter that is present in the bean and that is what will make it it liquefies.

It starts to look like when you start making brownie batter, so now that same cocoa, oh, suddenly. it's liquid, this is what we would call chocolate liquor, it's just a crumbly tip, so it's almost like a very thick peanut butter, very, very astringent, you feel it here, the texture is quite gritty, so we would need soften it, add sugar if we are going to make milk chocolate we add milk to transform it into the chocolate we are used to I spent part of my childhood in Barranquilla in Colombia chocolate for Colombians is simple dark chocolate is very very good and that was something very satisfying and something that I really enjoyed and stayed with me for many years and then from there it will go to our refineries, so originally these machines are actually nut crushers, so they are mainly used in India to make nut butters, sometimes with peanuts.

In this machine you find two giant stone rollers and a slab of granite and what they do are two things, one refined to make it soft and velvety, as we are used to with chocolate, the other thing it does is a process called conching and it What it does is the air continually enters and leaves the mixture and aerates it much like when you open a bottle of red wine and let it breathe. We are doing the same with cocoa. All those tannins, those volatiles are evaporating. Air gets in and makes the chocolate smoother as the process runs, we'll let them run for about four days straight and it will refine everything.

The sugar we use is not refined and has more of a molasses flavor, it sweetens the chocolate, but it does not dominate it. In this intermediate machine we are making milk chocolates, we also add cane sugar, a little cocoa butter to give it texture and then we add powdered milk because we cannot add any type of liquid or anything that is water-based. in our mixture otherwise it's like when you add water to flour it won't really work well with the molecules in the cocoa and then here we are making white chocolate the only thing we don't have is any cocoa beans so this is based mainly in cocoa butter, unrefined cane sugar and powdered milk, so normally when you have powdered milk it is this color.

I'm not a big fan of that type of white chocolate so we like to make something here caramelized, we actually take this milk and slow roast it in the oven, it has a nice toasty note that is really delicious when we take the chocolate out of the machine . At that point, it's the coverage run, which is when most places would purchase that finished product so they can make their items. it uses a filter that's actually designed for honey and it catches any seeds that we haven't refined and that way we have a smooth final product when it produces tons and tons of chocolate every year that it has to buy from a bunch of different places and they mix it up to To sell quantity, those companies want the chocolate to always taste the same, so when it's over-roasted you can maintain the consistency and then you can mask it with things like vanilla so that's always what consumers taste.

In large factories, they are usually connected through tubes and the chocolate has to travel from one side of the factory to the other, so they often use lecithin to help it run more smoothly from one side to the other, so It's really a help. In production we don't use any of those things because you're tasting exactly what they're producing on that farm from the soil of the environment instead of just eating something that's mixed together and doesn't have any different notes or flavor profiles than the chocolate. solidify and we will go from this to this in the course of a day the cocoa butter that is present in all the chocolates we eat is a six phase polymorphic crystal, which means that at any point it can be in six different types of stages in This stage is not in its ideal form, that's why it

creates

these strange color patterns, if you bite into it, it would be gritty because of that texture change, it will alter the way you experience the chocolate, it won't be as pleasant, but yes Let's make it. any type of bars or chocolates.

We'll have to temper it. We have melted the chocolate at about 40 42 degrees Celsius to remove all those crystals that we don't want. Let's cool down slowly. We lower the chocolate, so we use temperature and movement to form a crystalline formation that will create a chocolate that is silky to the palate. This is extremely important. You can make the best tasting chocolate in the world, but based on that texture it won't be possible. as good as when you have a good temper, so the mixing is simply adding the good crystals that we just formed in that batch to the rest of the chocolate that is not tempered, all the molecules form forming a little conga line and as you do so, all of the chocolate molecules are in order and look good.

One of the things that is very important is how we get most farmers live on less than a dollar a day. It is a very difficult industry for us. It is really important to support these producers who are investing time and money to produce. something better they should be compensated for what they are doing, we are not talking about fair trade, we are going above what is direct trade and we will be able to pay them more than the price of that commodity, so let's start the process. When making chocolates, this color is made from cocoa butter that comes from the cocoa bean, it has a little bit of coloring and what we have done before is temper it so that it is shiny and shiny like our chocolate has to go through that process, so that one of the things that makes us unique is that we are a bean that unites us and that means that we produce all the chocolate that goes into our chocolates.

In fact, I am an organizational psychologist by training. I worked. As a management consultant, I was in Europe in Paris and had this amazing hot chocolate and it seemed so simple but well made that I couldn't stop thinking about how wonderful it was and how I wanted to bring something to the US similar to what I had tried abroad, so this ganache is made of dark chocolate and then a little rum and when it crystallizes we can make the final layer of chocolate, which is the base of the bonbon. I would use a cover route to play. around and seeing how it worked, I realized it was too sweet, it just didn't focus on the cocoa, it was mixed in, there were a lot of things that just didn't seem to stand out and recreate that experience I had had with it. hot chocolate I knew I wanted to take it down to the grain making a product like this that requires so much labor by hand helps us control the process more from start to finish when we roast and analyze we take more care after what we are doing, rather than feeding everything through a machine, it takes us about a week, but it takes farmers two to three years to grow the plants, six months from when the flower comes out until the pot is ready. and then from the time the pod is cut, another two weeks, so it's a very long process behind every bar, there's a farmer and a story behind all of that and we want to make sure we honor the fact that we're talking about years to consume that. last piece of chocolate you buy and consume