Homemade Milk Chocolate

Milk

chocolate

. Do you really know how it's done? Because I found out that most people actually have no idea. I mean, do you know where the cashew comes from? Did you know it's this weird little thing that hangs above a fruit? There are so many foods that people 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 sweets are made. But to begin with, this here is useless. No, we will do it ourselves. But first we are going to take some cocoa pods, the fruit from which

chocolate

comes.

Oh, one thing we forgot to mention is that we will actually fly to Ecuador to pick the cocoa pods ourselves. We do it big here so see you in Ecuador. In fact, we are now in Ecuador. We landed last night. So I didn't want to film anything, but right now we're going to grab a quick cup of coffee. Here we have humita. The humita is like a Mexican tamale. It is made with corn and cheese. It is sweet and it is very common to have it here for breakfast or lunch. Wow. I usually have it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late into the night.

I love him so much! A quick little last stop for some coconut water and then we will be at the cocoa farm. And how long until we get to the cocoa farm? 15 minutes. We're almost there. Perfect. Well. Let's drink some coconut water... Wow, that's amazing. Oh thanks. Thank you so much. This is how we finish the coconut. Now they are going to open it so we can eat the meat inside. Thank you. Thank you so much. This reminds me more of me and then there's Manny. That is wrong. Start with the flower. You have this little capsule.

It's a week. This is stage 1. We have six stages. This is stage 1. This is stage 2. There, if you can take a picture, you see stages 3, 4 and 5. Every day we harvest in the morning and... Wow. Now you see the large sizes. These are 50 and 51. Can I? Can I open it? Sure, but it's difficult. Look. Oh. Alright? Manny, take a photo. You see it? Now you can taste it. For you, Nick. Manny. Here you have the pulp, you have the bean and you have the shell. From the peel today we prepare the flour. Pulp. It can be with pulp, without pulp or without pulp.

And from the pulp we can extract the liquid and make the juice, okay? And inside we have the bean. So good. Yes. Do you see the bean? If it is not fermented, it is purple. So when we talk about ruby, now you can understand that the color is natural. As you continue to grow, you get those huge, big, thick guys again. That's great. So we are here right now in Ecuador as we said. We started in Boston, we were going to make

milk

chocolate, but this is my good friend, Oded, who, it's fair to say... Max Brenner.

Are you Willy Wonka? You're basically Willy Wonka, right? Yes. Willy Wonka reincarnated? Exactly. In fact I have a photo here. I lost my hair. Is there any similarity? I got older. Do you see any similarity? Good. Something here? I lost my hair. I mean, they told me that cocoa actually makes your hair grow, but I don't know. I probably ate too much. He is the current Willy Wonka. You didn't believe that chocolate doesn't grow on trees. Chocolate is the fruit. I wanted to take you here, to the farm in Ecuador where we can actually see that there is no chocolate bar on a tree.

It's a fruit. Truly an incredible, delicious fruit. Let's describe it. It's lovely. So many colors. You know, what's strange to me is that this seems mature but it's not yet. No? You'll see when it's ripe. He seems mature. I would think it was ripe. Yes, but in the process of maturation. Yes. Then it turns red and yellow, and there are different varieties of cocoa. Do you know Criollo or here in Ecuador they call it Arriba Nacional? It is a very, very expensive cocoa. It looks different from this one but there are also many different types of chocolate flavors, nuances of flavor.

Anything you need to know about chocolate? He is your boy. Take it. Do not open it with your hand. Oh, he was so ready to karate chop it up. You can try, but we'll take you to the hospital. Can you see the difference? Oh, wow! Look at all that. The size. Do you see the shell? The SAP? Manny, go ahead, you can have some. Alright? Are you sure? Yes Yes. They won't fire you... You're fired! No. The moment you cut it from the tree, it is like the mother's umbilical. Fermentation begins. Now when you eat it.

You can see the evolution of why humans are so close to apes. That's the closest you can see. That's the closest evidence of a monkey. It is eating all the seed. All the thing. What's in your hands? I love, I love cocoa. I love it. I love it. $400 bar. They make it from this, the Nacional Arriba. With these pods they make a $400 chocolate bar. Look. Oh. This is a disease. Oh. Tom Brady is throwing this at Oded. It's the Super Bowl. That's what it should be. This should be a commercial. It's actually like a soccer ball.

A small spiral. The taste of this is... I can't even begin to describe it. Fresh off the trees, it's a little sticky, but it's almost like a carbonated flavor and texture with a sweet citrus, almost a little lemony. I don't even know how to describe it but it's incredible. Check it out. Amazing. It's crazy to think that this turns into chocolate, right? ...It's too fast. It's too fast. It's too fast. Catch him. So they have three huge farms here. There are fields that literally last forever and are trees after trees, all super grouped together. You have this perfect cute little building in the middle of nowhere, right?

And then all these gigantic companies that we all know eat all the time. Everyone is using this to make chocolate. Yo, cut the camera for a second. Yes Yes Yes. Yes Yes. What are you doing? This is the La Chola farm. It belongs to Mars. This is where M&Ms come from. Yes. Look at that entrance sign right there. The largest cocoa pod ever seen. So if you look back, right behind me, this is the entire water tank. Many times, if the guy who manages the entire city's water supply doesn't get paid, he just goes and turns off the switch.

He'll just turn the knob off and then you'll be left with that water, so they'll have all these backup supplies. Now we are going to look at the second stage of the process where they are fermented and dried because that is when you get 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 that this is an old tree. This has been here for 20 years, okay? And you have all these pods and they're still small but they're growing.

And then you have the second one that they are growing on the side. And what they will eventually do, this is brand new, what they will eventually do is cut down this tree after they harvest all the pods from the tree, right? And then they will uproot this one and this will be the new tree and then a new one will come out of this tree and move on. That's how they keep the cycle going, which is really cool. So we finally get to the drying process here. And now it smells like chocolate. And this is where we will get closer and closer to chocolate.

Look at this, all chocolate. Oh, wow. They smell really... Fermented. Fermented, wow. Look down here. Now everything is ready. They have removed the seeds from the cocoa pods and they are all very slimy and sticky and that is how we have been eating them all day. This is how they arrange it at the beginning of the process and that is when they begin to ferment. Now look at the gradient here. So we have the lighter colors, it starts to ferment and then if you slowly look up it starts to get darker and darker as the fermentation process happens.

It's amazing. So it eventually ferments, right? And then you have this, you have these dried beans and they're hot and hard, right? And that's when they pack it in these big bags here. And this is what would be sent to a factory like Mars that will go ahead and take them and make chocolate out of them. So that's that process. And you can see that if I take a couple of these here and open this one up, like this, inside here I'll have cocoa nibs, which you may have seen on top of a smoothie or something like that. but this, ground to a fine paste, is what would eventually make a chocolate bar.

Crazy, right? It practically comes and goes. Yes. And move the cocoa. Thinking a lot. That is incredible. So this is the storage facility with all the dry... Sorry. Manny just fell over, but this is where they would store all those seeds that are about to be shipped. That's a big palette. He had never seen a pallet that big. Oh, wow. Oh Lord. This is crazy. Cocoa tower. Alright? It's a video? Then I'll have to kill you. I'll tell you something, look. They pick them up and take them to the collection center here. Is incredible. This is crazy.

It's a beautiful bright purple seed, right? Some people eat it raw. Like this guy. The ape man around here, I guess. Wow. Oh, look at that. You know, Manny, if you want, you can eat this like it's ice cream, you know? You won't know much if you just lick it but... Alright, everyone. I just wanted to go somewhere quiet to get some information. I know it was a very, very crazy day. We have literally been here since 8:00 AM. m. and the whole day has passed, right? Now we're heading to dinner right now. There was a lot more to this farm than I really thought there would be.

And you really think about the final product, right? Think of a chocolate bar on the store shelf and suddenly we find ourselves in this huge, huge oasis of cocoa everywhere. I just want to take a moment to almost report and think about the experience we had seeing the kind of behind the scenes, behind those mysterious walls of all of this that ultimately makes it one of the most mainstream products. that you can imagine in the whole world. No one has actually ever shown anything like this behind the scenes. So I'm very happy and very lucky to be able to do this, so we can't take any of these home in our bag because it's illegal, but I'm going to send some of these home and we'll go. to make chocolate.

But we literally just arrived in Ecuador, so I want to thank everyone who's watching. You are the ones who make this kind of thing possible. I mean, you're the reason we literally were able to fly, come to Ecuador from Boston and now we're going to come home and make chocolate. It doesn't get much more

homemade

than this, so see you in Boston. Yes, I just returned from Ecuador. We actually went there and came back to this kitchen. And look, I brought some beans and most importantly, some pods. Unfortunately, I couldn't take the capsules on the plane because they just wouldn't let us board with them, but we sent 18 capsules right behind us, so they arrived perfectly on time.

Man, these boxes are big. To start, let's remove this cover. I know that every time we receive cocoa pods, they are very well packaged because they are actually quite delicate. Now, when we open these things, inside each wrapper will be one of the pods from the exact farms you just saw. Due to shipping some of them will already be cracked like this but if I go in everyone will know what cocoa should look like and the fact that it's really juicy and slippery means it's nice and fresh. I love the fact that they are all different colors, shapes and sizes.

They really are beautiful. And looking at all this already makes me really miss that incredible farm we visited. Now that we have opened the first box, let's remove the second lid. I find it incredibly amazing, somewhat magical, you could say, how amazing these things are. Who could have thought that this is what chocolate does? Fortunately, it appears that most of the capsules were fine in transit. So at this point, we're ready to crack open a bunch and start the fermentation process. Now, after we've finally removed all of these cocoa pods from their protective covering from that shipment, I want to take a real quick moment to show you all of those colors again.

We have some of those beautiful yellowish-orange ones, and perhaps my favorites are the rainbow ones with greens, yellows, oranges, and reds. And of course we have some of those deep red ones that have some darker black spots. But now it's time to have fun and open them all so we can begin the fermentation process that will take us about a week. The first is the first. It's time for some karate action. Here we go. Oh! Cleanest cut yet! Check it out. Right in the middle. Perfect impact on the entire capsule. There's a karate chop right there and I'm not even going to do any more because it's the best I can do.

Now I'm going to open this bad boy. It looks like I ruined it a little by hitting it too hard, but he looks absolutely beautiful. Let me get a paper towel real quick. Well. Brother, what are you doing? You are fired. You just ate half the pod. Spit it out. At this point, I'm going to use my knife like a normal person to open the rest, opening them all up so that we can easily remove these seeds and start fermenting. So give me a few minutes while I open this up. Once we've opened and separated all of our alien capsules, I'll go ahead and put them all on a large tray and then it's time for what is perhaps my favorite part: squeezing them all out.

Just listen. We just want to get all the seeds out andput them on our tray here so they can then sit and ferment for a week. This is what will finally give them those flavors that we all expect from chocolate. Now, it's true that if we roasted these seeds right away in our kitchen, the whole room would smell like a chocolate bar, but fermentation actually develops things. It brings out flavor that you wouldn't otherwise have. As we separate all of these seeds, we will leave the stem on each of our pods, which we don't really need right now.

However, with all of this behind me, I'm going to throw it into my garden as compost to try to give it some flavor as well. Once we finally squeeze them all into our tray, it's time to spread them out and set them aside for a week to ferment. I'll be keeping a close eye on these over the next week to make sure mold doesn't develop and I'll try to update you to make sure you're informed as well. After about a week of fermentation, the seeds have changed quite a bit. Unfortunately, during the process, some of them started to get a little moldy at one point, so I rinsed them with a little alcohol, put them back in and they seem fine.

Now the first thing that hits you 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 sticky. You can see that when I open these gloves, there's all this goo in there. And again, that's the same thing we saw on the farm in Ecuador. At this point, it is time for the roasting process. So after mixing them up a bit, I'll just roll them out and pop them in the oven. And at this point, I'll roast these bad boys at 300 degrees Fahrenheit until they turn a deep brown color and are fully charred.

Not in my flip flops. What are you doing? And finally, at this point, they are all completely roasted. Now, these seeds here at this point smell like a perfect mix 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 all of these seeds have been roasted, it's time for what will be the most practical part of what we're doing today, which is opening all of these seeds and getting those seeds out. Now we're going to put all of these cocoa beans in a bag because grinding them in one bag is going to be much better than trying to grind them all individually on our cutting board.

What is going to 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 cocoa beans, which will be used to make chocolate. Now is the time to grab a rolling pin and pretend that what's in this bag is someone you really don't like. I'm pretty good with the roller. What are you doing? At this point, we crush. And now, after we've been grinding for quite some time, we're going to pour the contents back into our tray and as you can see here, we have a nice mixture of shells and seeds.

At this point, we'll take a quick pause and I'll separate all the tips from the shells. Alright, cut off the camera for a second. Alright, you're going to break this all up real quick. I'm going to take a bubble bath real quick, okay? Alright. Are you still filming? Dude, you're fired! Yes Yes. Don't film me. Don't film me! At this point, after about an hour of separating all of these cocoa beans, we have our roasted beans. Overall, I'm sure some of you have seen them before. They often put them on top of things like smoothie bowls, acai bowls, and that sort of thing, but we actually all know them because they blend into chocolate liquor, which eventually transforms into all the chocolate bars you know and love.

Now we are ready to start grinding and I am very excited because we have a real stone polishing machine here with us right now. Just before roasting, I want to show you here a perfectly peeled cocoa bean. It's beautiful and looks like a dinosaur egg. So this here is the whole bean without the shell and then when I crush it, we have all those seeds. I am very excited about this machine because it is a stone crusher. These beautifully polished stones inside are going to work for hours and hours to grind those cocoa beans into the smooth, perfect chocolate we're looking for.

Before we put anything in there, we'll watch them spin for a minute. Now the time has finally come. I'm going to start slowly throwing these cocoa beans in here and let them start grinding, but this machine is very loud, so I may not be able to talk while I'm doing it. To start, we will let them grind for a while so that the first small batch begins to disintegrate. Then we will add more. We've let it go for about five minutes and this is what it looks like. Again, I turned the machine off because it makes a lot of noise, but if you watch for a second, it's almost like we have a slightly rough peanut butter consistency right now, but for now, I'm going to turn it back on and continue adding. tips.

I turned it off again because of how loud it is, but at this point we're going to add those last cocoa beans to our machine. As we can see now from below, that chocolate has become even softer and smoother and we are slowly getting to the point where we can add our final flavorings and then turn it into a bar. For now I'll turn it back on. At this point, once it is almost liquid, we are going to start adding our sugar. The sugar will have to go in little by little so that it slowly melts and combines with the chocolate.

Now we finally have this beautiful liquor here. At this point, it's a really soft, smooth, beautiful consistency, as you can see here on my rubber spatula. Let's take out a big spoonful of this chocolate and look at that chocolate. We just made this with cocoa pods. Once our chocolate has finally finished mixing, I'll tilt the machine all the way so it can be slowly drizzled into our chocolate mold. I'm slightly skipping a step by not doing the full process of tempering the chocolate, but you'll see that we'll still end up with a smooth chocolate bar with a nice crack.

Once we let all that chocolate flow into this beautiful mold, we're going to let it spread through our chocolate mold. This looks incredibly good. At this point, we'll run a bench scraper all over the chocolate, making sure our entire bar is perfectly level. And once we've cleaned all these edges, we'll let it cool. Now for our

milk

chocolate bar, we're going to go ahead and sprinkle some milk powder over our cocoa and let it blend again. And now we pour our milk chocolate and repeat the same process we did with the dark chocolate bar. Once we have given the chocolate some time to rest, here it is.

This is my favorite part of the entire process, the classic moment of truth when removing the mold. As you can see, we have a wonderfully smooth chocolate bar here. It has a fantastic shine and the idea of ​​this coming from cocoa pods from Ecuador is really cool. We certainly took a shortcut or two throughout this process. Mainly in the name of just moving this forward, but I'm very, very happy with how it turned out and now it's time to make sure we get that nice classic photo. Here we go. Our milk chocolate also looks great. And I have to say I'm really proud of how this came out, but there's only one way to know how good it really is.

So, here we go. First you have to let that chocolate slowly melt on your tongue and let it slowly melt with the heat of your mouth. Once the wonderfully smooth cocoa and cocoa butter start to melt on your tongue, you'll start to pick up all those flavors. This chocolate, as expected, is absolutely delicious. It was an incredibly fun trip and I hope you learned something about how this all works. I mean, it's really crazy that most of us have no idea where this kind of stuff comes from. I'll try to think of more examples that we can show you firsthand to give you an idea of ​​where some of your food comes from.

But first I'll pause to say something quick that I'm very excited about. Before I close, I want to take a moment to offer you a great deal and before you go, this is not an endorsement. This is purely me having spoken to Blue Stripes, the company that so kindly brought me on this trip and asking them to pick all my favorites and make a box set that you can get. So they literally offer it to you at the cheapest price possible. I'll have a link in the description below, but if you click that link and enter the promo code FLYCACAO, F-L-Y-C-A-C-A-O you'll get 20% off.

This will cost $35 plus shipping and what's inside is one of each type of cocoa water they have. A cocoa pod, which I imagine will be very exciting for a lot of people, and some of these hazelnut chocolate bars that are absolutely delicious. It's basically just a healthy chocolate bar. Again, I really wanted to make something to give you what I experienced on this trip and this will give you pretty much all those farm fresh flavors in Ecuador. Now, I know this has been a long video, but to finally close, I first want to thank everyone who helped make this trip possible because it was a great production.

And now I want to encourage you to go down and hit 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, be sure to hit the notifications icon. Just take a second to do it because you don't want to miss what's coming soon. See you later!