Guest Post: Online Pastry Chef Makes Chocolate

Today I’m so happy to introduce you all to Jenni Field, also known as Online Pastry Chef. She doing the unthinkable today, something very few of us can say we’ve done. I can’t say I’ve done this myself but after ready Jenni’s post, I’m more than excited to give this a try! Imagine, being able to say you MADE the chocolate from beans. That’s why they call it “bean to bar” chocolate, and it’s such a craved detail in the chocolate market.

Not only is Jenni a great chef, she’s an amazing friend. She’ll help you through any baking dilemas; she’ll calm you down when you run out of Nutella and she’s funny! What are you waiting for?! Follow her on Twitter @onlinepastrychf and check out her blog “The Balanced Pastry Chef”. Now read her adventures in chocolate making below!

How to Make Chocolate. From Scratch! First, just let me say that I am Thrilled to be writing a guest post for the Lovely, Talented and Amazing Nelly! Thanks for asking me, Nelly. And since I love Nelly so much, I wanted to make sure that I had an Awesome Thing about which to post. And I have. I hope you’re ready.

 

So, guess what I did on Tuesday? A partner in crime and I made chocolate. From scratch. As in roasting the beans, grinding, conching, giving tempering the old College Try and then finally, making lovely truffles. Ta da!! Here’s what happened. A local twitter friend contacted me to see if I would like to help her make chocolate. And when asked that question, there is only one answer. So, of course, I Gave it: “Yes.!” She is writing a one-year blog and is attempting to complete fifty different craft projects this year. Chocolate making is Craft # 39, but she has also done anodizing, blacksmithing, felting, crochet and all manner of other cool stuff. Go check her out. 

                                

Now, back to the chocolate making. We started by just roasting a handful of beans, just in case we messed up. And good thing we did, too, because they burned. Sneakily, we couldn’t really tell by smelling that they were burnt, and even though they tasted kind of…odd…they didn’t seem Overly Bad, so optimistically, we soldiered on. And then, as soon as we started to grind the beans, an indescribable Odor hit us. It was like rancid espresso and old wine and carbon and Nastiness. I can only imagine that the first time someone accidentally tossed some cocoa beans in the fire, they took them out at Exactly the right time, because otherwise, the entire history of chocolate would be the History That Wasn’t. We went through the whole chocolate making procedure using the burned beans just to get a feel for all the steps. We then went back and roasted some more beans without burning them, and the difference between what we made first and what we made next was literally the difference between Hell and Heaven. Wow. Our total roasting time was about 13 minutes. Then, we let the beans cool a bit and peeled off the husks by hand. Yes, you could bash them all up in a zip top bag and then use a hair dryer to blow out the light chaff (hull pieces), but hand peeling wasn’t too time consuming, especially with a buddy, and it was easier to get out all the chaff than it would have been with a hair dryer. 

 

We ground the beans with sugar and a bit of extra cocoa butter. I wish that I’d had some vanilla bean or vanilla powder to grind along with the chocolate, but I am Fresh Out of both. In commercial chocolate production, they must have Uber Grinders, because there was absolutely no way to get the chocolate completely smooth. Graininess notwithstanding, this stuff smelled amazing and tasted unlike any other chocolate I’ve ever eaten. It was somehow…bigger…in the mouth. Since we roasted and then ground our beans all in one day, a lot of the volatile oils and flavors that might Waft away or oxidize over time were present and lent a lovely brightness to the chocolate. After grinding, it was time for conching. Conching is arguably the most pivotal step in chocolate making. The process evenly distributes the cocoa butter throughout the product, helps some more acidic, harsh flavors to oxidize and mellow and can increase the temperature of the chocolate to allow some caramelized flavor notes to develop. Conching can take up to three days, but even lower-end chocolate is conched for several hours. We conched in the mixer because that’s what we had on hand. We did do some hand conching of the burned batch using a mortar and pestle, but the mortar was Wee and it would’ve taken Forever to adequately conch our Good batch. Technically, the mixer bowl and paddle were both too smooth to do a great job of conching, but we were able to introduce some air into the mix which aided in mellowing some of the more off flavors that might have been present.

After about 25-30 minutes of conching, it was time to temper. I was able to get the burned batch in temper. The second, awesome batch was less Cooperative, but I managed to get it close. Most chocolatiers have tempering machines. Those that don’t generally temper by seeding. Seeding is a process in which you add small pieces of solid tempered chocolate to hot melted chocolate to encourage proper cocoa butter crystallization. Introducing seed crystals into the batch makes it much more likely that all the other fat falls into line. Considering that a)we didn’t have a tempering machine and b)I was trying to temper solely based on temperature without seeding, I will Take almost-tempered! Once I finally admitted defeat, we decided to make a 2:1 chocolate to cream ganache and then make truffles. So we did. Our batch of chocolate weighed about 275grams, so I heated up 137.5 grams of heavy cream and whisked it into the chocolate along with a wee splash of vanilla. The resultant ganache (again, texture notwithstanding), was a Revelation. Far be it from me to wax poetic about some fermented, roasted and ground beans, but dang! The vanilla further rounded out the flavors and it was Just. So. Good. One interesting side note: unlike most commercially produced chocolate, ours did not contain lecithin. Lecithin is a powerful emulsifier that is added to chocolate to keep the cocoa butter from separating from the rest of the chocolate. It became Evident that the addition of some lecithin would prove Useful because, after we made the ganache (introducing even more liquid to the fat), some of the cocoa butter actually leaked out of the ganache. See?

 

Ew. Anyway, to make the truffles, we simply chilled the ganache and then scooped it into small balls. 

 

We had to work quickly because of the Lack of Lecithin, so we shaped them into rough balls and then threw in the freezer for ten minutes to firm up so we could roll them Real Purdy. Once we rolled them into Lovely Spheres, we rolled them in cocoa powder, toasted chopped pecans or powdered sugar. They were positively Addictive. Yes, they were a wee bit grainy, but that Slight Deficit was more than made up for with the incredible flavor of pure, gorgeous chocolate that we made ourselves! If you’d like to check out the festivities, please enjoy the video I made of the entire process. 

 

Well, I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial, and its companion Cautionary Tales, on making chocolate. Honestly, I will probably do this again, but not to temper. It’s a bit of a hassle and, with the texture issues, it won’t necessarily be the loveliest chocolate you’ve ever seen. Save the tempering step with some nice couverture. But make some of this and make some truffles. Or use it as the melted chocolate for making a chocolate cake or brownies. Oh, mama, that would be good!