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Chocolate from Bean to Bar

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Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#51

Post by bckygldstn »

hoseja wrote: post #16
jcims wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just had a long conversation about morel mushrooms last night. They fit nicely in this category. Hands down the best mushroom I’ve ever eaten. Probably because they look like a brain on a stick.

There are thousands of mindblowingly delicious fruits that are simply incompatible with modern supply chains so most people don't even know exist. I recommend "Weird Explorer" on youtube to get a small glimpse.

Farmers markets very occasionally will have interesting fruit, often I suspect as a side project for the farmer, sitting at the back of their stall for a couple of weeks only.

In Californian farmers markets and fruit stalls I've been able to get some relatively uncommon fruit with unique flavours: feijoa, persimmon, passionfruit, pomegranate.

Travel is another way to be exposed to new fruit via alternate supply chains. Most Americans have never heard of feijoa but New Zealand in autumn is awash with them! You don't even need to buy them cause everyone has a friend, relative or neighbour with a tree trying to git rid of theirs before they go off!

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-04-2017/in-praise-of-the...

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#52

Post by riffraff »

knuthsat wrote: post #27
jihadjihad wrote: post #21

This is very strange to see on HN this morning...I was bored last night while eating a piece of dark chocolate, and began wondering how exactly they make it. I learned something fascinating: the primary thing that distinguishes "good" chocolate from "bad" chocolate, apart from taste, is the texture--more specifically, the crystal structure of tempered cocoa butter. There are in fact six different crystal forms of coc…

Sounds a lot like annealing.

it's called "tempering", tempering and annealing are somewhat similar processes.

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#53

Post by [deleted] »

rwmj wrote: post #2

This was an interesting series of blog posts about a (supposedly) bean to bar chocolate maker: https://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behin... https://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behin... https://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behin... https://dallasfood.org/2015/12/mast-brothers-what-lies-behin...

[deleted]

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#54

Post by bckygldstn »

jcims wrote: post #18
hoseja wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of mindblowingly delicious fruits that are simply incompatible with modern supply chains so most people don't even know exist. I recommend "Weird Explorer" on youtube to get a small glimpse.

Nice! Will check that out. I just saw a thing yesterday about nutmeg, the fruit it comes from and the 'mace' which is a beautiful webbing around the pit. Never heard of any of it.

Wow, it is beautiful! [1]

In the US it might be most commonly encountered as a primary constituent of Pumpkin Spice.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Nu...

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#55

Post by riffraff »

bedobi wrote: post #3

countless plant and animal species have evolved and died out throughout the history of life on Earth humans have existed only for a tiny fraction of the duration of the history of complex life on Earth but somehow humans managed to co-exist with chocolate, sugarcane, vanilla, bovids (cow milk, steak), coffee and any number of stupidly tasty things I'm not going anywhere with this comment but, like, wow, no!? if human…

but we would have experienced different ones?

If we didn't have cacao we would have learned to get something awesome from carobs, if we didn't have bovids we might have gotten fat deers, etc

There's soooo much stuff outside the usual flavours and ingredients even today.

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#56

Post by wastedhours »

pezzana wrote: post #43

> Alright, so the cacao has some natural oil in each of the beans, this stuff is what is known as cacao butter, depending on how well we were able to grind this down, the cacao butter will express itself in the powder we have here. However, as you can see this isn’t very oily looking, so we will need to bolster this with cacao butter. To my 120 grams of cacao nibs, I am added initially 20 grams of cacao butter, (but…

It's very difficult as you need a lot of pressure in order to squeeze the fats out from the mass - there were some small batch machines for doing so, but a homebrew approach would be marvelous to see.

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#57

Post by wastedhours »

afranchuk wrote: post #13

I did this once as I like to understand the processes that go into modern everyday items. Without a grinding mill I wasn't able to get the cacao to the smoothest consistency (it was grainy as the article describes), however it still came out as delicious pieces of chocolate. I did not add any cocoa butter, just sugar (and not much, I like it dark). The process of shelling, toasting, grinding, conching, and tempering…

Also used to do it too - amazing how far you can get with a £15 coffee grinder and a bag of beans. Like anything that goes through multiple step processing (same when I roasted coffee), it's the small percentage improvements at every stage that make the difference between home and manufactured.

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#58

Post by wastedhours »

Xophmeister wrote: post #28
jihadjihad wrote: post #21

This is very strange to see on HN this morning...I was bored last night while eating a piece of dark chocolate, and began wondering how exactly they make it. I learned something fascinating: the primary thing that distinguishes "good" chocolate from "bad" chocolate, apart from taste, is the texture--more specifically, the crystal structure of tempered cocoa butter. There are in fact six different crystal forms of coc…

You can also do it by seeding, using chocolate with the right crystalline structure. This method is usually a lot less troublesome than the thermal shocking (tempering) approach.

You can also seed with the cocoa butter you add in, seeding with pre-tempered chocolate tends to require more added as far as I remember.

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#59

Post by RangerScience »

jihadjihad wrote: post #21

This is very strange to see on HN this morning...I was bored last night while eating a piece of dark chocolate, and began wondering how exactly they make it. I learned something fascinating: the primary thing that distinguishes "good" chocolate from "bad" chocolate, apart from taste, is the texture--more specifically, the crystal structure of tempered cocoa butter. There are in fact six different crystal forms of coc…

Ah, but that's only the case for tempered chocolate! You can find a lot of the older style (stone ground) around, and notably, the Sicilian town of Modica has a 300+ history of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cioccolato_di_Modica

Re: Chocolate from Bean to Bar

#60

Post by RangerScience »

Protips for finding the best chocolate in any area:

- Look for "chocolate" shops, NOT "chocolates" shops! The latter tends to be confections / pastries, the former, bars

- Look for places with 90%+ bars (ideally a 100%). You might not like something that dark, but, it means that the source beans are good enough to stand on their own

- Slightly avoid places that put flavored bars (adding anything other than the core ingredients) front-and-center. They definitely can have amazing chocolate, and usually do have amazing flavors, but it does mean that they're not ALL about the cacao. (Don't even bother with "pressed" flavors; if it's not mixed in, it's gonna be mediocre).

- Look for bars that don't use soy lecithin.

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