What you're about to read has been highly guarded by the super mega corporate chocolate producers of the world. The short of it is that despite the ultra-complex images of chocolate factories you may have seen (Willy Wonka's included), high quality dark chocolate is very easy to make all by yourself in your own kitchen in a matter of hours. In the interest of not listing multi-hundred dollar pieces of equipment, the chocolate you will end up with will have a rustic texture, and will be excellent for eating and cooking.
Equipment list:
A normal household oven
A baking sheet that will fit in the oven
A timer
3-4 bowls
A calculator
A kitchen scale
A hair drier
A Champion brand juicer (or similar auger style--I have a Solo Star II)
A spoon
A rubber spatula
Aluminum foil or parchment paper
A coffee grinder (cheap whirly blade type, not the fancy burr type)
A fan
A friend (choose wisely since you will have to share your chocolate with this person :)
Ingredients:
16 oz unroasted whole cocoa beans (if you can only find roasted, just skip the roasting step). You can find these at health food stores like Whole Foods.
***If you only have nibs available, get roasted ones and skip to Step 3.***
Granulated white sugar (DO NOT use powdered sugar --it contains corn starch, and you don't want that in your chocolate)
Equipment list:
A normal household oven
A baking sheet that will fit in the oven
A timer
3-4 bowls
A calculator
A kitchen scale
A hair drier
A Champion brand juicer (or similar auger style--I have a Solo Star II)
A spoon
A rubber spatula
Aluminum foil or parchment paper
A coffee grinder (cheap whirly blade type, not the fancy burr type)
A fan
A friend (choose wisely since you will have to share your chocolate with this person :)
Ingredients:
16 oz unroasted whole cocoa beans (if you can only find roasted, just skip the roasting step). You can find these at health food stores like Whole Foods.
***If you only have nibs available, get roasted ones and skip to Step 3.***
Granulated white sugar (DO NOT use powdered sugar --it contains corn starch, and you don't want that in your chocolate)
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Signing UpStep 1: Roasting
Roasting the cocoa beans is essential to develop the "chocolate" flavor. Its also pretty easy to do (there is a lot of science to roasting cocoa, but we won't get into that here)
1. Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and pre-heat your oven to 300F.
2. Spread your unroasted beans out on your baking sheet so they are in a single layer.
3. Once the oven is preheated, place the pan in and start your timer. Roast the beans for 30 minutes. For your first time trying this, pay close attention to the smell. When your beans first start heating, you might notice an acidic smell coming off--this is normal. What we want to do is cook that off and wait until they start smelling like brownies. Because there are endless variations on how to roast and beans vary in how much they should be roasted, I've suggested a very "average" roast. You can experiment with future batches.
4. At 30 mins, pull the beans out and place the pan in front of a fan to cool. If you don't have a fan, don't worry, just let them cool until they are cool enough to handle.
1. Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and pre-heat your oven to 300F.
2. Spread your unroasted beans out on your baking sheet so they are in a single layer.
3. Once the oven is preheated, place the pan in and start your timer. Roast the beans for 30 minutes. For your first time trying this, pay close attention to the smell. When your beans first start heating, you might notice an acidic smell coming off--this is normal. What we want to do is cook that off and wait until they start smelling like brownies. Because there are endless variations on how to roast and beans vary in how much they should be roasted, I've suggested a very "average" roast. You can experiment with future batches.
4. At 30 mins, pull the beans out and place the pan in front of a fan to cool. If you don't have a fan, don't worry, just let them cool until they are cool enough to handle.
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A blender is a safer bet, since it does the same thing as a coffee grinder with none of the risks---you just need more beans (=more chocolate :). its safer and batch size is not limited to just a few beans. You will still need to stop every minute or so to scrape everything down since there is a "dead" spot under the blades that won't get ground. Like the juicer, if your blender doesn't generate enough heat, just use the hair drier on the side of it.
If you're not opposed to investing a few hundred dollars, I can suggest a few stone refiners. There are really only two brands, Santha and Ultra, and I'd be happy to discuss the pros and cons of them if you wanted to go that route (I have one of each running now :)
First off, you can buy a hair drier at most any thrift store for a few dollars.
In the blender, as the cocoa butter content of the nibs liquifies, the dead spot will be less of a problem, since you will have a liquified mass instead of a solid. You will want to scrape the blender down and clean out the dead spot every minute or so (this is depending on how many beans you have, the less you have the more often you need to scrape).
The two stone refiners are essentially the same, with the exception of the shape of the rollers. To be honest, what I've found is that the Santha style cylindical rollers have few problems, but the machine overall is built much more poorly (i.e., expect to have to fix it). The Ultra has conical rollers that seem to get gummed up and stop rolling while a batch is going, making it less efficient, but the machine overall is built better and will likely run trouble free for many batches. They have the same capacity, and motor, and the Santha is $50 less. Is the price difference worth having to fix it periodically? You need to decide that to make your choice.
Both machines will make "real" chocolate though--perfectly smooth (final particle size 30 micons and below), and both will as an effective conch. There is more going on during conching than just stirring the chocolate around. Stirring/agitation is NOT conching. Conching is a chemical and mechanical transformation of the flavor and texture of chocolate. The key is in applying shearing forces on the cocoa-sugar agglomerates, to break them down, and to "round out" the sugar crystals. This is also an extremely oversimplified explanation, but there are volumes written about it if you want to explore further.
Hope this helps.