artisanal thinking

Friday, July 17th witnessed the inaugural cacao roast of Daniel Schreiber – Chocolate Maker.

I was very excited to get started with the process of making chocolate that I couldn’t wait until Saturday, having just gotten my beans Friday, to try my hand at the first step towards bars, roasting the raw cacao beans. I am a greenhorn at this (as are all but a select group of individuals!), so I first studied the temperatures and times that we want to subject our cacao to. Unlike coffee roasting, where internal bean temperatures can range between 365 and 440 F, we want to keep our cacao under 300 F, which translates to about 15-30 minutes in the oven. At this internal temperature the beans should be starting to crack with the husk starting to peel away… have you ever listened to almonds sound like rice krispies after taking them out of the oven?

The purpose of roasting is, like with coffee, to help separate the husk from the inner bean, which incidentally in cacao is thicker and harder to winnow away than for coffee, where it flies off mid-roast. But primarily it develops the flavour of the beans through such means as the Maillard reaction.

With experience, one’s nose and ears will help to guide the roast, but I was sticking to the following schedule: first, a blast of high heat for 10 minutes in the 350 F preheated oven, second, 10 minutes while ramping down the temperature to 300 F, finally 10 minutes in the turned off, cooling oven. I had my infrared thermometer in hand to check conditions on the pan, cell phone for time management, and after ladling 3 cups of Peruvian beans on to the baking sheet, away I went!

It is nice to think that not many people have the opportunity to roast cacao at home and I feel great to have done so, but the actual immediate pleasure of the roast was the deep chocolate, ‘baking brownies’ scent that filled the kitchen ten minutes after going in. Currently the plan is to keep a ‘chocolate diary’ of all that we do, and for this roast, I recorded that the highest pan temperature we reached was 20 minutes in at 285 F, at which point I took some beans out to compare with the final 30 minutes roasted version. When I pulled them from the oven, the pan temperature had cooled back to 223 F, however even outside the oven, the beans will continue to roast for a couple minutes more.

After roasting the beans, we still don’t have something we can do anything with. We have to crack the beans (using our Crankandstein cocoa mill!), which peels away the husk from the beans but leaves a bowl of husky nibs that have to be winnowed to separate the loose husk from the precious nibs. We did this by putting our nibs in a shallow container, and then using a hair dryer, we shook and tossed the nibs around while blowing the lighter husk away. Ideally we would have a shallow sloped steel bowl for this task, but presently we just used another baking sheet.

The whole time we were winnowing, I was very nervous that we would blow away all the nibs we had worked so hard to roast and I repeatedly checked the ground for errant nibs, but thankfully I saw only husk. We started with 3 cups of beans, and we ended with about 2 and three quarters of nibs, which is more than I expected, but our winnowing technique still needs improvement, and sadly, there remains some husk with my nibs. I think that I may have over-roasted a bit this first time, tomorrow I’m planning to try again, maybe with 20-25 minutes in the oven. I have over a pound of nibs, so if anybody wants to try some and tell me what you think, please get in contact (that is danielhschreiber(at)gmail(dot)com , or tweet)! Also, sorry, pictures will be better in the future…

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Chocolate Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.