Hi,

I would like to start learning about making chocolate for myself (not
just cooking with it, but making it). Could anyone point me in the
right direction to start? I have looked on the web a bit. There are
lots of suppliers of beans, and lots of sites that sell equipment, but
i am stuggling to find a good starting point for the art of chocolate
making.

Please, could anyone recommend books, links, anything?

Thanks

It is indeed feasable.

However, it is a long process and requires rigor and some equipement to
acheive a good result. Beside, you'll need to buy small quantities of
(hopefully) good quality cocoa beans - Criolos are the best ones -
which is not easy to find. Both the US and the EU have strict
regulations for importing vegetal goods so you cannot buy beans direct
form the producers and will have to go via an importer. Prices vary
from $ 15 to $28 per pound.

For well thought hobyist techniques and recommandations you'll find
everything on www.chocolatealchemy.com

For Professional grade chocolate making principles and chimistery buy
"The Science of chocolate" from Stephen T. Beckett.

I'd like to know how you're doing. Please keep me informed.

Alek Dabo


NewChoc wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to start learning about making chocolate for myself (not
> just cooking with it, but making it). Could anyone point me in the
> right direction to start? I have looked on the web a bit. There are
> lots of suppliers of beans, and lots of sites that sell equipment, but
> i am stuggling to find a good starting point for the art of chocolate
> making.
>
> Please, could anyone recommend books, links, anything?
>
> Thanks

"NewChoc" > wrote in message
oups.com...
> Hi,
>
> I would like to start learning about making chocolate for myself (not
> just cooking with it, but making it). Could anyone point me in the
> right direction to start? I have looked on the web a bit. There are
> lots of suppliers of beans, and lots of sites that sell equipment, but
> i am stuggling to find a good starting point for the art of chocolate
> making.

You can make chocolate through the use of a champion food juicer. You will
need to roast the beans at approx 300 degrees F for about 1/2 an hour.
(Different beans require different roasts and other factors may come in to
play so you'll have to play with the time.) After the beans are done, you
will need to remove the paper-like husks. What you will have left are
"nibs" or bits of bean. You can "cheat" a bit and buy pre-roasted nibs from
a variety of places including Scharffen Berger
(http://www.scharffenberger.com/) which will save you a lot of work.

You can then run it through a Champion food juicer and it will make it
liquidy or into chocolate liquor. From here, you can add sugar and perhaps
some spice (like cinnamon). What you will have in the end is something
closely akin to the Mexican chocolate that you buy in the grocery store such
as Ibarra.

Getting it so that it is smooth and not-gritty is the trick. To do this,
everything including the sugar needs to be ground to less than 20 microns
which takes fancier equipment and can potentially take a long time (up to 72
hours).

Don't forget when you are done, you will need to temper it to make sure it
has the proper texture. You can do this by hand (which takes some skill) or
buy a tempering machine which does not take as much skill.

So, that is how you can make it. It isn't going to be nice and smooth like
a regular chocolate bar. But it will be something you can play around with
and perhaps make hot cocoa with.

-Art

at Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:33:39 GMT in <1136583219.656558.158600
@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>, (NewChoc) wrote :

>Hi,
>
>I would like to start learning about making chocolate for myself (not
>just cooking with it, but making it). Could anyone point me in the
>right direction to start? I have looked on the web a bit. There are
>lots of suppliers of beans, and lots of sites that sell equipment, but
>i am stuggling to find a good starting point for the art of chocolate
>making.
>
>Please, could anyone recommend books, links, anything?
>
Check out my numerous posts on the topic. (Generally under "chocolate from
scratch" or other such topics) This is one of those "old chestnuts" -
cyclical questions that get revisited every few months.

A major question to ask yourself is - what is your purpose in making
chocolate?

Is it simply dissatisfaction with the quality or taste of the chocolates
you've had to date and a desire to do better? If so, know right now that
success will be *very* difficult - and you won't get it right immediately.
Even if you do manage to produce a chocolate on the level of a good
manufacturer, it will probably be after multiple failed attempts.

Is it because of tricky dietary restrictions? For instance, common ones
include diabetes and nut allergies. If so, there are chocolates produced to
circumvent almost every dietary restriction out there. I can probably
indicate brands if this is the primary problem. However, again this reason
is generally not the most productive one if you don't want to have multiple
experiments with uneven success.

Is it with the goal of starting a professional career? If so then the best
route is to get some professional training. You might investigate an
apprenticeship at a chocolate manufacturer. However, with that in mind this
would be one reason you might wish to experiment at home that would make
sense - so that you could enter a programme with at least some familiarity
with the techniques, tools, materials, etc. In that situation you might
want to experiment for a year or so, until you feel comfortable with a
range of variables, and then consider training.

Is it just curiosity and a desire to learn about a process essentially as a
hobbyist interest? If so again, you can try. Be prepared for a fairly
substantial capital investment in equipment at the start - and for probably
some experimentation with different set-ups before you find the one that
works for you.

The critical point is, unless your interest level is high almost to the
point of obsession and you're ready to tough it out over multiple attempts
for multiple days, then you'll probably conclude it's not worth the effort.
If OTOH, you do have that obsessive interest level, it will be a nice
exercise in self-information and very rewarding once you eventually do
succeed - just have patience because you won't succeed overnight.

You'll discover exactly why and how this is for the most part an
industrial-scale process done with large machines in a factory setting.
That alone can be rewarding because it allows you both to decipher what
companies are doing with their chocolate and also will develop respect for
the fruits of their labour.

Another point I'll emphasize is that the technical details of the process
are usually closely guarded with most companies. Each of them has their own
process specifics (often geared to their particular equipment setup),
reflecting their own style approach. So to a certain extent even such
suggestions as you can find are only useful in the most general of senses.
Much better I think is to change different process variables and see how
they affect the results.

Some other posters have included a decent cross-section of hints. The one
thing I have to say I'd stay away from is the juicer approach for grinding
your beans. These don't really grind fine enough and leave you with a mass
that's difficult to process effectively, as well as straining the machine
somewhat because it's not really designed for that kind of task.

--
Alex Rast

(remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)

> Some other posters have included a decent cross-section of hints. The one
> thing I have to say I'd stay away from is the juicer approach for grinding
> your beans. These don't really grind fine enough and leave you with a mass
> that's difficult to process effectively, as well as straining the machine
> somewhat because it's not really designed for that kind of task.

Alex:

I disagree. The Champion Juicer does a find job turning nibs into chocolate
liquor. It does not stress it out and the resultant liquor is of sufficient
quality that you can use it in your cooking. You do however sometimes have
to run it through several times to get it really smooth. By smooth, I do
not mean smooth compared to cocoa liquor of a commercial nature, I only mean
no obvious chunkies in it. The Champion is NOT well suited for dealing with
sugar and should NOT be used to try to refine the sugar. Here you will
overheat the motor and cause damage to the blades of the juicer. Other
brands of juicer are not well suited to the task and I do agree that it
making chocolate liquor with the Champion is stretching its capabilities a
bit. Even so, for the amount that someone will make at home, it will serve
its purpose for quite a while.

This is how I got started and then I took the resultant liquor and put it
into a machine of my own design which would refine it further until the
particle sizes were in the 15-20 micron range (on average). This process
would take multiple days and the resultant chocolate was smooth and had a
nice flavor profile. I would be remiss to leave out that it was VERY
expensive to develop, and build my own machine since parts were expensive
and it took quite a few attempts to work the bugs out. It seems quite
simple and then you find out why few people attempt let alone do it.
However, I do consider it to be an advantage since the entire process was
able to school me in a number of properties of chocolate I doubt that I
would be able to learn any other way. (Since I had to control all the
aspects of the manufacutring process and build the best into my design.)

Now while I am still working on perfecting my own machine, I have purchased
a small handful of larger commercial refiners which don't have to have their
bugs worked out. Some have their own advantages and I am enjoying working
with them and seeing the changes in flavor when machines are compared one
against another.

But if someone want to play around with the process, the Champion Juicer is
a good place to start. The resultant chocolate will be gritty since it
can't refine the sugar. However, it will make a nice cup of hot chocolate
since sugar particle size is not a consideration in this case.

-Art

at Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:48:05 GMT in
>, (Art
Pollard) wrote :

>> Some other posters have included a decent cross-section of hints. The
>> one thing I have to say I'd stay away from is the juicer approach for
>> grinding your beans. These don't really grind fine enough and leave
>> you with a mass that's difficult to process effectively, as well as
>> straining the machine somewhat because it's not really designed for
>> that kind of task.
>
>Alex:
>
>I disagree. The Champion Juicer does a find job turning nibs into
>chocolate liquor. It does not stress it out and the resultant liquor is
>of sufficient quality that you can use it in your cooking. You do
>however sometimes have to run it through several times to get it really
>smooth. By smooth, I do not mean smooth compared to cocoa liquor of a
>commercial nature, I only mean no obvious chunkies in it.

Yeah, that's where our ideas diverge. I developed methodologies to get it
down to a smoothness level comparable to commercial chocolate, so to a
certain extent that's what I was comparing it to. Why I wouldn't recommend
the juicer approach is because if you start out with a methodology that, no
matter how carefully you apply it, will never yield optimum results, then
IMHO it's best to ditch the methodology at the outset. Better to start
experimenting with methods that can ultimately work if you have enough
persistence. The Champion seems to be the best of the juicers, but overall,
I can't recommend a juicer approach for chocolate-making. Relative to other
machines I'm sure the mechanical stress might be less, but there is also
the issue of fat and how it affects the machine. AFAIK none of the juicers
are designed for oily substances.

>But if someone want to play around with the process, the Champion Juicer
>is a good place to start. The resultant chocolate will be gritty since
>it can't refine the sugar.

There is a way to get nice smooth sugar without special equipment - use
candymaking technique and cook your sugar to hard-crack. If you're quick
with blending it with the chocolate it will be quite smooth. However, this
requires an equal amount of practice because it's easy not to be efficient
in your blending motion and then the sugar will solidify fast into large
"bits" in the chocolate.

You can also find powdered sugar without cornstarch if you look hard
enough. It's clumpy in the bag but you can bust it up with a mallet or a
wooden spoon.

--
Alex Rast

(remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 08:55:17 -0000,
(Alex Rast) wrote:

>at Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:48:05 GMT in
>, (Art
>Pollard) wrote :
>
>>> Some other posters have included a decent cross-section of hints. The
>>> one thing I have to say I'd stay away from is the juicer approach for
>>> grinding your beans. These don't really grind fine enough and leave
>>> you with a mass that's difficult to process effectively, as well as
>>> straining the machine somewhat because it's not really designed for
>>> that kind of task.
>>
>>Alex:
>>
>>I disagree. The Champion Juicer does a find job turning nibs into
>>chocolate liquor. It does not stress it out and the resultant liquor is
>>of sufficient quality that you can use it in your cooking. You do
>>however sometimes have to run it through several times to get it really
>>smooth. By smooth, I do not mean smooth compared to cocoa liquor of a
>>commercial nature, I only mean no obvious chunkies in it.
>
>Yeah, that's where our ideas diverge. I developed methodologies to get it
>down to a smoothness level comparable to commercial chocolate, so to a
>certain extent that's what I was comparing it to. Why I wouldn't recommend
>the juicer approach is because if you start out with a methodology that, no
>matter how carefully you apply it, will never yield optimum results, then
>IMHO it's best to ditch the methodology at the outset. Better to start
>experimenting with methods that can ultimately work if you have enough
>persistence. The Champion seems to be the best of the juicers, but overall,
>I can't recommend a juicer approach for chocolate-making. Relative to other
>machines I'm sure the mechanical stress might be less, but there is also
>the issue of fat and how it affects the machine. AFAIK none of the juicers
>are designed for oily substances.
>
>>But if someone want to play around with the process, the Champion Juicer
>>is a good place to start. The resultant chocolate will be gritty since
>>it can't refine the sugar.
>
>There is a way to get nice smooth sugar without special equipment - use
>candymaking technique and cook your sugar to hard-crack. If you're quick
>with blending it with the chocolate it will be quite smooth. However, this
>requires an equal amount of practice because it's easy not to be efficient
>in your blending motion and then the sugar will solidify fast into large
>"bits" in the chocolate.
>
>You can also find powdered sugar without cornstarch if you look hard
>enough. It's clumpy in the bag but you can bust it up with a mallet or a
>wooden spoon.


Sorry to step in this conversation as a complete newbie but is the
problem with the Juicer liquor/chocolate the grain size of the sugar
or the grain size of the cacoa mass? I ask this because I am curious
as to whether additional conching of the liquor/sugar mixture would be
necessary if one would be cooking with the chocolate if it is due to
sugar grain size? Wouldn't the process of heating the unrefined
chocolate simply melt the sugar grains? Would the same melting also
happen to the cacoa mass grains?

Please forgive what I am sure is complete ignorance on my part. I am
just trying to understand the chemistry/process.

Eric