By hand, this means spreading it out and scraping it up, over and over, on a polished stone slab while it cools. As the desirable crystals form, it takes on a dull, claylike consistency for which the professional term is "mush." Of course there are computer-controlled machines to do this at scale.

The mush can be added back to a larger pool of melted chocolate, and as long as it's not hot enough to melt the seed crystals, this produces a pool of "tempered" chocolate that can be poured into bar molds or decorative molds, or kept warm and agitated while things are dipped in it to make filled chocolates.

White chocolate is cocoa butter with sugar and vanilla and milk powder, but without any of the actual cocoa. As long as it's made with actual cocoa butter, it shares the melting/tempering/setting properties of actual chocolate, although the thermal profiles are a little different.

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Once you're happy that what you have is good melted chocolate, the final step is tempering.

Chocolate is a suspension of finely ground flavorful things in cocoa butter. And cocoa butter is, chemically, a complex mixture of different fats. It can take on various crystal structures, depending on things like the exact cooling profile, agitation, the presence of seed crystals, etc. And these structures can have very different properties in terms of mouthfeel, stability, melting temperature, etc.

If you just let melted chocolate set back up again, it won't be nice. The default crystal structure that the cocoa butter adopts will get soft and sticky at even moderately warm room temperature, and has a gummy feeling when chewed. It will also develop grey, powdery bloom very quickly, and turn chalky over time.

So instead, you cool it *past* its normal freezing point, but with continuous agitation. At another, lower freezing point, it starts to form better crystals.

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So the penultimate step is called "conching." The chocolate mixture is put in a machine that fundamentally reproduces the action of a mortar and pestle, and continuously ground for hours or, in some of the finest high-end chocolates, days.

Industrial conchers (or "melangeurs") are typically the size of a small bus, but for home use it's possible to buy a machine originally designed for making dosa batter that works as a concher. A bowl with a stone base has a central spindle with stone rollers. The bowl turns, the rollers roll IN a pool of chocolate, continuously crushing the chocolate in front of them until the entire mixture reaches the texture you want.

During this process, the whole thing outgasses. It gives up moisture, especially at the beginning, and also there are various smells that come off that really aren't lovely. (Remember, fermented food. Some notes are, I'm sorry, reminiscent of urine.) These are nice things NOT to have in the finished chocolate.

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The nibs can now be processed a couple of different ways. One option is to heat them and press them for oil, like olives or sunflower seeds. The oil solidifies at room temperature and that's cocoa butter, which has a lot of desirable properties for cosmetics, or can be added back to the chocolate-making process. Finely grinding the remaining "cake" of pressed out solids yields cocoa powder.

Alternatively, you can simply grind up the nibs whole, and then you have "cocoa liquor," aka unsweetened chocolate.

To make chocolate bars, this is mixed with sugar, optionally milk powder (for milk chocolate), usually vanilla, and usually some lecithin. Lecithin is a fraction purified from different oily foods that acts like a biological detergent and helps emulsify mixtures of fats with things (like sugar) that prefer to dissolve in water. It helps with the texture and stability of the finished product.

Even with finely ground sugar and cacao, this mixture is grittier than "chocolate."

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When I get a new variety, I will do test-roasts, taking samples at defined timepoints, to see if they have a sweet spot, when it is, and what it's like. I grind them with sugar to a coarse powder and then I can do blending experiments to decide on a recipe.

Once you have your beans roasted, it's time to separate them from their shells. The shell is fibrous and has relatively little chocolate flavor, so it will weaken the finished product unless removed.

The large-scale way to do that is to crack the beans into a mixture of bean pieces (if you buy "cacao nibs" that's what these are) and shell pieces. Then they are separated by density using moving air, an ancient agricultural practice called "winnowing," although now performed with complicated fan-driven machinery. The shell pieces can be composted or used for mulch. They also, since they have a faint chocolate flavor/scent and no fat content, get used to flavor things like chocolate beer or chocolate tea.

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In the broadest of generalities, forastero beans have more of the bass-heavy, "chocolatey" notes and take a longer, hotter roast, but they tend to be somewhat "flat" or uncomplicated, with very little finish or development of the flavor on the palate. The vast plantations of west Africa that produce most of the world's cocoa beans (even though the species are native to central America) are planted in forastero monoculture and that's what most of the mass-market commercial chocolate you've ever had uses.

Criollo are lighter, fruity beans with all kinds of top notes and complexity, but typically too tangy for my tastes on their own, and lack the deep richness that we associate with chocolate. These are the beans that will burn to gross if you look at them funny.

Some trinitarios manage to achieve a desirable balance of these characteristics, but much of the art of chocolate-making is in blending different beans to balance each other's weaknesses.

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The next step is to roast the beans. On a large scale, this is typically done in a drum roaster, heating and agitating, similar to those used for coffee, although the temperature profile is quite different. I myself roast them in the oven, on an insulated pan, stirring every five minutes.

Also like coffee, there are many different varieties of cocoa bean. There are two major species, which produce beans called "criollo" and "forastero," but they hybridize freely, so there is a vast range of "trinitario" beans with more or less character from one parent or the other. Then of course there's terroire, and the same strain will produce different beans in different soils or different years. The roast has to be sensitive to these differences; the same conditions that will leave one bean variety underroasted and tasting, well, *bean-y* will leave a different variety badly burnt, acrid and nasty.

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Which is just as well because the typical processing involves splitting the pods open and spreading the mixture of pulp and seeds out in the sun. Within the aforementioned 10° of the equator, the pulp rots almost instantly, which is actually a crucial part of the process. Chocolate is a fermented food, and this step develops chemicals that contribute to the taste of the final product.

After fermentation, the seeds (which of course are cocoa beans), in their shells, are washed and dried and bagged up for shipping. This is the state in which they are distributed to chocolate-makers around the world.

The international unit of cocoa bean sales is apparently the 50-kilo sack. That is how companies that make chocolate buy them. For home chocolate-makers (yes, it's a thing), there is at least one company that buys them and breaks them up and sells them on by the pound. They are chocolatealchemy.com and if you get to the end and think "I wanna do that!" they are your source.

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How chocolate is made, in case you're curious (a thread):

Cacao grows within about 10° of the equator. The trees are WEIRD-looking small trees and the fruit kind of grows straight out of the trunk and large branches. Fruit growing out of a trunk looks very wrong to me but I have no complaints about the result.

The fruit is a pod, shaped like and slightly smaller than an American football or rugby ball. Like so many other fruits, it contains a number of seeds, each with a thin shell of its own, embedded in pulp. (Does this make it technically a berry? I find I'm curious without actually caring.) The pulp is edible and can be pressed for juice, but spoils very quickly, so it's not typically eaten outside chocolate-growing areas. I've had the juice once (from a carton, far from the equator) and it was … okay. Kind of fruity/musky, a little sweet and a little tangy and with a pronounced "damp basement" note. I'll pass.

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RE: https://ohai.social/@TarkabarkaHolgy/116990430990203205

It's a very quintessentially mastodon post. Hi I have cool rocks let me show you them.

I ran past a construction site yesterday and I was really enjoying the art that they were displaying on the fence-covering material, when it suddenly occurred to me that we didn't used to have that. It used to only ever be dark green plastic mesh, and now it often still is but it's also not infrequent to see pictures or screen-printed art on the mesh, just because some institution doing the construction has decided it's better public relations if what everyone has to look at here for the next couple of years isn't ugly. This is a small great change.

Holy shit the blackcurrant frangipane cake thing was fucking phenomenal. I tasted the compote when I made it and it was SO sour I was dubious it could ever work, but the cake and the frangipane balanced it out so beautifully, and the compote sank into the cake and made it super moist and soft and it's delicious and I'm VERY full of myself today, just absolutely intolerable. Sorry.

RE: https://beige.party/@kimlockhartga/116947809444406077

It is a really, really good story.

Damn what the hell is it a Jewish holiday or something? I got no fewer than FIVE (5!) separate "Excuse me, are you Jewish?" on the walk to work today.

Also a pair of probably-Mormons but they were bothering someone else so I passed unmolested.

Let's all just mind our fucking business, shall we? Jeez.

Look, I don't wanna speak ill of the dead, but I just wanna say that if you're concerned that maybe you might drink too much, or even if you're FINE everything's FINE but you know or suspect that maybe someone ELSE is concerned that maybe you might drink too much, just, chill out with that, huh? Have a ginger ale, maybe get into seltzer, they're everywhere these days. Your friends don't want to mourn you. Really.

Finally a DST proposal I can get behind.

https://xkcd.com/3272/

First farmers’ market gazpacho of the season. I hate summer but I love gazpacho.

Yesterday I found out my friend Ernesto had died and today another friend was going through pictures and sent me this and I am in, as they say, my feels.

"All I am is a very angry gay man."

PREACH!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/07/jason-jones-activist-11-year-fight-to-overturn-trinidads-homophobic-laws-reaches-final-hurdle

Saw the catnip lotion mosquito repellant headline and thought, Lovely, instead of the inefficiency of losing a tiny bit of blood at a time to mosquito bites, you could lose all that blood at once when your cat bites/claws the living shit out of you.