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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 8:50 PM

    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.

    (4/9)

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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 8:55 PM

    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.

    (5/9)

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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 9:01 PM

    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."

    (6/9)

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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 9:07 PM

    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.

    (7/9)

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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 9:13 PM

    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.

    (8/9)

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  • Steve Gisselbrechtstevegis_ssg@mas.to
    Aug 1, 2026, 9:17 PM

    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.

    (9/9)

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