Steve GisselbrechtIt has been a very lazy couple days but I think it's time to start on a little project!
Phase 1 of the little project is complete: I’ve test-roasted 3 different varieties of cocoa beans. My beloved husband very kindly helped me peel them.
I used to make chocolate from scratch kind of a lot, but the last entry in my chocolate notebook is from January of 2015 and reads, "Concher failed after < 4 hours."
This was kinda traumatic and then the new concher that Tom got me had other issues. Combine that with the fact that, with age and experience, I just naturally took on more responsibilities at work, and big projects became harder to budget energy for. It just became really daunting to get back up on that horse.
But lately it's been bugging me. So I have some beans, and now I've done the test roasts. The next step will be to grind them with sugar into kind of a coarse powder; I can taste those to choose my optimal roast for each variety, and mix them to hint at recipes for the chocolate that I'd like to make.
More updates to come, obviously. You can't possibly imagine I'd ever shut up about this sort of thing.
Okay, I did my grinding with sugar and tasted.
• The Ghana is like all the other Ghana beans I've had, deep and chocolatey but kinda flat, best between 25 and 30 min.
• These Dominican Republic beans are VERY fruity/tangy. Best between 20 and 25 minutes, and pretty decent blended with the Ghana. It will be an aggressively fruity blend but not, I think, outside the range of what I'll use.
• The Fiji have potential as a single-origin chocolate. I've never done that before …
… I've always been more interested in what I could achieve by blending. But this is pretty well-balanced. Also I think something between 20 and 25 minutes here. I'll taste some more and think about it but I needed a break, as the unrefined beans mess me up if I eat too much.
Okay, I've returned to this after a break and some real food. I tried a 2:1 of the Ghana and the DR and I am sold. I think I'll order more Ghana beans when I order cocoa butter.
I also tried the Fiji again and I really do think a single-origin from these beans can be great.
Next steps in chocolate-making:
Last weekend I did production roasting of 3 pounds each of the Ghana and Dominican Republic beans. Now is cracking and winnowing.
As you can see in the above pictures, each flavorful bean has a thin, hard skin. These are not nice and should be removed, to the extent possible, from the “nibs,” or pieces of cocoa bean.
It is possible to hand-peel them all but … not recommended.
A quick pass through an industrial-grade juicer, without the screen that separates juice from pulp mounted, shatters them into a mixture of nibs and shell fragments. Here you can see before and after.
Winnowing is an ancient word and an ancient process, in which wind is used to separate the denser nibs from the less dense and more wind-catching shell pieces.
The most straightforward way to do this is to spread a tarp in front of a fan, pick up handfuls of the cracked bean mix, and let them rain down back into the bowl. More shell than bean blows onto the tarp. More bean than shell falls into the bowl. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Unfortunately, here in New England, the season for tempering chocolate in my un-air-conditioned kitchen and the season when it's not unpleasant to sit outside for an hour with your hands in front of a fan are nearly disjoint. The amount of dust mobilized by this process makes doing it indoors kind of a non-starter.
Enter the winnower!
This is a home winnower. The huge nerd who runs chocolatealchemy.com (and when *I* call someone a huge nerd you know it’s because Game Recognize Game) engineered this, had it prototyped, tested, refined, and ultimately offered it for sale.
The big hopper-like tube on top is where you feed your nibs mix in. The flexible tube goes to a shop-vac, which provides suction to the bucket. Your nibs mix goes down the tube and, if everything is set correctly, almost all the nibs fall into the bowl, and almost all the shell pieces are sucked up into the bucket. There are two valves, the left- and right-most things on top, for adjusting the vacuum above and below the segregation point.
Since the shell pieces that make it through the winnower are typically the largest ones, it's possible to pick most of them out manually after the fact. Especially if you're … *fastidious*, as I admittedly am.
Mikey Reppy@stevegis_ssg wow. Such a cool device!
there is beauty in simplicity@stevegis_ssg if I had something like this for hulling rice I would definitely be growing my own rice
JTinMI@stevegis_ssg In olden days, farmers used a fan mill for separating grain from chaff. I wonder if they still make such things, or if it would be possible to find a working model you could use or adapt?
Andrew Abdalian@stevegis_ssg I only learned that this was a thing when I started working with the #Tunica language and had to figure out what the dictionary entry marked "fanner for corn" referred to. It's woven like a basket and has its own word, which seems to be completely different from the general word for a fan. #MoreThanYouWantedToKnow