best batch yet

29th October 2021

 

Ingredients

For our final batch with these beans, we stuck with the 70% bars with 10% cocoa butter:

• 618g cocoa nibs
• 309g cane sugar
• 103g cocoa butter

Roasting

We also stuck with the roast temperature and timing from the previous successful roast:

• 28 minutes at 111C

The roast went well and the nibs tasted pretty good, we were looking forward to how the bars would turn out but a bit nervous after our last two disastrous attempts!

Refining

Again, we stuck with the timing of the previous successful attempts, although this time we did add the sugar much later once the flavour of the chocolate had settled down. This was around 22.5 hours into the grind.

• 28 hours total
• Sugar in the last 5.5 hours

Maturing

We added an extra stage into our process this time, and left the untempered chocolate to set and mature for a week before we tempered it and moulded it into bars. The tempering process went much more smoothly, perhaps because of this extra step.

Tasting

These are definitely our best bars yet. We’ve got the flavour of the bean coming through, no bitterness and a good, smooth texture with a nice snap. We’re really happy with how this batch turned out, especially after the previous failures.

Notes

Now that we’ve learnt how to make chocolate successfully and made a batch from start to finish with no issues, we’re ready to get some really good cocoa beans and see what we can do with them. We’re really excited about this!

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