a hotter roast

19th April 2021

Ingredients

Sticking with the 70% with 10% cocoa butter, so that the bars are comparable with the previous batches, we used:

809g cocoa nibs
404g cane sugar
135g cocoa butter

Roasting

Since the longer roast made such a difference to the chocolate with batch 2 compared to batch 1, we wanted to try a hotter roast. We also tried new oven trays with perforations, which allow the heat to move more easily throughout the oven and hopefully create a more even roast.

10 minutes at 182C
7 minutes to bring the temperature down to 140C
7 minutes at 140C for a total of 24 minutes

The perforated roasting trays made a bigger than anticipated difference to how quickly the temperature of the beans went up. Unfortunately this resulted in the beans slightly burning in the initial higher temperature stage. We will try missing this out in future roasts. We cooled the beans with a fan after taking them out of the oven to stop them from continuing to cook.

Refining

We intended to refine for around 22 hours, similar to batches 1 and 2, but we went a bit over because life got in the way.

25 hours

Tasting

Due to the new roasting trays, the beans were slightly burnt during roasting. The burnt flavour did dissipate somewhat during refining, but not enough to disappear from the final bars. They tasted similar to batch 2 but with a slightly charred aftertaste.

Notes

We will miss the initial higher temperature in the next roast.