Our first beans
1st March 2021
For our first chocolate, we ordered some beans from Peru from the internet. There was very little information about them, but they were all we could find that could be bought in small quantities, which seemed ideal for learning with. We soon learned that to make quality chocolate, you need quality ingredients, and unfortunately for us, these beans just weren't very good. On the plus side, we were able to have a go at chocolate making without spending a fortune, and we weren't stuck with an endless supply of poor beans.
There's really not much else to say about these beans, except that they made us really look forward to getting our hands on some better ones!
Made with these beans:
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Batch 7 - Best Batch Yet
For our final batch with these beans, we stuck with the 70% bars with 10% cocoa butter:...
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Batch 6 - Bad Beans
Attempting to replicate the ruined batch 5, we used the same ratios for a 70% batch with 10% added cocoa butter:...
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Batch 5 - A Disaster!
Sticking with 70% dark chocolate with 10% additional cocoa butter so that our batches are comparable, we used:...
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Batch 4 - A Single Stage Roast
As we’re still experimenting with the roasting, we went for another 70% batch with 10% cocoa butter:...
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Batch 3 - A Hotter Roast
Sticking with the 70% with 10% cocoa butter, so that the bars are comparable with the previous batches, we used:...
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Batch 2 - Improvements
We’re sticking with the 70% dark so that this batch is comparable to our first attempt, and sticking with the 10% cocoa butter. This is what we put in batch 2:...
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Batch 1 - Learning to Make Chocolate
We’re making a 70% dark bar for our first attempt, so after roasting and peeling the nibs, we weighed them out and added the remaining ingredients in the required ratio. We opted for adding 10% cocoa butter to make sure the chocolate would be easy to work with....