So far we’ve seen the raw cacao beans and the roasted nibs they become.  To continue in the series of how local chocolate maker, Dan Schreiber, is making his product, we must transform the nibs into what any lay-person would call “chocolate”.

Many commercial chocolate makers will use stainless steel grinders and milling devices.  This certainly produces a uniform, tightly controlled product.  Dan, like other artisanal bean-to-bar operations, is using stone.  Granite and other stones have been used to grind chocolate (among other things) for thousands of years, though it wasn’t until almost 1800 that a machine-powered mill was invented.  Today you can buy a table-top stone grinding machine that will do a very nice job, as you will see.

In reality, Dan is combining a couple processes here.  He’s milling, or grinding, the nibs and sugar together, and he’s also refining and conching his chocolate.  Grinding does a few things.  Obviously, it’s grinding down the nibs into smaller pieces.  This process, due to the friction involved, generates heat which helps to liquefy and emulsify the fat (cocoa butter) that is naturally found in the cacao.  If you just grind cacao beans, you will get what’s referred to in the business as “chocolate liquor.”  According to the great Wikipedia, this contains about 53% cocoa butter (the rest is cocoa solids).

Sugar can be added at this point, to be ground and mixed together with the cacao.  The idea being that you want the individual particles of sugar and cacao to be the same size, evenly distributed, and all coated with cocoa butter.  The grinding and refining take a long time; a day on average.  What you end up with looks, smells, and tastes like chocolate.

Grinding (no flash)

Grinding (flash)

I took these pictures of Dan’s chocolate grinding.  The one on the left is without a flash, and probably better reflects the true color of the dark chocolate inside.  The one on the right was with flash, and shows how shiny the chocolate was with all the melted cocoa butter inside.  I slightly prefer the no-flash version for its softer, more natural look, but you can choose for yourself.  As always, click for a larger version.

Dan’s been experimenting with different grinding times and considering temperature manipulation as well.  You know how I mentioned that it gets hot from all the friction?  That’s great, to a point, but with heat and friction comes conching.  As the chocolate is conched, it becomes more and more uniform, but also less… unique.  Conching is usually necessary to a point, as it drives away undesirable flavors and unwanted astringency.  The heat involved can adjust some of what the chocolate maker did (or didn’t) achieve in the roasting process.The chocolate Dan made this day was the same variety as an earlier batch, but was ground and conched longer.  It lost some of the unique flavors as they were ground and heated away.  It’s yet another sign of how processing food more tends to detract from flavor.  That said, it was still damn good chocolate, just not as unique or as interesting as the earlier batch that was ground less.

Finally, when the chocolate was sufficiently ground/refined/conched, he poured it into a holding vessel in preparation for tempering.  That’s the next stop in our chocolate journey, after we lick our fingers (and wash up again).

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 at 2:13 PM and is filed under chocolate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.