What would it take me to make a home brewed chocolate ‘bar’. On a lazy Sunday afternoon I took the time to have some fun with roasted beans I had from Pralus, and some standard kitchen tools. Curiosity was at the heart of the experiment: what happens when you go through some steps of making chocolate?
All I had was Madagascar beans, cocoa butter, sugar, a Magimix and a hairdryer. So what follows is just for the fun, don’t take it too serious, yet!
Taking of the shell of roasted beans
From François Pralus, I had some Madagascar beans to show for my tasting events. They were already roasted by the master himself, so all I had left to do was take away the shell off the beans. But gosh, what a job! It’s even worse than pistachio nuts. The big thing here was how best to separate the thin fragile shell from the bean itself.
Breaking them gave me too much waste though for this home experiment. I quickly understood why we invented machines for this, ha! I experimented with a hairdryer to blow out the shell pieces, but with a force to weak. The dust cleaner to suck instead of blow (something I learned from the Mast Brothers’ home equipment), but that was to strong though and sucked almost half of my materials! Then I tried outdoors to blow from underneath myself through a sieve. Luckily neighbors were out to miss this foolish looking scene. Hehe…
