Comments on: From beans to bars

From beans to bars

rmd1023 — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:26:42 -0800

Steve Gisselbrecht writes about his experiments taking chocolate from beans to bars at home.

One of the main barriers for the home chocolatier is the lack of home conching machines. Steve also has a write-up on tempering chocolate, which is the step after conching. This is really going from raw beans to full-on prepared chocolate, not like the claims of this company discussed previously on the blue. As a bit of trivia, his husband was mentioned on the blue previously

By: autodidact

autodidact — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:35:30 -0800

Think the article has been Mefi'd or worse.

By: anthill

anthill — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:45:14 -0800

This had better involve plates of beans.

By: puke & cry

puke & cry — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:45:27 -0800

the coral cache still works

By: clavicle

clavicle — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:52:53 -0800

Related: I totally wanted to fpp this guy, who is 22 and has his own tiny little chocolate factory furnished entirely with equipment he built himself. The story's amazing and it's seriously damn good chocolate.

By: autodidact

autodidact — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:59:28 -0800

Great article Clavicle.

By: rivenwanderer

rivenwanderer — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:01:01 -0800

These guys have a tiny factory that I took a tour of a few months ago. The machines and the processes and everything are really cool. They don't conch their chocolate because they're going for the cacao flavor (if you've ever had cocoa nibs, their chocolate is very much in that vein). It's really yummy, but also very different from stereotypical chocolatier-shop chocolate, which I'm guessing is what conching helps work towards.

By: dirtynumbangelboy

dirtynumbangelboy — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:23:04 -0800

Well someone has overthought.. oh, fuck. Dammit!

By: rmd1023

rmd1023 — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:07:29 -0800

Clavicle: neat article.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:16:35 -0800

What an amazing article!

By: clockwork

clockwork — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:03:17 -0800

Steve's husband Tom is a neat guy, too.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:05:23 -0800

Chocolate is probably the most awesome thing in the world but I often forget what an industrial product it is. It's odd how chocolate is associated with countries like Switzerland and Belgium which are thousands of miles from where cocoa actually grows but were the first places to put industrial-grade machinery to work to make new foods.

By: shelleycat

shelleycat — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:08:06 -0800

Man, am seriously hanging out for chocolate now.

By: desuetude

desuetude — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:35:14 -0800

Clavicle, you totally should've. And the hot choc they make from his chocolate at Kopplin's is...well, i'd call it transcendent hot chocolate, but it's really a whole 'nother beverage.

By: Dr. Curare

Dr. Curare — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:12:50 -0800

There is (or was, no idea what happened during the 'civil unrest' there) a little hotel near the bus station in Oaxaca. The ground floor is a chocolate shop. Not a touristy thing but a place where mothers stop to get some chocolate on the way home from the market. They get the green beans, and process them all the way to the final product. The formulas are posted on the blackboard, and you can custom order. The typical is like 90% cacao, 10% sugar and traces of almond oil, for the traditional hard chocolate that you dissolve in boiling milk. I once stayed in the hotel, and my clothes smelled of chocolate for a week. On that trip, I also learned, after putting a 2 kilo bag of freshly mixed chocolate in my pack, that the reaction is fairly exothermic. Chocolate as a status symbol is fairly new in the US, I believe. Imagine this kind of setup in some place like San Francisco, done in an earth friendly style, with some literature printed in post consumer paper reminding you that this is fair trade, mixed crop cocoa beans you are buying, produced by hand by the last surviving descendants of the Mayan. It would be like printing money. Just hoping these stock options amount to something better than toilet paper.

By: Mr. Anthropomorphism

Mr. Anthropomorphism — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:32:30 -0800

Questions? Comments? Yeah. HOW DOES IT TASTE!?

By: femmme

femmme — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:34:16 -0800

check this out this is the bestest ever! chocolate science!

By: BrotherCaine

BrotherCaine — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:57:24 -0800

Oh man, I love cocoa nibs. I keep buying Scharffen-Berger's, but what I dont understand is why it seems to cost more by weight than chocolate that's been further processed.