Transcription
What's up, guys? Today we're going to talk about how to make chocolate at home in four easy steps.
The first thing you have to do is get some cocoa beans or cacao seeds. What you're going to do with these is roast them. You can throw these on a sheet pan in your oven at around 250-260°F for 25 minutes. Then, you have to deshell them; this is called winnowing. You can do this by hand, which is time-consuming, or you can gently break them up and put them in a big bowl with a fan. With the bowl, you move it around like this: the fan is going to blow the shells, which are light, out of your bowl.
Once you have nibs, your third step is to smash them up or refine them. You can buy an affordable small mill or stone grinder from a few different companies like Premier Wonder Grinder or Coco Town. These are a couple hundred dollars, and they will refine your chocolate over the course of a couple of days really well. If you don't want to smash your nibs up and refine them in that way, you can just use a blender. You could even go as far as just taking a rock and literally smashing up the nibs because nibs are roughly half cocoa butter and half cocoa solids, which you can think of as cocoa powder. So, nibs getting smashed are like peanuts turning into peanut butter, and you're creating a paste.
The next step would be to add sugar. That's it! That's how you make chocolate. So go ahead, give it a try, whether it's really well refined in the right machine like a stone grinder or you do it at home with a rock. Have fun, eat it, and enjoy it with your friends. That's how you make chocolate at home in four easy steps!