a starting guide to bean to bar
equipment info, sorting, roasting, how to create a % formula for batches, pdfs and videos
You know how, when someone says their appetite was bigger than their stomach, what they’re trying to say is they couldn’t take in as much as they thought they wanted?
What do we call it when our dreams are bigger than our budget? or our workspace? or our know-how? or even, our biggest fears?
We call it making chocolate.
I say this because there’s no perfect setup, no perfect moment, no perfect piece of equipment or origin. Just the here and now.
Getting started: what you’ll need
Getting started is easier than it seems, and also, you won’t know what you don’t know yet (all the stuff pro craft makers fret over, and the good reasons for the fretting), which means getting started is 50% just go for it and 50% saving grace.
The cacao goddess truly is in your corner.
This means, you can literally buy a melanger, buy beans, roast the beans, hand-winnow the beans, scribble out a % recipe, and get started. Don’t worry about “is it any good.” Would you tell a baby hey! you’re not walking so good! No. No you would not.
You’d let them waddle, toddle, tip over, grab the dog’s tail, whatever it takes. Just walk kiddo, walk. This is what you need to do to get started.
(and yes, it will actually be better than “good”).
Here’s what you need to get started. This is not the same as what you need to know for making chocolate, because that begins to fall in place the more batches we make, and the more attention we pay to every teensy thing, and the more willing we are to open ourselves to learning.
a tabletop melanger. These are sometimes called a “grinder” by chocolate makers. It is not a conche. If you just asked yourself what is a conche? it’s both a technique (keeping chocolate warm + in motion with aeration over time to develop flavor without over-refining) and a piece of equipment used for this person. Can a melanger be used to help conche a batch? Yes. Do you need to worry about this weird word right now? Nope.
Do not try to make chocolate with a food processor or nutri-bullet: you could make better, smoother chocolate with a mortar and pestle or with two rocks (I’m not kidding). The goal is to grind the beans into as smooth a paste as we can. The finer (smaller) the particles become, the more liquidy the paste becomes, until eventually it’s not a paste but liquid chocolate. This happens due to friction (the grinding) which creates heat, which in turn releases the inherent cocoa fat inside the beans. The design of a melanger is “how” this grinding works: two stone wheels (sometimes called “stones,” rotate against a spinning stone base: stone on stone grinds and refines, unlike a nutri-bullet or food processor, which chop.
a roaster. Yes, you could buy already-roasted nibs, but roasting is the most important step used by a chocolate maker to bring out the flavor in the origin. If you’re going to buy a melanger you should buy a small roaster at the same time: you will enhance your learning, add to the joy of making chocolate, and, most importantly, begin to develop your cacao sense. Cacao sense is the sum of paying attention, observing, making decisions every step of the way, choosing one origin over another, creating % formulas, knowing and understanding why you know when a batch is finished, and so on. Think of it this way: if you want to become a sourdough baker, is it because you want to dive into the art/science of creating a sourdough starter and then shape, proof, and bake your bread, or are you just looking for something easier like frozen pre-made sourdough loaves?
I recommend a 1kg drum roaster like the Behmor (and no, I do not get a kickback). In a true roaster the drum is what tumbles and lofts the beans so they are roasted evenly (hard to do when football-shaped beans lie flat on a tray, and yes, even when stirring, which lets heat escape); it is the ability to apply heat or slow down the heat when we choose to is that makes it a roaster. If there’s just a dial with a way to set a temperature it’s an oven. A roaster like the Behmor is affordable, small space friendly, and has pre-set profiles that do the heat application for us and once we have a few roasts under our belt can be used manually. Honestly, it’s an amazingly easy piece of equipment to use.
a kitchen scale to weigh the beans and then later, to weigh your sugar etc etc.
a cracker and winnower are two separate things, and once the crafting chocolate bug bites, you’ll want both. Cracking and winnowing can be as low tech as hand-peeling then smashing the beans into nibs. An affordable (fun) option is a Victoria grinder; I like to hand peel first, then run the beans through. If you have a Champion juicer it can also be used to crack beans, but if you don’t have a winnower, you’ll want to hand peel the beans first.
My opinion when you reach the chocolate-bug-has-beaten stage is to skip the teensy hand-fed winnowers, as they are slow and not all that great at winnowing, plus you’ll need a stand-alone cracker to go with one anyway; opt (budget) for a pro-sized winnower. The ONLY way to make more bars is to roast and winnow more beans. At least if roasting 1kg at a time there’s an option to buy a 2nd Behmor, roast 2 x 1kg batches at a time, then have plenty to winnow. But I am putting the cart way ahead of the horse). But back to the cracker: this breaks the roasted beans (well-roasted beans help the shells come off easily) into nibs. The winnower separates the shell (husks) from the nibs. It’s critical to remove as many husks as possible as (1) husks do not add flavor and (2) husks compromise texture.
An aside: overwhelmed yet? please don’t be! Yes, it requires specific equipment you probably don’t already have to make chocolate. However, used equipment is available, and most small batch equipment is affordable.
chocolate bar moulds. It is fine to buy simple, not-so-expensive ones for your first batches of bars. Know that geometric patterns serve to help release the chocolate from the mould as it sets and cools and retracts. Flat, plain moulds have a tighter (slower) release, as do moulds designed to create thicker bars.
a way to temper, which is not to say a machine. Hand-tempering and seed tempering are options and I will say I do not and will never teach hand tempering, because once I began seed tempering in 2015 I’ve never ever looked back. As one student called it, seed tempering is game and life changing. To seed temper you’ll need a sous vide to make the seed or, if your budget is plump, an EzTemper.
beans and cocoa butter and sugar are the basic ingredients. You can make a two-ingredient dark bar (no added cocoa butter at the refining stage) or a three-ingredients dark bar (small amount of cocoa butter, usually 5% or less, at the refining stage). Buy or source at least 2.5 kgs of beans to start because you need 1 kg per roast batch, and there will be some bean loss to sorting (taking out mis-shapen beans) and weight (moisture and shells) loss due to roasting and winnowing.
a pen and paper or calculator for some basic math. If you want to make a batch of 70% dark chocolate (70 = the % of cacao in relation to all other ingredients, in a two-ingredient batch this will mean the remaining 30% = the sugar). The %s always add up to 100%; 100% is not the same as your ingredient weights. To figure out how the weights are the correct % proportions you’ll need to:
weigh the nibs,
divide the weight by .70,
then take the number you get and multiply it x .30, which = the weight of sugar you’ll use.
If you want to use added cocoa butter (let’s say, 5%)
weigh the nibs,
divide the weight by .65
take the number you get and multiply it by .5, which = the weight of cocoa butter you’ll use,
then take that same number you used to multiply the .5 and multiply .30, which = the weight of sugar you’ll use.
Getting started: what you’ll do
1. Gather your equipment and tools (this page also has a guide to tempering)
2. Order beans. When they arrive, sort the beans
3. After sorting, weigh out and roast 1kg beans in your Behmor.
Here’s a short intro tutorial on roasting.
4. After the beans are cool, hand-peel and break into nibs, or if you have a cracker and winnower, use those.
5. Next, it’s time to batchcraft. This video shows the basic steps.
After the batch is finished, if you want to make bars you’ll need to temper the chocolate. There are insights on tempering here and in under the Basics tab there’s a guide for making seed to use for tempering with seed.
Now, what about alllllll the other insights? Yep, there’s a lot of joy in making our own chocolate, and in finding our chocolate path, and a lot to learn and take in.
You can find everything I’ve ever learned and every method, technique, and best practices (and the ones I don’t recommend :) in the Bean to Bar ChocolateCraft Workshop.
Happy chocolate making,
Mackenzie