I’ve tried chocolate from many, many makers since the start of my craft chocolate career. Chocolate made by makers of every size and experience level, in teensy no-elbow room chocolate kitchens up to the biggest well-funded craf(t)actories. Chocolate made by award-winners, non-award winners, and makers who never enter competitions, from around the world, at every price level, from respected makers and new makers.
Some of it blew my mind. Some made me stop and pause as I experienced it and try to discern what and why. Some fell short of my giddy anticipation. Some I would happily buy again, others not so much. All of this is to be expected.
Here is what I’ve learned from this ongoing experience:
inconsistency is common.
We might think, given the consistency of similarities shared by craft makers—the same origins crafted on basically all the same equipment in batches formulated very often at the same %, that it would mostly taste the same. A few years ago I wondered what you may have wondered: why does my (insert commonly used origin here) taste different from (insert some other maker’s name here)? By inconsistency, here’s what I’ve experienced.
Unpleasant texture
I list it first because the texture we sense sets the stage for everything that follows.
This includes chalky, dusty, sandy, gritty, random nibs or things that go crunch (when it’s not an inclusion bar with nibs), fudgey, sticky, crumbly-brittle, and untempered bars or bars that have lost temper due to storage/shipping/mishandling.
FYI, texture issues are due to the approach in the batchcrafting phase (once the nibs land in the melanger/refiner until the batch is deemed “done” and poured/strained.) It could be time length, ambient and/or batch temperature, tension (intensity of grind), under-powered grind, timeframe of adding sugar.
Texture issues can also be the result of poor tempering + moulding efforts.
Texture issues can be result of type of sugar used (there’s info on amorphous vs crystalline sugar in chocolate making in The Science of Chocolate by Stephen Beckett.
Unpleasant flavor/aroma
The obvious issues are funky (not talking about intentional umami), cheesy, smoked ham, metallic, chemical, burnt toast, medicinal, mushroom, compost.
Flavor that’s actually not flavor but sensation: astringent, green-banana, acidic/chemical, which shares borders with grassy, green, and juicy to the point of jaw-cringing.
Some sources of inconsistency NOT in our control
Cacao quality can change radically from post-harvest production to the pre-ship sample provided to an importer, to what lands in the hands of the chocolate maker. Something to consider is that cacao is “alive,” meaning, it’s not enert like a rock. I could easily wander off on that tangent, but another day. My point is, shifts in flavor continue throughout its life, from bagging to storage to loading into the shipping containers, to where/how it’s stored in country and on down the line. Some of these (how we store our beans) is in our control, but everything until our decisions about this stage is not.
The age (freshness) of cacao, especially if ordering from middle-men brokers, is not always transparently communicated: if Mr. Cacao Seller has bags in country left from previous harvests, those beans will be used to fill orders. The disadvantage is on small makers: bigger craft makers source bigger amounts, work directly with cacao producers, go through bean orders faster, and are often batching from more recent (fresher) harvests than small makers.
if you live and craft at origin, I am enthralled with how wonderful your access to cacao and all that means, must truly be.
When it comes to big orders (by big, full pallet/multiple pallets) “which beans go to who” is a question only the folks on the production-shipping-fulfilling-contract negotiating end can answer. Not in our control.
What is in our control is how we approach chocolate making, of course.
Bean to bar is a nesting doll of multiple variables, each variable opening to yet another increasingly important step or some key decision we need to make. In nesting dolls the smallest, innermost doll is the “seed” and represents the soul. Craft chocolate is, if anything, layer building upon layers of process and insights, so much so that it’s easy—at the start or when things get crazy busy—to want to grab onto what feels like the most straightforward A to B to Chocolate approach. Meaning: don’t look inside or too closely.
But that means not getting to the soul of it all.
Chocolate making isn’t hard. And, it’s not the insights or nuanced techniques and tweaks that are hard. Making the commitment to crafting our best chocolate is where the hard work comes in because it means peeling back layers, and then what?
As makers begin to “sell more” the obvious scramble becomes “make more.” Some makers scale equipment, and enter a phase of new equipment learning curve inconsistency. Some makers scale staff and enter a training on the fly inconsistency. For small makers who remain small but attempt to make more, the hamster wheel can become an ongoing cause of inconsistency.
Test batching can easily be set aside for production needs. This is EXACTLY where roasting enters the picture and process, and where, I think, most of craft’s inconsistencies arise, because test roasting and batching is where we start to learn “what’s in a bean.”
For once :) I’m not writing about cacao roasting’s great divide (roasting vs baking), or the biggest pain point of craft chocolate—the reality that to date there is no cacao roasting machine available that roasts with the precision, data collection + management, drum + heat flow configuration and oversight of a coffee roaster designed and manufactured specifically for chocolate making. Our options: coffee roasters that are not just $$$ but over-engineered for cacao’s needs (we don’t require after burners and venting systems, for example), or chocolate industry “roasters” that are nothing more than a quickmart hotdog oven fitted with a rotisserie basket.
Here is something I learned recently from one of specialty coffee’s most respected roasting professionals, Rob Hoos (I’ve paraphrased his comment).
Convection-dominant machines that recirculate air make inner bean development easier than classic-drum roasters. When inner bean development is easier to achieve, it is safer to roast light with less risk of underdeveloped flavors.
I’m not changing my stance on drum roasters vs ovens! Anything but. When I read this though I nearly had a panic attack. Did he really just say
it is safer to roast light with less risk of underdeveloped flavors
I read on. He followed with this, and it started to come together
we learned the hard way on our first roast day that our roastery’s ambient temperature was not stable enough to roast on our preferred knife’s edge of Nordic/maximum juiciness without flirting with underdeveloped flavors
Roasting review: Ambient temperature is “where” we’re roasting. If our roasting space is super warm, our roasts progress faster, which means we might have to try to slow down the rate of rise or back off the heat. If our space is cold—and if our beans are cold—the roasts progress slower, it’s possibly harder to reach the rate of rise and end temp we want. Each subsequent roast CHANGES the ambient temp. As does humidity. Small 1kg loads of beans respond differently to ambient temp than 15kg loads. Double-walled drums provide insulation vs that wonky Behmor basket.
Underdeveloped flavors = missing the sweet spot or target flavors. If, say, Tanzania Kokoa Kamili can offer fresh raspberry notes, but our bar tastes like unripe raspberry, we missed the mark.
Cacao roasting lore (and frankly, I’m not sure where/who this lore comes from, but I’ve had so many questions about it over the years I take this lore as a given; not to say I agree, because I do not) is that cacao should (must, is always, no other choice) be roasted “long and low.” This, I think, is why many bars don’t fully express the “best” of an origin, falling short of the subtleties that make bars memorable, and landing into the Meh zone.
Personally, I find ho-hum meh just as disappointing as obvious flavor defects, if not more troubling.
The flipside is that long and low in a drum roaster means long drawn out temperatures that dry the beans, leading to over-roasted/burnt toast aroma/flavor. Not good. We fear-roast, evidently, worried about over-roasting and then create over-roasted notes or under-developed flavors.
The inconsistencies are arising from fear.
If you’ve taken one of my roasting workshops you’re familiar with the question I posed to a chemistry professor who’s known in the specialty coffee industry as the Doc of Coffee: What is happening to the volatile compounds inside cacao and exactly when during the roast? His answer was, in short, that we don’t know.
We can guess, we can target, and most importantly, we can roast our way to discovering that sweet spot of an origin; you know, the one where a single bite makes us swoon and want to enter the Good Foods Awards. But we must roast over and over, which of course means making batches out of those test roasts to know yes/no/meh. In the small batch maker’s life this is time-consuming, and as I mentioned earlier, can be ditched when the hamster wheel starts whirling.
What if looking inside to see just how many more layers exist was the key to, not just consistency, but improving our productivity? Once we begin to get a hand on unlocking an origin’s potential the next and the next and the next origin (and all those next batches) will be less of a mystery.
On a practical note, and what I hope will be the next new wave of small batch nano micro limited chocolate offerings: yes, you can (and should) sell all those test batches.
They have value. They represent YOUR dedication to craft. They don’t have to be wrapped in the fancy wrappers. They just need to be as intentionally offered as all our other bars.
»Sell them as a taste and compare set: one origin, test-roasted and batched in however many ways you chose. Include a description of your process, what you learned. State your thought: happy with results? work to be done? Ask for feedback. Make them affordable and gain new fans.
»Blend and sell as a test batch blend bar. Again, I find customers crave insight into “what makes craft different” so include info and details. Make it a subscription: every so many months a whole new blend, rare and nano and not available ever again.
Happy making,
Mackenzie