The fat elf brought my wife a chocolate melanger for Christmas. “Melanger” is surrender-monkey speak for “refiner”. I freely admit that I am enabling my wife’s borderline pathological obsession1 with chocolate. By importing a melanger into the household, her tasting hobby can turn into a making hobby.
If you paid any attention to my previous Chocolate Snobbery posts, you will recall that the steps of making chocolate are more or less:
- Harvest and process the raw beans2
- Roast the beans
- Crack the beans into nibs, and winnow
- Refine the nibs into chocolate
- Optionally conch the chocolate
- Temper and mold the chocolate
Since we live about 1500 miles too far north to grow cacao trees, we have to depend on others to provide the raw beans. Happily, thanks to the global market, it’s not hard these days to get raw beans in hobby quantities. One can find a variety of beans in a unit size of kilograms, rather than burlap sacks.
Roasting, cracking and winnowing are steps that a hobbyist can perform with some degree of success using items likely already on hand, or that can be fabricated with a few trips to Lowes, etc. The trickiest of these three is roasting, since there are a raft of variables and the correct roast is key to bringing out the flavor of the beans. However, a careful person can do a passable job with a kitchen oven, time and patience3.
What you cannot homebrew with some PVC pipe and a battery drill is an effective refining machine. Refining chocolate requires grinding the nibs (the size of a black peppercorn) down to around 20 microns4, and this takes a purpose built machine, and a lot of time. The melanger we have is from Diamond Custom Machines. It’s a countertop model, actually manufactured by Premier, but imported and upgraded by DCM5. DCM also manufactures their own melangers (and cracker/winnowers) but those are light commercial units outside of a hobby budget.
The melanger consists of a pot with a granite bottom, and two granite wheels mounted on a frame. The frame goes in the pot, the pot turns, and the wheels spin. There is a tension spring and nut that controls the downward pressure on the wheels. What you don’t see is any sort of heating element. Refining the chocolate requires heat to melt the cocoa butter, but good old friction makes all the heat that is necessary.
With melanger in hand, we totally cheated and purchased roasted nibs in the form of kits from Chocolate Alchemy. We actually have some raw beans, and we could roast, etc. to make our own nibs, but as mentioned above roasting is hard6. Someday we’ll try it, but for now we’re buying nibs from someone that has made a lot of chocolate.
Chocolate Alchemist sells kits containing everything you need to make about two pounds of chocolate. We’ve made two batches from kits7, and for this third batch we’ve graduated past the kits, and bought separate ingredients to make about eight pounds of a 70% chocolate: five pounds of Mexican nibs, two thirds of a pound of cocoa butter, and about two and a half pounds of sugar. Recall that the percentage includes cocoa mass and cocoa butter.
To get everything kind of lubricated at the start, the cocoa butter is melted, and poured into the melanger. The nibs are lightly warmed, to ~150 F, and added gradually. Warming helps the cocoa butter in the nibs to start to melt. Once all the nibs are in, the sugar, also warmed, is added gradually. Once everything is in the pot, the melanger runs for at least 24 hours, with an occasional scrape down of the pot to make sure no unrefined nibs are stuck to the sides.
There is a lot of vinegar (or something like it) in nibs, as a result of the bean fermentation process. Right away during refining, that vinegar starts to cook off. Remember your high school chemistry, and don’t stick your nose down into the pot. After a few hours, it smells less like vinegar, and you can start to get a sense of the actual flavor from the nibs. You can see and taste the change in texture, as the nibs get ground finer and finer. Once the graininess is gone, you can stop, or you can let it run a while in a process called conching, where you aren’t grinding, but just circulating the hot chocolate. This process does affect final flavor, but it’s like roasting, it’s an art to decide whether and how much.
The last step is tempering and molding. If you watch any cooking shows, you’ve seen people tempering chocolate, and it is universally agreed that it is a fiddly process, but until our first batch, I didn’t realize how critical proper tempering is to what we think of as chocolate. Cocoa butter can crystalize into six structures, and only one of them8 results in the crisp snap and smooth texture that we expect. Our first batch, badly tempered, came out soft and grainy, just unappealing. After a lot of frustration, we cheated again, and purchased some Cocoa Butter Silk from Chocolate Alchemy, which is a tempered cocoa butter. The Silk is grated and mixed it into the chocolate, and it seeds the proper crystal structure and promotes growth of the proper structure in the whole batch. You still need to be careful with temperature, but the Silk made tempering a lot easier.
The untempered tub o’ chocolate will eventually be melted and molded, after we work through these bars.
Late breaking update: Tonight my wife says “We’re down to just two bars!” While some of them have left the house as giifts… we eat a lot of chocolate. Time to mold some more.
1I don’t think she’d object to this characterization.
2Harvest the pods; separate the beans from the pulp; ferment the beans; dry the beans.
3We failed on patience, read on.
4Unless you’re one of those “heritage” chocolate nutters that intentionally leaves the chocolate a little grainy, because that’s how the “Central American natives used to make it.”
5I honestly have no idea what parts were upgraded.
6Says Malibu Stacy.
7Two double batches, actually. The minimum batch size for our melanger is four pounds.
8The fifth structure, if you care. Leeloo Dallas Multipass.
You have a Melanger but make no Dune jokes?
Shame
They also made it as a beverage – with zero sweeteners, and added chili.
You don’t want original chocolate, you want modern chocolate.
My wife makes tsokolate from tablea. I sometimes drink it unsweatened.
I think I, too, would prefer it without sweat. 😝
TeDS’ latest competition
I have better taste in music.
Hateful™.
You don’t want original chocolate, you want modern chocolate.
You are correct, sir. The “stone ground” chocolates I have tried did not appeal.
And I am baffled by the popular notion that chiles need to be added to every damn thing, and I certainly don’t need heat in my chocolate. My wife has, I think, made me even snobbier than she is: just give me a single origin chocolate, and let the beans speak for themselves. I don’t need a bunch of inclusions hiding your shitty beans or poor processing.
Chilies don’t need to be added to anything.
I ordered a mango smoothie at baskin Robbins last month. Damn thing was hot and spicy. What kind of monster would do that to a frosty mango treat?!
I’ve had some chocolate chili dishes that work. I’ve had some that don’t. I think not throwing chilis randomly at chocolate is key, which probably sounds obvious but apparently isn’t to some folks.
Chocolate and chilies works for mole.
Should I make the joke about the subterranian animals or the joke aboue Moe Lay?
Upon occasion, I’ll add unsweetened chocolate to a batch of chili. Or mole sauce, whichever I have on hand. But that’s it.
To make it more like Cincinnati style? 😋👍
I think I need to send you my address.
Seconded
Send email to thecow at my_screen_name dot com. Although I won’t try to ship anything until the weather gets back down to non-chocolate-melting temperatures.
I swear a third of the chocolate my wife buys leaves the house as gifts. She took one bar each for the adult women in the family gathering I mentioned below.
Done
Can’t remember whether you (or I or anyone else) linked to this authoritative work in your previous post(s) on the subject.
Tasty.
no new hobbies
no new hobbies
no new hobbies
no new hobbies
make booze
buy chocolate
make chocolate booze?
been there
done that
Turn chocolate liquor into chocolate liqueur.
Creme de cacao for the win! (Drink recipes, please, Mr. Ilium?)
Ditto.
The wife and I just got back from a long weekend visiting family in Northern Michigan. We hit three chocolate places along the way, Harvest in Tecumseh MI, Grocer’s Daughter in Empire MI and Great Lakes in Traverse City, MI. We walked into the shop in Traverse City and the vinegar smell hit us right away, the wife and I looked at each other: “they just started a new batch.”
So, when are you building the greenhouses to grow your own cacao trees?
And don’t give me that “too far north” nonsense. with artificial heat and lighting you can make any climate you want.
I read a piece by someone who did that with coffee.
Bottom line, their cup of coffee after several years was lackluster.
Of course it was, because it’s a terrible idea.
I mean, drinking burnt bean squeezings?
A cacao greenhouse is in “hit the lotto” territory, and even then, I don’t know if I’d try it. That seems like a project with a really long payoff.
I mean, drinking burnt bean squeezings?
I didn’t mention the roaster I bought… I tried waiting out the wife, until she broke down and bought a cacao roaster I could use for coffee. Sadly, I broke first and bought a coffee roaster she can use for cacao.
To my unsophisticated but dark chocolate-loving palate, 80% is the ideal “strength.” Do you have plans to make some with a higher percentage?
In my drawer here at work, I have 80%, 82%, 85%, and 88% bars.
And many, many thanks to Grummun for pointing me to Chocosphere. My latest money-sink destination.
How will you save enough to retire?
There is a reason that I am still working.
I wouldn’t mind making an 80 or 85, I like it dark and bitter. Like my heart. But I’m not in charge, this is her hobby, I’m along for the ride. Maybe I’ll try weasel her into making a small batch of high test.
It’s a start
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-drug-users-gun-law-us-v-hemani/
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of a Texas man who challenged a federal law that bars certain drug users from having firearms.
In a unanimous decision in the case U.S. v. Hemani, the justices found that Ali Hemani’s prosecution for having a firearm while he was an unlawful drug user is inconsistent with the Second Amendment. Hemani allegedly was only an occasional user of marijuana when the FBI found a handgun at his Texas home in 2022.
The ruling from the Supreme Court is narrow, since the justices did not strike down the law at the center of the case in its entirety. Instead, the high court said the government cannot automatically disarm a person who uses marijuana a few times a week. Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the majority opinion for the court.
Where is my surprised face.
It may be narrow, but it says that occasional users of MJ can’t be barred from possessing guns.
I see that as a big deal.
But, we’ll wait to see what Washington Gun Law has to say later today.
First they came for the occasional MJ users’ guns but I didn’t say anything…
I can hear the unhinged shrieking from the boomerfudds from here…
I’m working a writeup on “positive things I learned from the asshole formerly known as Ken White,” and this plays right into it.
I don’t know if it’s a positive thing, but, “Kill your heros,” is certainly a useful thing to learn.
I once made the mistake of doing that in the middle of a book with a first person narrator.
I had to re-write the fight scene so I could finish the book.
Joe Gillis is found dead at the beginning of Sunset Blvd. yet narrates the whole movie.
Now do quality of life features and standard capacity magazine bans.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-backs-marijuana-users-challenge-restriction-gun-ownershi-rcna266931
In future cases, prosecutors would need to show more than just drug use alone and instead provide evidence that the defendant is a danger to the public as a result of consuming such illegal substances, said William Sack, a lawyer at the Second Amendment Foundation, a gun rights group.
The ruling doesn’t change the basics — the process is the punishment.
Thanks, Grummun
That’s a lot of work but the product looks great. Chocolate is always enjoyable.
OTOH, I’m going to let the bees do the work and hijack them in the fall.
wink, wink, nudge, nudge
What’s the shelf life of chocolate? And what’s the difference in shelf life between commercial and hobby choc?
I mostly ask because the path of least resistance socially has been to accept the gifts. I still have holiday chocolate sitting around the house. I’m unsure of when they are trash bait.
My understanding is that chocolate has a pretty long shelf life, if stored correctly. Temps 65-70 F, low humidity. If it gets too warm, you’ll see a white film, called “bloom” on the surface. It’s not hazardous, but it tells you that the temper has been degraded. Some makers actually “age” their bars, the thinking is this somehow improves flavor. It seems to me that this supposes there are chemical processes happening in the molded chocolate. The obvious process would be oxidation, which doesn’t seem like a benefit, but what do I know, I never took OChem.
if I recall correctly, bloom is just cocoa butter separating.
I’ll just chime in. Chocolate remains good far longer than the dates on the package. That’s true for a lot of products. Tylenol from the 70’s has been found to still work. People online eat MRE’s from WW2 and are fine.
A lot of those dates are just about phasing out old product and make retailers replenish. It keeps things moving.
My last austere medicine course when over this with drugs. Most (medicine, not recreational) drugs will last way, way beyond their expiration dates. So don’t throw out those unused prescription drugs.
Two notable exceptions – aspirin, and amphetamines. So when planning your survival cache, go with opiates and cocaine.
My 50 year old reloads punch holes in critters, assuming I’ve did my part.
Glibertarians.com doesn’t even have a chocolate ration. What kind of proper webzine/forum doesn’t have a chocolate ration?
all of them?
People like you don’t even deserve a chocolate ration, but I’m benevolent and will fight for you to have it anyway.
No rationing here. Buy as much as you want.
darn smokehouse closes at 5pm. I can’t make it after work today. Guess it’s tomorrow morning.
Oscar’s?
yes.
Immediately after work I have to head the wrong direction for a haircut, then route 87 will be clogged with rush hour traffic, meaning by the time I get up to warrensburg, they’ll be closed.
Do they still have the vending machine outside?
I don’t recall a vending machine, but I also wasn’t looking last time I was there, so I’m not sure.
Leeches hunger
What’s more likely to eat into potential tax revenue is employees choosing not to sell at all but rather to take loans instead, said Will Gornall, associate professor of finance at the University of British Columbia.
By taking a loan against their shares instead of selling them, shareholders save money by paying interest rather than capital gains taxes. This so-called “buy, borrow, die” strategy is employed by SpaceX founder and world’s first trillionaire Elon Musk, who has taken out loans against billions of dollars’ worth of Tesla shares. This strategy also has the benefit of allowing employees to stay invested and benefit from future stock appreciation.
While financial maneuvers to avoid taxes have grown more sophisticated, so, too, have the auditing methods of the California Franchise Tax Board, according to Robert Willens, longtime tax and accounting analyst, who added the agency is notoriously aggressive.
Oh, no. California might not get giant tax windfall from Spacex they expected.
Of course, IPOs are one-time revenue boosts, and there’s a potential downside to lobbing hefty bills. Ewens told CNBC that he worries a big tax burden may drive these newly wealthy and often entrepreneurial employees away from the state.
“That’s not a point that California should lower its taxes now, but I think it has to keep in mind that taxes have longer-term consequences for people’s entrepreneurial decision-making, and that’s a big wealth driver in the state,” he said.
It’s your civic duty to earn the greatest amount of taxable income possible.
😠😡🤬
Damn “Game Key Card”. I ordered physical to have physical. These things are the worst of both worlds – the inconvenience of having to find the cartridge, and the inconvenience of having to download and use up internal storage.
These things should have mile-high warning labels on the store page that they’re this form of trash. if I’d known, I’d have bought digital, same hassle, but I don’t have to fumble with carts.
Episcopal Church puts multimillion-dollar New York headquarters on the market
And why might that be happening? Maybe go to this paragraph randomly inserted at the bottom of the article.
Baking chocolate chips straight out of the bag is good enough for me.