- [Andrew] This episode is sponsored by Cash App.
When your personal finances connect you
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and that's Cash App.
You know what else is money?
Harnessing the Power of Wind in the kitchen,
getting to have chocolate for breakfast,
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- Could we interest you in some chocolate?
- Chocolate?
Did you say chocolate?
- Yes, sir. With or without nuts.
- Chocolate?
Chocolate?
Chocolate!
- [Andrew] Hey, what's up, guys?
Welcome back to "Binging With Babish,"
where, last week, we hit 10 million subscribers.
So, on Monday, we tried to come up with
the craziest way we could imagine to celebrate,
and I knew immediately we had to take a crack at
chocolate from SpongeBob, and, oh, how do you like that?
There's some chocolate right here.
Hmm, nevermind. Easiest episode ever.
Anyway, thank you guys for subscribing
and I hope you have a great day,
and, obviously, I'm just joking.
Of course, we are gonna make some chocolate
entirely from scratch, which is gonna require
some tools and ingredients
that you can't really get at your local grocery.
So, if you guys will follow me on a quick field trip,
we'll run out and get the stuff that we need
to make our own chocolate,
which might take us a bit farther afield than usual.
(foreboding music)
(singer vocalizing)
- [Incidental 6] Chocolate?
Chocolate?
Chocolate!
(intense music)
- [Andrew] All right, that was dramatic,
but we dragged the fancy camera all the way here,
and, by God, we're gonna use it.
We've got one day in Ecuador,
and we're spending it here at Hacienda Cacao Mango,
a cacao farm nestled in the mountains
about an hour away from the city of Guayaquil.
Our guide Jamil, who's also an owner,
provided us with a tour of the farm
and showed me how cacao is grown and harvested there.
The cacao fruit grows from these little flowers on the trees
and the 0.01% of them that get pollinated
grow to this size in about four months.
The ripeness of the fruit is judged by its color,
which Jamil explained,
and then let me try harvesting one for myself.
- As you can see, there is just purple cacaos,
but we need find a red cacao right now.
- Red.
- So, when the cacao is ripe,
it's ready for collect or harvest.
So, if you see a red cacao, please tell me.
- What about that guy, that one there?
- Great. Nice eye.
You can do it.
You can do it. Arm twists in one direction, okay?
(upbeat music)
- Ooh, he's a twisty one.
He's a twisty one!
- [Jamil] Oh, great.
- All right.
- Hit the pod in this part.
Just not too hard and not too light.
Okay. One, two, three.
Almost ready. Yup, it's done.
Yeah, there we go. - Woo!
- [Jamil] There we go.
- [Staff Member] Pull it. Pull it.
- [Andrew] Oh, man.
- [Jamil] Fresh cacao.
The fresh cacao idea to try is just put it in your mouth.
- [Staff Member] Don't bite it. Don't bite it.
Just put it in your mouth.
- [Jamil] Suck it and don't bite.
- [Staff Member] When you're finished, spit it out.
- Oh, it's delicious.
- [Jamil] It's awesome, yeah?
- Oh, man. It's delicious.
Here. You gotta try this.
Open wide!
Once I got my fill of fresh cacao fruit,
it was time to check out the next stage
in the chocolate making process, fermentation,
which we skipped over,
because Jamil didn't have any fermenting at the time.
Maybe we'll just get some stock footage.
(cameraman chuckles)
I mean, we're gonna go see the fermenters.
After 6 to 10 days, the beans turn a reddish brown,
and then are dried,
after which they're ready to be turned into chocolate.
This is what I'll be using to make modern chocolate at home,
but Jamil wanted to show me
the traditional way that chocolate was prepared.
The fermented beans are roasted in a clay pot
for a few minutes until you hear popcorn sounds,
which is the sound of the husks cracking,
indicating that they're ready to peel.
- [Jamil] The idea in the roasted process is
to try to peel the shell.
(upbeat music)
- [Andrew] With the peels removed,
we then run the beans through a manual grinder
and shape the ground beans lovingly.
(Andrew grunting)
Then we're back on the stove, where we warm some water
to which we're gonna add our 100% cacao, raw sugar cane,
some chili pepper, lemon grass, and clove leaf.
Once everything is brought to a simmer, it's ready to enjoy.
Ah. Perfect.
(group speaking in foreign language)
- [Andrew] But now it's time to head back to New York
and make our bar of chocolate.
So, we thanked our gracious hosts,
and we're on our way with fresh cacao fruit in tow,
only to leave it at the hotel
after realizing we wouldn't make it through customs.
So I'm gonna use these backup beans that I bought online.
They might not be exactly the same,
but for all intents and purposes,
they're right where we left off at the farm.
So we're gonna start by roasting these guys,
spreading them out evenly in a single layer
on two rimmed baking sheets,
roasting in a 250 degree Fahrenheit oven
for 25 to 45 minutes,
shaking and rotating halfway through.
Shorter roasting times will apparently yield
a fruitier chocolate,
and longer roasting times yielding a nuttier chocolate.
So we went for about 30 minutes to strike a good balance
between fruity and nutty.
Let these guys cool completely,
and then it's time to peel in a process known as winnowing.
Now, not all cacao beans are as easy to peel
as the ones we saw out in Ecuador.
The shells were holding on for dear life,
and the beans were a little bit more brittle,
so before I could get the skins off,
they were breaking down into nibs,
which I then had to separate by hand.
So, eventually I turned, as I so often do, to a hammer,
resigning myself to hand sorting through
a kilo of nibs and shells,
which I was determined to do for about five minutes.
Luckily, we came across a technique
that involves making wind in the kitchen,
starting off by a thoroughly smashing up a handful of beans,
making sure that no shells
were sticking to their nib counterparts,
and then slowly, carefully sprinkling them down
in front of a running fan.
Thanks to the husks' lighter weight
and less aerodynamic form factor,
they should get pushed out of the nib stream
as they cascade down into a bowl.
Now, this is obviously not a perfect system.
It makes a dusty, husky mess
of anything that's in front of the fan,
and definitely does not catch all the skins,
requiring at least a dozen passes to get rid of
what looked like about 90% of the husks.
The cool part is that it was surprisingly effective at
not sacrificing nibs,
as the pile accumulating to the left of the fan
contained virtually only husks.
That being said,
some manual removal was definitely necessary,
which Kendall and Nico were very kind to help me with.
Otherwise, it would've taken me much longer
than an hour and a half to sort through this kilo of nibs,
but there you have it, the building blocks of chocolate,
which must now be crushed
into a liquid called chocolate liquor.
No, not chocolate liqueur, which is alcoholic,
while chocolate liquor is
an ultra-smooth paste of cocoa solids and cocoa butter.
Before we break out the heavy stuff,
we're gonna preemptively process the nibs in batches
for about one minute each
until they're just starting to release their fats
and take on a consistency like wet sand.
Rinse and repeat with the remaining nibs,
and then it's time to bust out the concher,
this home appliance version of the traditional process
where two rough stone wheels are kept immobile
in the center of a rotating drum,
the bottom which is made from the same stone.
This has the effect of
both grinding and warming the chocolate,
deepening the flavors and making it impossibly smooth.
We're gonna start by gently warming
the drum of the concher itself,
using a torch on a very low setting and a laser thermometer.
Then we're gonna add the pre-ground nibs
and set this thing to maximum grind,
which is its only setting, just like me.
Oh, wait, no, that didn't work,
both the joke and the concher,
which, due to the still rough texture of the chocolate,
obstinately refused to turn, just like me.
That worked even less.
Now, you're supposed to let this grind
for an hour on its own before adding any cocoa butter,
but we decided to cheat,
hoping that the fat would help get things going, and it did.
Adding the chocolate and cocoa butter in small batches,
the concher finally whirred to life.
Now, for a 65% dark chocolate,
that meant obviously 65% cacao, 750 grams,
5% cocoa butter, 55 grams,
and the rest is sugar, which we'll add
after these guys get to know each other
for about four hours.
Now, I can't recommend what I'm doing
for safety and legal reasons, but we're taping down
the 45-minute maximum timer on this concher
and leaving this device to its own devices for four hours
before adding any sugar.
Now, I had never used one of these things before,
so I was surprised to find that, after the allotted time,
it had rendered our cocoa solids and fats
into an incredibly smooth liquid.
It already looked and tasted like 100% baking chocolate,
but we want to eat this stuff, so we gotta add sugar.
30% of the total weight is
about 350 grams of superfine sugar,
added slowly through the sugar feed hole thing.
Now, the chocolate's texture
might have seemed very nearly done,
but this thing was only getting started,
gearing up to grind for another 20 hours.
Apparently, this not only makes the chocolate super smooth,
but develops its flavor.
The next morning, and it's not quite done yet,
but I wanted to come downstairs and give it a taste,
and, at this point, it is untempered chocolate,
which is kind of magic to see happen
from its original bean state, but how does it taste?
And the answer is, and I might be biased here,
really, really good.
It's rich and deep, and not too sweet,
and pronouncedly fruity.
Later on, I'm all dressed for work,
and the chocolate has passed the 20-hour mark,
and, at this point,
it's clocking about 110 degrees Fahrenheit,
a perfect place to start the tempering process.
Now, we wanna slowly cool it off two ways.
First, by pouring it into a large stainless steel bowl
where we can agitate and aerate it with great vigor,
and this might seem like cheating,
but we need some seed chocolate.
That is, a handful of chocolate that's already been tempered
so that it contains the precious crystals
necessary to make our chocolate set
shiny and snappy at room temperature.
So, after adding 10 to 20% of the chocolate's weight
in seed chocolate,
we're stirring the chocolate constantly and spiritedly,
especially once the chocolate
starts dropping below 94 degrees Fahrenheit,
as this is where crystals begin to grow.
If your seed chocolate isn't fully melted,
you can place it over a pot of simmering water,
but just make sure not to let it exceed 94.
This is pretty long and arduous process,
so it's a good idea every once in a while
to do a temper test,
coating the end of a butter knife or tiny offset spatula
with a thin layer of chocolate every five minutes,
letting it sit at room temperature for another five minutes
to see how your crystals are developing.
You can see the improvement in the temper from left to right
that resulted from nothing more than time and agitation.
At long last, once the chocolate is tempered,
it's finally time to turn it into chocolate bars,
spreading the chocolate evenly
over a polycarbonate chocolate bar mold,
scraping off the excess back into the bowl
to flatten out the top.
Don't worry, we obviously saved all the extra,
and I plan on eating all of it
over the next seven days at most,
and then to coax out any hidden bubbles
underneath the surface of the chocolate,
we're gonna whack it many, many times,
as hard as we can without breaking the mold,
against the tabletop, before stepping aside
and letting the crystals do their thing
for at least two hours.
And, optionally, this is the point
where you can add stuff like salt.
After all, nowadays, you can buy almost any dessert
with extra salt sprinkled on it.
Four hours later, just to be safe,
I'm finally gonna un-mold my bars.
It looks like our temper was effective
and the chocolate bars have set,
so time to turn them out onto a sheet pan and take a look,
and, unfortunately, it looks like a little bit of moisture
got into the mold before we poured in the chocolate,
resulting in a slight bloom on its surface,
but this is easily remedied
by very carefully painting the chocolate with a torch.
If you heat it above 94 degrees, it will go out of temper,
so be very super careful,
and there you have it, chocolate from scratch.
It might not be totally bean to bar,
but it's as close as we could legally get.
All that's left now is some arts and crafts
to make it look like the bars from SpongeBob.
I'm starting with gold foil
wrapped around the chocolate itself,
blue foil around that, red foil stripe on top of that,
yada, yada, yada.
I got to play with a glue stick
for the first time in a while,
and while it might only be
a cartoonish approximation of a cartoon, there you have it.
Chocolate from SpongeBob.
Look, it even matches the reference photo
on Kendall's laptop.
Now I just gotta make the same face.
There it is, and as we all know,
no self-respecting candy bar salesman
would be caught dead without one of these.
What is it? It's a candy bar bag, you knucklehead.
So, when you're carrying your candy bars,
oh, wait a second, hold on.
I forgot about the candy bar bag bag.
In here, we should have, oh.
There we go. There's the good stuff.
Thank you guys so much for helping the BCU
reach 10 million subscribers.
While I got you here, and while we're celebrating,
I'm very excited to announce
the new "Basics With Babish" cookbook
is coming out October 17th,
and pre-orders just went live on Amazon.
I'm really proud of this book.
I've been writing it for the past year and a half,
and it's more than just a cookbook.
It's a celebration of mistakes, how to make them,
how to brush them off, and how to learn from them.
Check out the link in the video description
to pre-order your copy on Amazon today,
and thanks again to Cash App.
That's money. That's Cash App.
Download Cash App from the App Store or Google Play Store
to add your Cashtag to the 80 million and counting.
(lively music)