This video is brought to you by my own cookbook. Yes
So I'm currently driving to La Chapelle in Paris,
Which is the Indian district and probably the only place where I could find the missing piece of my puzzle.
It's the only way I can make good chocolate.
In 200 meters you will arrive at your destination.
Hey, guys. Salud! Welcome back to the chocolate series. In the previous episode, I successfully tempered and
casted or molded my own chocolate bar.
The thing is, there's a comment that I've seen quite a lot, and it's "You're not making chocolate Alex. You're just tempering.
Making chocolate would start from cocoa beans." Now to some extent this comment is absolutely NOT absurd.
Unless of course,
you had access to the series structure that I had in mind. Let me explain...
I have been building this series upside down.
The first episodes were in fact about the end of the process,
tempering and molding.
Now in the next episode I would go even further and roast and crush cocoa beans and turn them into nibs.
And of course I can go even further upstream,
fermenting and drying cocoa beans, and then - why not - harvesting cocoa pods?
Someday.
Now, this episode will be about grinding cocoa nibs and turning them into cocoa liqueur - just rough chocolate.
That is usually the input on step 5.
Ah, voila. These are cocoa nibs.
It's those broken pieces of the seeds located inside the cocoa beans that are going to turn into that beautiful, silky smooth chocolate at the end.
Now if the subject of this video might sound a bit simple, even simplistic maybe,
just turning roasted cocoa into a chocolate paste,
but it's not the case. It's way more complicated than what you thought.
The problem really is related to the smoothness of chocolate.
It's gonna be very hard to get rid of those super tiny particles of cocoa nibs.
With a food processor, you stand no chances. With a high speed blender, then you have enough power, but it's too aggressive. Pestle and mortar -
technically could work. The only problem I see is that I'm producing one video a week, not like once a year.
And that leaves us only one tool we could be using to grind those cocoa nibs properly,
a wet grinder.
Well, if you've never heard of a wet grinder before, don't panic.
It's just not that common to be honest, at least in the Western world.
I'm saying Western world because it's quite common in Indian cuisine.
This is called Medu vada, it's a south Indian fritter made from black lentils and the only way you can make this
silky smooth, without any grain inside is to use a wet grinder
Hi, Alex. We love your cooking. Awesome.
Wait. Yeah!
Wheee
I've got my wet grinder. I've also got a little extra Indian sweets. I love those.
Okay, let's head back to the studio.
So on the right you've got a big fat motor
that drives a two-liter stainless steel bowl
and inside you've got three elements made out of stone.
You've got two millstones and a bottom slab. Plus you've got this scraper.
So basically when you turn it on, this starts spinning and the stones inside - they start grinding.
Just need to get my ratios right between the cocoa nibs, cocoa butter, and sugar
because these are the only three ingredients you technically need to make chocolate.
Now instead of just guessing at random the proportions,
I'm just gonna use this chocolate that I really enjoyed as a reference between the nibs and the cocoa butter.
I need to be at 70% cacao.
For 100 gram of chocolate of end product, I need 40 grams of fats, 27 gram of sugar.
Mass sugar, nibs, cocoa butter; 100 grams.
But I also know something else.
Half of the nibs plus cocoa butter; 40. It is based out of something I read online.
50% of the nibs' mass is in fact fat, and from that
we get that the mass of cocoa butter is seven gram and the mass of cocoa nibs is 66 grams.
Well, basically if you don't give an F about these,
just remember that you need 66 grams of cocoa nibs, 7 grams of cocoa butter, and 27 grams of sugar.
To make the job easier for my wet grinder, which is definitely not commercial grade, I'm going to give a quick blitz to those nibs.
wha, the smell is incredible. Super chocolaty smell.
Well, to the taste it's more complicated.
It's slightly bitter, you know - very distant chocolate layer behind it.
So, I'm going to add them to the wet grinder, but just super gradually.
The magic is starting to happen -- slowly starting to happen.
So basically every time I'm adding something to the bowl
I'm waiting for the noises to stabilize, because it goes BL BL BL and then Bl bl bl...
Which basically means that the particles have been incorporated. It's not smooth, but it's getting there.
So I'm about an hour in the process. This is what I got so far
You can definitely feel that grainy texture.
It's starting to taste like chocolate. It's lacking the roundness. It's also a bit astringent.
But it's not bad. [chuckle] Not bad.
Now I need to let that machine work on its own and do its own magic.
It's basically reducing down the size of the cocoa particles which are becoming chocolate.
An interesting fact - the tongue is an amazing sensor, as it can detect particles down to the size of
20 microns. A micron, just for the record, is a millionth of a meter.
So, thb thb thp, ha ha.
This is amazing. From what I've read online, the machine needs at least
12 hours just for the grinding process. Then there's something else.
Right, so it's basically the next day.
I let this machine run overnight. Luckily for me, I don't sleep here.
Neighbors! I'm thinking the grinding process should be over by now.
Neighbors!
..so let's just give it a quick test.
Silence is just beautiful.
anyways...
Ah, the smell is just warm and sweet and powerfully chocolaty.
whaaa. aah.
It's extremely shiny. It's it's... I can see my face in it!
I'm a bit distorted, but I can see my face.
The smell is very pleasant. mmm
A deep chocolate flavor, I can't feel any particles anymore.
It's smooth, but it's not round, if that makes sense.
It still has quite a lot of astringency, and that probably has something to do with the next step in fact,
cause after grinding chocolate, we should be cun-shing it or conching it.
I'm not sure exactly how to say this...
maturing the chocolate, developing the flavors,
rounding, smoothening the chocolate out. So I guess let's just wait another few hours,
but this time, I'm gonna make a sequence like
beautiful B - rolls. (film/television term - supplementary footage)
The oppression is a bit complicated because it weighs a ton because of the big granite slab inside.
mmmm. F
I probably got 750 grams right there.
Now, basically, this could be seen as a base for tempering again and then molding again that chocolate.
This is probably something I'm gonna do, but not right now
since it would take ages and I've got more important things on the stove at the moment.
Nada bosh
The thing I can share with you though is that chocolate has become way smoother over the whole process; first the nibs -
they were a bit acidic and also bitter and astringent. Then of course, by grinding them along with sugar and cocoa butter,
I induced a bit of roundness. I added some sweetness to the whole thing
And then the luxurious experience has come over time while the chocolate was
maturing, and from an astringent, silky liquid,
I got that smooth, but also round and
satisfying
soft
experience
It is a dark chocolate, at the end of the day, so it keeps bit of astringency, but it's nothing overwhelming.
It's just very enjoyable
its pleasant.
[chuckles]
So I guess it still is very cocky, but I'm gonna say it anyway: I now know how to grind and mature chocolate,
which is one step that I wanted to check.
In the next episode. I will start one step ahead.
So we are going upstream, remember, and this time I will start with fermented cocoa beans and should hopefully end with
roasted, broken, cocoa nibs without the husk.
Trust me. It's way more complicated than what you think. Sounds easy...
Well, you know the ending of all this.
Thank you for watching. Take care, bye-bye. Salud!