How to make chocolate? page

[NicoleP]

I recently picked up a chocolate bar that was spicy with chili and cinnamon. It was very good, but was not dark enough and not hot enough for me. It costs way too much at $6.50 a bar. Is there a way I can make my own from caco nibs that I already have or with some sort of good quality bakers chocolate? I also want to make one with bacon in it. Please help!

Do I just melt down the bar or nibs and add some sort of cream with all the spices I want? What would I use to sweeten it just a tad?

[Isis]

I made chocolate last night! but you might need cocoa butter?

this is the recipe from another forum (fructose free dedicated) that I had followed and turned out good! I used coconut oil, cocoa butter, coconut powder, vanilla essence, some milk and xylitol instead of dextrose. You can leave out the soya lecithin, tastes gross anyway. I then add roasted almonds or sprinkle desiccated coconut on top.

The Sweet Poison Forum :: Chocolate Version 2

[PatrickF]

Chocolate essentially is cocoa powder in cocoa butter. The easiest way to make your own flavored chocolate is to melt down a chocolate bar and add your flavors. You can't add anything containing water or it will turn into ganache instead of solid chocolate. And you probably want to use some way of tempering the chocolate to make sure it is crunchy and shiny when solid.

Spices are easy, just throw them in. Herbs, bacon or anything else with water in it should either be dried or used to infuse some fat (cocoa or coconut seems best) that then is added to the chocolate.

[randallfloyd]

Can you make your own cocoa butter??

I've made coconut butter by blending dried coconut for long enough. I'll try making a bar with that but would like to make cocoa butter too.

[PatrickF]

Can you make your own cocoa butter??

Well, you need to remove the cocoa solids from the ground cocoa beans to make cocoa butter. That's somewhat complicated compared to just blending stuff.

[Dr. Bork Bork]

cacao butter, sweetener, and cacao (ether chocolate powder, or finely ground nibs)

raw, handmade chocolate ROCKS!

I'm also a chocolatier for Dove if you ever get utterly frustrated and give up, I can get you hooked up, lol
http://www.dovechocolatediscoveries....productcatalog

[liss]

While chocolate is my life, every effort I've made to make it has failed. I even purchased a small tempering machine from ChocoVision and special water-free flavouring oils in an attempt to make very dark mint chocolate. Fail after fail. I always ended up with nice-tasting but pathetically crumbly bloomed chunks.

In order to achieve the gloss and clean snap of a typical chocolate bar you have to take the cacao butter through a series of specific temperatures so the chocolate ends up with a single, specific type of cocao butter crystal. Simply melting the chocolate, adding ingredients and letting it solidify yields random configurations of butter crystals--and the bloomed chunky mass I always end up with.

Of course it still tastes yummy, so if you don't mind the subpar texture it's still lovely healthful food.

And you could also embrace a love for a rougher version of chocolate as the wise founder of Chocvivo did. Her untempered bars are amazing. For that, simply grind away at nibs or crushed beans until you get the paste texture you desire then let it solidify. I believe there's a demonstration on Youtube from one of the Scharffen Berger folks. Okay, yes, that video is here.

There's a good explanation of making tempered bar chocolate from Tcho here.

If anyone here has actually achieved tempered chocolate with a little tempering machine, please share how you did it!

[PatrickF]

I have tempered chocolate with my thermometer and microwave oven a few times, it takes quite a bit of time but thus far always worked fine. I used that method: Chocolate Tempering: How To Temper Chocolate | David Lebovitz

[NicoleP]

Thanks for all the replys. I'm still not sure how to do this, but I think I will melt a good dark chocolate bar down and add the things I want to start with. Seems like a complicated thing to make chocolate.

[inquisitiveone]

If anyone here has actually achieved tempered chocolate with a little tempering machine, please share how you did it!

I have, repeatedly. But I knew how to temper chocolate by hand before getting the machine, so that helped. One thing that's essential to understanding tempering chocolate is that chocolate is quite a variable substance. Differences in beans and processing can mean that two brands of, say, 70% cocoa chocolate will temper at different temperatures.

So, I never relied on the machine to do the thinking for me. I was taught that the first step is to heat the chocolate to 115° F and hold it there for three minutes. Then it gets cooled, quickly, to 92°F. Once it's cooled to that temperature, that's when the agitation is vital; it's what sets up the beta crystal structure that gives tempered chocolate its sheen and crisp snap. I stirred the chocolate occasionally with a spatula during this period to ensure sufficient agitation, because it seemed to me the ChocoVision machine never provided enough.

White and milk chocolates generally come in to temper between 84–86°F; "dark" chocolate usually does around 88°F. The amount of cocoa butter and chocolate liquor influence that temperature, however; and a good rule of thumb is the darker the chocolate, the higher the temperature will be. But I never relied on the temperature as proof of tempered chocolate: I always tested it, by putting a drop on parchment paper and letting it sit for 5 minutes. If it was hard after that interval, it was in temper and ready to work with.

Once chocolate is in temper, if it gets too cool (and stiff) it can be reheated. As long as it doesn't reach 92°F again, it will remain in temper.

I can't help but wonder if the oils somehow interfered with your tempering attempts.