DIY
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LCSofficers (Talk | contribs) (Created page with "=Tour a local factory= * =These chocolate experiments are meant to be tried at home!= ==Making Chocolate from Beans== *Making chocolate involves heavy machinery and complicated...") |
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=These chocolate experiments are meant to be tried at home!= | =These chocolate experiments are meant to be tried at home!= | ||
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==Chocolate Tasting== | ==Chocolate Tasting== | ||
*You can do a [[Chocolate Tasting]], and use different brands of chocolate to show how certain variables affect the taste. Dark chocolates often work best for this. Swiss chocolate is conched, so it has a much smaller particle size than American chocolate. Then there are brands of Mexican-style chocolate like Taza which are stone-ground. Other important variables include the freshness of the cacao beans, the species of cacao, the location of the crop, and different bean-to-bar processing styles. | *You can do a [[Chocolate Tasting]], and use different brands of chocolate to show how certain variables affect the taste. Dark chocolates often work best for this. Swiss chocolate is conched, so it has a much smaller particle size than American chocolate. Then there are brands of Mexican-style chocolate like Taza which are stone-ground. Other important variables include the freshness of the cacao beans, the species of cacao, the location of the crop, and different bean-to-bar processing styles. | ||
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+ | =Tour a local factory= | ||
+ | *[http://www.tazachocolate.com/tours Taza in Somerville, MA] | ||
+ | *[http://www.tcho.com/explore/tour TCHO in San Francisco, CA] |
Revision as of 22:44, 14 February 2012
Contents |
These chocolate experiments are meant to be tried at home!
Making Chocolate from Beans
- Making chocolate involves heavy machinery and complicated Science, so it's unlikely that you can make the perfect chocolate bar in your kitchen. But we recommend getting hold of some cacao beans, and giving it a try!
- To buy cacao "nibs" or beans, check your local health food store for something like this
- Or perhaps ask a nearby chocolate factory if you could have some for educational purposes
- Taste some raw cacao beans, then roast them in a skillet (be careful-- they burn quickly!) and see how the taste changes
- Try making cocoa liquor in an electric juicer
- If you have an electric stone mill like this, you can make Mexican-style stone-ground chocolate from nibs! A slight issue is that it's only designed to run for ~20 minute intervals, and liquifying the nibs takes at least an hour-- so you can either grind the nibs in shorter intervals, or modify the motor enclosure to give more ventilation
Crystallization Demos
- Add a bit of water to melted chocolate-- there are a lot of hydrophobic fats in chocolate, so as soon as you add water the hydrophobic bits gather together and the structure changes dramatically. The melted chocolate turns a much darker color, and it doesn't quite solidify because the crystals can no longer stack together.
- Experiment with melting and then cooling chocolate until it re-solidifies: chocolate with water won't crystallize properly, and neither will chocolate that's heated too quickly (ie poorly tempered). The way to get your final chocolate into the right crystalline state is to add a few pieces of solid chocolate, or "seed crystals," so the molecules know which crystal structure to emulate. So you can cool a bit of chocolate with seed crystals, and a bit without, and see the difference.
Chocolate Tasting
- You can do a Chocolate Tasting, and use different brands of chocolate to show how certain variables affect the taste. Dark chocolates often work best for this. Swiss chocolate is conched, so it has a much smaller particle size than American chocolate. Then there are brands of Mexican-style chocolate like Taza which are stone-ground. Other important variables include the freshness of the cacao beans, the species of cacao, the location of the crop, and different bean-to-bar processing styles.