the making of chocolate, part two: from beans to bars

October 23, 2015

It’s about time I told you about part two of chocolate making, also known as THE FUN PART! Warning: you will very likely feel compelled to go out and buy a chocolate bar after reading this post... SORRY!

We'll start where we left off - you may remember the final step of part one was drying the beans. Once the beans are dried, they are then stored until we decide to make chocolate. (At this point, I am pretty sure you could also sell them as “raw cacao” if desired.) Here at the farm, they store the beans for up to a year, so when we made the chocolate in these photos, we were actually using beans from last year’s harvest.

Making chocolate from the raw cacao beans takes two days, and at the end of each day there is a special “treat” that happily involves some waste-reducing cleanup of the chocolate :)

DAY ONE

step 1: roasting & cracking

First, we roast the beans to bring out their rich, delicious flavor. Here at the farm we have a very small roaster (about the size of a toaster oven) that holds only 2.5 pounds of beans, so for one batch of chocolate we have to do two rounds of roasting, each of which takes about 30 minutes. So, one batch of chocolate around here requires about 5 pounds of raw cacao beans.

After the beans are roasted, we let them cool slightly, and then crack them to remove the shells. Each cacao bean has a thin shell that coats the "meat" of the bean - referred to as the nib. You can crack the roasted cacao beans easily just by rolling them in your hands. The shell is very thin and both shell and nib break easily into small pieces.

Rather than cracking by hand, we have a cool gadget called a "CRANKANDSTEIN" that helps us quickly crack the beans. It's essentially a funnel that feeds into rollers powered by a hand crank.

shells and nibs out of the CRACKANDSTEIN

step 2: winnowing

So now we have cracked shells and nibs in a large bowl. Though you can eat the shells if you want to, all the flavor is in the nibs, so we need to separate the two. In chocolate shops, they have machines to do this, but here we use a hairdryer! We take the bowl outside on a clean counter and spin the bowl while gently agitating the nibs with the hairdryer blowing on the surface. The feather-light shells fly out onto the counter and the heavier nibs remain.

Periodically, we stop and swipe up the shells on the counter to save them. You can brew delicious tea out of these! It is lightly chocolatey and delicious as a faux-dessert! Lately I've been making iced tea with it and throwing in an orange slice - so good!

step 3: grinding

Now that we have mostly nibs (a few shells inevitably remain, but that's ok), it's time to grind the beans. Una and Leon (the farmers extraordinaire who I'm working for) use a Champion Juicer that they reserve solely for chocolate making, and it works amazingly well! The result is called "chocolate liquor," a technical term in the chocolate world for "ground cocoa mass" - it has nothing to do with alcohol. Start reading your chocolate bar ingredient labels and you'll likely see this listed.

ground nibs, aka chocolate liquor, fresh out of the grinder-juicer — ground nibs, aka chocolate liquor, fresh out of the grinder-juicer

our 5-pound batch of raw beans resulted in about 8 cups of chocolate liquor

step 4: ingredient prep

Next it's time to quickly prep the other ingredients. Una's recipe for chocolate involves three ingredients - this chocolate liquor that we just made from our organic cacao, organic cocoa butter that she buys from another a small chocolate company, and organic sugar.

Cocoa butter is what you would get if you took the ground nibs and separated out the fat (this requires special equipment). As soon as I saw it, I realized why white chocolate is white and still allowed to be called chocolate!

This is cocoa butter in its solid form. Looks kinda like white chocolate, right?!

To prep our ingredients, we measure them out and melt the cocoa butter. Amazingly, it turns slightly brown when melted - I was fascinated by this stuff!

step 5: melanger time

In our final step for day one, it's time to mix everything together! For this, we use a melanger - another special piece of equipment used for chocolate making. It's essentially a spinning bowl with a stone bottom and cylindrical stones inside that slowly grind the chocolate and other ingredients into smaller and smaller particles. Once the machine is up and running, we add the ingredients slowly, a little of each at a time, until everything has been added.

We let this machine run for about 24 hours, periodically using a special tool to scrape down the sides of the bowl. By the afternoon, I could see the mixture becoming smoother.

the top red one is a special scraper - we'd stick this in along the side of the bowl as the machine was running to scrape down the sides

Now it's time for the day 1 treat! To "clean" out the juicer-grinder where we first ground the nibs, we put frozen bananas through it to make banana-chocolate soft serve. No sweetener needed, and let me tell you it's AMAZING!

I was SO excited to eat this I didn't take the time to get a great photo...

DAY TWO

It's been 24 hours and IT'S READY...

isn't it just... GORGEOUS?! BREATHTAKING?! Making you want to run to the nearest store for a good bar of dark chocolate?!

We wipe out the molds and prep some with our macadamia nuts and coffee beans:

step 6: tempering

This is the trickiest part of the chocolate-making. We need to cool the chocolate down slowly to just the right temperature before we put it into the molds. If we don't do it correctly, when it hardens the chocolate can "bloom" - making that white, gritty stuff you may have seen on older bars before. You can still eat it that way, but it's not as pretty.

To slowly cool it, we spread about a third of the chocolate mixture on a granite slab and mix it around, agitating it for several minutes. Then we add another third and do this again. Finally we add these back to the remaining third and, again, mix to even out the temperature.

step 7: piping into the molds

This is the MOST FUN PART! We pour the tempered chocolate into a pastry piping bag (keeping finger tightly on the end!) and then pipe the chocolate into the molds. We had already prepped the molds with our own roasted coffee beans and macadamia nuts. I absolutely love the preciseness required for this task - my perfectionist tendencies found their outlet!

step 8: pop & package

Finally, after a few hours, we pop the chocolates out of the molds, wrap up the bars, pop the specialty ones into bags and call it a day!

And last but not least - our "cleanup" treats for day 2 are...

THE MOST DELICIOUS CHOCOLATE MILK made by cleaning out the piping bag and...

Chocolate covered dried bananas made by swiping the extra chocolate out of all the bowls. YUM.

And now, my chocolate conclusions! Congruent with most of my realizations here on the farm - making chocolate from scratch is HARD WORK! You need special equipment that you would only use for chocolate making, and if one thing goes wrong, you might lose your whole batch (for example - we had an issue with the melanger and ended up spending an hour looking for spare parts from friends and in the hardware store. If we wouldn't have found a solution we would have wasted all that cacao!).

Despite the work, chocolate is simply MAGICAL and I can see why people become chocolatiers. I could have piped into those molds all day - I couldn't get enough! This is definitely my favorite thing we've done on the farm. The smell alone is enough to make you happy all day long. Hope you enjoyed this, and stay tuned for the next installment in my "educational" type posts: coffee picking and processing!

PS. To my professional and/or pastry friends who may be reading this, I apologize if I got any of the terms wrong and please correct me if I did! Thank you!

kabocha squash - not quite ripe

the squash grows on the garden wall

baby squash

where there are flowers, a squash will grow!

ripe squash - ready to eat

double duty kabocha squash soup

October 16, 2015

A cool morning breeze swept by as I enjoyed my coffee on the lanai a few mornings ago. This was the closest thing to "fall" I've felt this October here in Hawaii. Instead of picking apples this year, I'm harvesting squash. We have a TON of it. It's a variety called kabocha squash, which is one of my favorite kinds because it cooks so quickly. Most of you should be able to find it at your local farmers market (preferably) or grocery store. It looks like a pumpkin and can be green, orange, or multicolored.

This is a super easy recipe that I came up with while here in Hawaii. I'm so lucky that (for now) I'm able to pick the lemongrass, ginger, kale and herbs straight from the farm! It really is amazing to go to the garden instead of the fridge for my ingredients!

Note: I know that fresh lemongrass is a rather obscure ingredient. I've found it at Asian markets and the Asian stands at farmers markets (in San Francisco), and at Whole Foods on the east coast. If you can find it - I'd recommend trying it just for fun! If not, you can use preserved lemon, or just go without either.

Double Duty Kabocha Squash Soup

Active time: about 35 minutes
Total time: about 50 minutes

Ingredients:
- one large kabocha squash
- coconut oil or butter, whatever you prefer
- fresh garlic, 3-6 cloves (depending how much you like garlic)
- fresh ginger, about 1 tablespoon grated or minced
- about half a bunch of kale (roughly two handfuls chopped)
- half a (13.5 oz) can of coconut milk (full fat for creamier soup, light is fine if you're going lighter) OR you can use 3/4 a container of one of these kinds of coconut milk
- a few sprigs of fresh rosemary and/or sage (ideally two of each)
- 2-3 stalks of fresh lemongrass OR 3 wedges of preserved lemon (optional but recommended)
- water

Tools and stuff:
- large pot for soup
- chef's knife and large cutting board
- large spoon
- can opener if using canned coconut milk

Instructions:
1. Chop your squash into roughly bite-size chunks. Chopping the squash is the most annoying/time-consuming part of this recipe so it's great that we'll get it over with first. One of the great things about kabocha is that you can actually leave the skin on if you want to save time & effort. You'll want to cut off any barnacle-looking growths and/or spots, but otherwise, I usually just cut off the extra-thick areas of skin and leave the rest on. Sometimes I do cut it all off - experiment and see what you prefer. Below you'll find an instructional photo series of how I chop my squash.

dig pointy end of knife in next to the stem and cut off the end

continue cutting off chunks, working around the stem

scoop out seeds and strings. reserve these insides so you can wash, dry, and toast up the seeds later!

remove any bruises/bad spots/barnacles, and/or all the skin if you wish

note that if you're removing the skin, you'll need a knife. a peeler will NOT do the job here

next, I slice each section into long slices like this

from there, cut your stack into sticks, and then chunks

the final product - by no means are they uniform sizes, but it's totally fine for this soup!

2. Crush and mince your garlic and ginger; chop kale into ribbons.
- If you're using lemongrass, rinse and dry it, then trim the ends and remove any dry outer layers until you have more tender, pale yellow/green stalks. Make sure to include the most tender part - usually the bottom of the bulb, and cut into pieces that are about four inches long (this does NOT need to be exact). Then pound the stalks with the back of your knife to release the oils and flavor.
- If you're using preserved lemon, pick out about 3 wedges and mince.

minced preserved lemon (great option if you can't find lemongrass)

3. Get out your big soup pot. Heat the oil on medium and add your garlic and ginger. When they start to become fragrant, add your preserved lemon (if using). After another minute, add the squash and stir to coat.

garlic + ginger + coconut oil

once fragrant, stir with squash to coat

4. Now add your half can of coconut milk. (If you want a more decadent soup, feel free to add the whole can, but I usually save it for something else like a coconut key lime pie - recipe coming soon!) Then fill up the pot with water so that you almost cover the squash. You want a couple of inches of room at the top of the pot.

5. Stir well to mix the coconut milk and water together. Now add your sage, rosemary, and lemongrass (if using). Gently push them under the liquid so they're submerged, but don't stir. (This makes it easier to remove them at the end.)

6. Turn up the heat to high and bring to a boil - should take a little under 10 minutes. Once at a boil, turn down to simmer (small bubbles should be coming up). Cook for another 10 minutes, then check the squash with a fork. The goal is for the top-most squash to be tender but not totally falling apart. If needed, give it another five minutes. When it's ready, use your spoon to gently skim out some of the top-most squash into a heat-proof tupperware (or bowl). This is the "double duty" part of the recipe - you're reserving these chunks of squash for other uses - throw them in salads, eat with eggs, season with spices and make a side dish, whatever you like! I usually take about a cup and a half but take as much or as little as you want!

7. Now, carefully remove the rosemary and sage. (If you'd like, you can let the sage cool a bit and then chop and add leaves back to the soup.) Then, with your spoon, start to gently mash the squash towards the bottom of the pot - the lemongrass helps with this too. The squash should easily mash and the soup will become even creamier and brighter orange.

8. Finally, add your chopped kale. Again, use the spoon to submerge the kale and cook soup for another minute or two until kale is bright green. Turn off the stove and you're done! Now - you don't want to serve or eat the lemongrass, but I recommend keeping it in the soup when you store it so that it has a chance to impart even more delicious lemongrassy flavor!

FInal tips: You likely have a pretty big pot of soup at this point, and it will keep for a solid week in the fridge. I've been making and eating large pots of this all by myself so I've come up with a few flavor changers/enhancers to keep this interesting throughout the week:
a) For easy protein - when reheating, add some chopped tofu and cook for an extra 5 minutes to make sure it's heated through
b) Just before eating, add a few dollops of pesto or green sauce/salsa verde or a handful of fresh basil and stir in slowly
c) Top with a fried egg (or poach an egg in the soup while reheating) and serve over quinoa
d) Add kalamata olives and chunks of avocado on top - sounds weird but really good! (especially the olives!)

pantry concoctions, #1 - preserved lemon

October 13, 2015

I am a pretty huge snob about what enters my mouth. I place full blame on my parents for this for feeding me too well growing up. Even someone who loves to cook as much as I do doesn't want to take the time to make something uniquely fabulous every day. So how do I satisfy my too-high taste standards on a daily basis? My method for keeping quick meals delicious and interesting throughout a busy week involves a few master strategies:

1) great ingredients (both pantry and fresh)
2) a "cookfest" once or twice per week
3) becoming a master of sauces and pantry concoctions

I have MUCH more to say about all of these strategies, but today I'm going to leave you with a quick recipe that falls under strategy #3. It needs to sit for about a week or two before you can use it, so figured we better hop to it! (Actually it needs to ferment for a week or two, but I didn't want to scare my newbie cooks too much with that word.)

I know a fermentation recipe is probably a little much for my second recipe post, so here is my sales pitch for why you should try this: First, there are just two ingredients that you might already have on hand. Second, this is a recipe that requires a little "feel," a tad bit of risk-taking, and has lots of room for creativity once you get the basics down. It's a perfect, easy confidence-builder-in-experimentation recipe (thus fulfilling the mission of this blog)! Third - fermented things are good for you because they promote healthy "gut" bacteria. And finally, I'll be using this ingredient in other recipes - including my favorite avocado kale salad - so I need to tell you how to make it before we can get to those!

Preserved Lemon

Active time: 20 minutes
Total time until usable: about 1-2 weeks

Ingredients:
- 3 to 4 lemons, the juicier the better (you might not use them all but just in case)
- salt (kosher, regular, or coarse - it doesn't matter), roughly a half cup

Tools and stuff:
- pint-size (mason) jar with a lid - wide mouthed is best but a smaller mouth works too
- knife and cutting board
- ideally: a muddler or pestle, backup plan: smaller jar that fits into your mason jar, or the back of a spoon

Things to know:
Ideally you should make this when you're going to be home for 1-2 weeks. If this is your first fermentation, it's great to check it every other day to get a feel for how it's changing (though that's not actually necessary). If you're a more seasoned cook/fermenter, feel free to leave it alone for a week before you check it. Once it's done it gets moved to the fridge and can live there indefinitely!

Instructions:
1. Wash your lemons and cut off any bad spots from the rinds.
2. Choose the biggest lemon that will fit in your jar without squeezing it in. Cut that lemon in half and set aside one half.
3. Cut the remaining half plus one other lemon into wedges, leaving rind and pith in tact. Remove seeds as you go.

4. Ok - the fun part! Put a loose layer of lemon wedges (probably 5-8?) at the bottom of the jar, sprinkle a layer of salt over top (probably close to two teaspoons but I never measure). Now, with your muddler, pestle, smaller jar, or whatever you're using, gently crush down the wedges to start releasing the juice. Top with another layer of lemons, then salt, then muddle.

5. Repeat this until the jar is about 3/4 of the way full. Cut more lemon wedges if you run out. At this point it should be really juicy at the top. If not, muddle harder :) If that doesn't work, juice one of your remaining lemons and add some juice to the jar to get to about 3/4 full.

6. Take the half lemon we set aside at the beginning. Place it flesh side down into the jar and press down slowly so the juice rises up around it. Ideally, at this point you should be able to push the lemon in until the top of it is just a little bit above the top of the jar with juice all around it. If your spacing worked out perfectly like this, put the lid on and you're done! The goal here is that when you put the lid on, the slight pressure from the lid will push down on the lemon-half to keep a layer of liquid at the top of the jar. If you can easily push down the lemon too low, take out the half and add some more wedges/salt/muddle until you get the right height (or see my lazy-strategy in below photo). If there's too much liquid, you can pour a little out (I'd recommend reserving it until you're done with the recipe, just in case). If there's too much lemon-half sticking out the top, you can cut a little off the top or remove a few wedges to make more room underneath.

too much space at the top here so either add more wedges or...

If you're lazy like me, you can add another piece of pith at the top to help push it down.

7. Once you get the right height, seal the jar very lightly - we WANT air to get in - and place it on a small plate on your counter. (The plate is just in case some liquid comes bubbling out and spills over.) If you live in a cold place, try to put the jar in the warmest spot in your kitchen. Once a day or every other day, if you think of it, take off the lid and check it. (This is not necessary, just good for learning). You want to keep a layer of liquid surrounding the lemon-half at all times. As it ferments, it should start to smell a little more sour, and the lemon rinds will start to get softer. If all seems to be going well, after a week, take off the top lemon-half and fork out a wedge from below. The liquid will be much thicker, almost like a jam. It should be soft, not quite mushy but getting close, and easy to mince. And it should smell good - different from the smell of a fresh lemon but still a nice scent. If all these traits present themselves, seal tightly and put the jar in your fridge. It will last indefinitely although I'd try to eat it in within 6-9 months.

When using: mince/eat/cook the entire wedge - rind, pith, and all!

Finished product - soft & salty preserved lemons

Bonus: Flavorings!
I'd recommend doing a plain one for your first try, but later/if you're feeling adventurous, you can add flavorings! I love adding cinnamon sticks for a warm & sweet effect. Bay leaves and rosemary (or really any hearty herbs) are great additions for earthy/savory concoctions. You can also make smaller jars to play with the flavors (without having preserved lemon coming out your ears). Just do your best to keep the flavorings submerged under the liquid to help prevent mold.

I added some allspice leaves to mine because we have those here!

This is preserved meyer lemon with cinnamon - a delicious combo that I had in my fridge in SF.

Questions/things to look for:

Mold - if mold starts to form at the top, it's totally fine to pour out some juice, remove the moldy parts (and a healthy layer of the good stuff underneath the mold just to be safe) and stick a new lemon/more juice and salt in there and keep going. If this freaks you out, you can also just toss the whole thing and try again. But really - a little mold just means it's alive! It's fine to remove it and keep going.

Doesn't seem ready after a week - give it a little more time until it reaches the description above - try a warmer place if you can find one in your kitchen.

Where/how to use:
If you haven't heard of preserved lemon before, you're probably wondering what the heck you're going to do with this. Well - you can use it anywhere you'd want lemon and salt. As someone who cooks mostly Mediterranean-inspired foods, that "anywhere" seems more like an "everywhere" to me! I love to mince preserved lemon and toss it into grain salads for an extra kick - it adds a pop of bright, salty citrus. It's also great in Asian sauces and marinades. I have a ton of other uses up my sleeve, but I'll save them for later recipes!

Ask away if you have any questions and I hope you'll try it and tell me how it turns out!

DAY ONE

DAY TWO

Double Duty Kabocha Squash Soup

Preserved Lemon

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