Holding a bag of our Raw Organic Cacao Beans in hand, but not exactly sure what to do with them? Maybe you snagged a bag because you've heard about the nutritional benefits of cacao or that you really can make chocolate at home from cacao beans. Maybe you're planning an educational activity for the kids, or just want to make your own nibs roasted exactly to your taste. Read on for methods to roast your cacao beans and make them into chocolate!
Roasting Cacao Beans
Roasting cacao beans before using the nibs for recipes or making chocolate accomplishes a few important tasks. It helps develop the beans' flavor by causing them to go through the Maillard reaction and caramelization process, which gives chocolate its characteristic sweet, nutty, roasted flavor. Roasting also allows excess moisture to evaporate from the beans, making them more suitable for chocolate making and taking much of the excess acidic flavor from fermentation with it to round out the flavor of the beans.
When it's bean roasting time at our factory, the building and parking lot smell exactly like brownies in the oven! That's all thanks to the Maillard reaction and caramelization.
Raw cacao beans are also a raw agricultural product, so they need to be either tested or cooked before consuming. Roasting makes easy work of this task at home and accomplishes flavor development all at the same time! *Note: Consuming raw or undercooked foods may increase your risk of foodborne illness.
How to roast your beans:
- Heat oven to 295 F.
- Spread the cacao beans out evenly on a baking tray. Roast in the oven for about 20 minutes or until the beans start making popping sounds.
This “first crack” is the sound of the outer husk separating from the bean inside.
- Remove the beans from the oven and allow them to cool until cool enough to handle.
- Twist the outer shells off of the beans, putting the outside husk to the side and reserving the nibs inside for eating or turning into chocolate.
The husks can be used for compost, mulch, or can be brewed as tea.
Now you have freshly roasted cacao nibs! Cacao nibs have a complex nutty, earthy flavor that can go sweet, savory, or boozy. Unbelievably versatile, they're antioxidant and protein-rich. You can use them to replace nuts & chocolate chips in baking, sprinkle on ice cream or granola, infuse sauces & meat rubs, garnish salads & soups, infuse your own rum & home brews, whatever you desire.
Need some inspiration? Try our recipe for a super-simple Cacao Nib & Banana Smoothie.
Making Chocolate At Home
Before you begin the process of making chocolate, you'll need to calculate what your recipe will be. This is much easier than it may sound! Just follow these steps to come up with your list of ingredients:
- Decide what percentage you want your chocolate to be — this determines how sweet or dark your final product will be. Chocolate bar percentage is essentially what proportion of the bar by weight is cacao bean vs. the sugar or other ingredients.
If you like a classic dark chocolate, we recommend trying a recipe of 70% cacao.
For darker, more intense chocolate, just increase the percentage of cacao. You can even omit sugar entirely for a 100% dark chocolate like our Pure 100% bar!
For sweeter chocolate you can decrease the percentage of cacao, but please note that recipes with a percentage lower than 60% may become more difficult to get a smooth texture from at home.
- Once you have your percentage, subtract that number from 100 to find out what proportion of sugar you'll add.
For example: If you want a 75% dark chocolate, 100 - 75 = 25, so 75% of your
total chocolate recipe will be cacao nibs and 25% will be sugar.
- Weigh your nibs (we recommend weighing in grams for easy math). Use the weight of the nibs in the formula below to calculate how much sugar you'll need to weigh out after.
Weight of cacao you just measured
×
Percentage of sugar
÷
Percentage of cacao
So for example: If your nibs weigh 500 grams and you want a recipe of 75% cacao, 25% sugar, this is how you would calculate the amount of sugar to use: 500 × 25 ÷ 75 = 167g of sugar. So your final recipe would be 500g of cacao nibs and 167g of sugar.
How to make chocolate:
- Weigh out your nibs and sugar.
If you're using a smaller blender or food processor, you may want to split each of your ingredients in half to work in batches.
- Put your nibs in a high-powered blender or food processor and begin to blend.
You'll need to play around with settings to see what works best for your machine as well as take breaks every now and then to scrape down the sides and let the machine cool off.
As you grind up the nibs, you'll eventually see them become like a coarse paste that also has a bit of shininess to it, like in the photo above.
Depending on the equipment you have, you can also use a mortar and pestle or other grinding tool to turn the nibs into paste — it will likely just take a longer time to grind.
- Once the beans are a paste, you can add in your sugar— depending on your ratio, you may want to add the sugar incrementally.
- When all of your sugar has been added, continue to blend (and continue to take breaks) until the chocolate becomes more smooth, like a thick liquid, and has your desired texture.
You may find that occasionally blowing on the paste with a hair dryer on the hot setting may help it get to this stage faster.
- When your chocolate is done, you can use it however you like! You can temper and mold it for a more traditional chocolate bar, make truffles or hot chocolate with untempered chocolate, bake with it, the sky's the limit!
We hope you enjoy your chocolate making adventure! If you make chocolate or another recipe with our beans, we'd love to hear from you.