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chocolate

December 8, 2017

Bringing Bean to Bar to the Home Food Factory

“Bean to bar” is among the lesser-known, but still popular, phrases in the foodie lexicon. For most, it’s the equivalent of an exquisite, controlled farm-to-table production process in the chocolate world. In that specific application of the term, it follows the cocoa bean from the farm. The bean starts with drying. After it is shelled, the inside nib is taken to a lab-like kitchen where those inner goodies are mixed with raw cocoa butter and sugar to make sumptuous craft chocolates.

For others, “bean to bar” is a come-hither headline that leads the inquisitive culinary explorer to a class where the hands-on experience of making (and later eating) chocolate is a multi-hour learning session. In such workshops from New York to the southern regions of Peru, the do’s and don’ts of chocolate making are explored, including how to carefully remove the outer part of the cocoa bean and devise the formula/ratio of bean to sugar and cocoa butter to suit individual tastes. Hence, when you see a chocolate bar in your local gourmet shop that says 70%, it means it’s 70% cocoa bean with the remaining 30% made up of sugar and cocoa butter.

In the bean to bar workshop, the class hits the pause button before actual production. The process of making artisan chocolate—be it a small batch for a class of 20 students, or for a large order—is a lengthy one that tempers the ingredients in a melangeur or similar commercial machine. Those in the workshop are given silicone molds, perfectly melted chocolate, and mix-ins to allow each student to create his or her final artistry.

With an emphasis on growing veggies at indoors, brewing your own beer, distilling booze and other home food factories, making your own chocolates appears to be lagging. With shrinking global supply chains, there certainly is a wide range of choices when it comes to cocoa beans, cocoa butter and sugars of every vintage (raw, refined, organic, etc.…) The issue is the lack of popularly-priced home chocolate tempering appliances. Smaller versions of a traditional melangeur run more than $350 with industrial-sized models running well over $1,000.

Following the model of such entrepreneurs as PicoBrew make sense for the home craft chocolate market. Any easy-to-use machine where the ingredients come in “kits” would be an idea for the novice chocolatier. Brands such as Nestle, Hershey, Ghirardelli and others could create kits (bean, cocoa butter, sugar) that carry their signature flavor and communities of chocoholics could share their magic recipes.

The global chocolate market is work more than $98 billion, so there’ s little fear the home market will cause the Belgian economy to suffer. As a foodtech trend, the home chocolate market appears to be a large, untapped opportunity.

January 21, 2017

Sous Vide Chocolate?

Here’s more evidence that, as Chris Young hypothesized a few months ago, sous vide is the new microwave: People are using devices like the Anova to temper chocolate.

I know, I know: We all thought that chocolate appeared in its finished form like a magical food from the gods. But it actually takes a lot of steps to make a shiny, delicious chocolate bar, the last of which is tempering, which means heating and cooling the melted chocolate to the right temperature so that certain crystals develop, making it shiny and shelf-stable. If it’s not, it will develop white blotches and streaks that change the texture entirely.

Pastry chefs and chocolatiers use all sorts of methods to temper chocolate, such as “tabling” it, which is visually and technically challenging. Theo Chocolate, for example, tables all the chocolate for its confections (think thousands of candies every month).

Resolve to learn more about chocolate in 2017, with my first recreational bean-to-bar class of the new year at @iceculinary on Jan 12: http://bit.ly/2eam5bz

A photo posted by Michael Laiskonis (@mlaiskonis) on Dec 29, 2016 at 7:51am PST

People who aren’t such purists use, you know, a machine to do this work. Those machines are huge, so you’ll often find home cooks tempering chocolate in the microwave.

Or at least, you used to. Recently I discovered a new recipe for tempering chocolate that seems even easier: sous vide! Simply heat the chocolate in a vacuum-sealed bag to a certain temperature in the water bath, “squish it around in the bag,” reduce the temperature of the water bath, squish a little more, and then pull it out. Who says you can only use your Anova to make a steak or some eggs?

I love the idea of this shortcut. It uses updated technology (the microwave is so 1966) in a new and no-nonsense way to transform a technically difficult task into one that anyone should be able to do. At the same time, I’m not sure it would really work. After all, when melted chocolate touches water, it seizes and gets all clumpy and unworkable: With this method, you’re submerging chocolate in the enemy.

But I get it: We’re all obsessed with chocolate, and anything to get our hands on it is going to be popular. Take 3D printing. “The first thing people want to 3D print is chocolate,” said Luis Rodriguez Alcalde, a 3D-printing expert who runs 3 Digital Cooks. Dozens of printers claim that they’ve mastered printing chocolate, which means they have to have mastered tempering, right? Some even say it’s the easiest medium to work with. But anyone who has tried tabling chocolate or making it from scratch knows that’s far from the truth.

Regardless, this kind of innovation only helps transform the tools and techniques that professional and home chefs use in the kitchen, demystifying and democratizing cooking for all.

Subscribe to the Spoon to get the latest analysis about the future of food, cooking, and kitchen. 

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