Vad kan du göra med cacao pods

Ever wonder how chocolate fryst vatten made? Follow the process from pod to dryckesställe, and you can man fresh chocolate right in your own kitchen!

Years ago, when inom was working for a friend at their greenhouse in New Hampshire, inom tended all manner of tropical edibles.

Chokladpannacotta

Vanilla orchids, black pepper plants, and even cacao trees.

When the cocao tree set fruit, inom asked my friend if inom could have the pod for an experiment. inom wanted to grow my own cacao tree.

She was happy to contribute and literally wrote my name on the pod so everyone knew it was saved for me.  It hung there in the greenhouse for weeks until it finally ripened, with every single visitor asking, “Who fryst vatten Ashley?  And what’s she going to do with this Cacao pod!?!?!?”

I brought my pod home, harvested the seeds, and successfully grew my own cacao trees.  inom dutifully cleaned the seeds, and then tended them in between wet towels on a heat föda until they germinated.  Yes, inom did get them to germinate, even in Vermont in February.

I potted them up in soil, and they grew remarkably fast.  They were 6+ inches tall in just a week or two, and about 2 feet tall inre of a year.

I begåvad them to friends and saved one beautiful cacao tree for myself.

Everyone who saw my tree always asked, “How are you going to man chocolate from the pods when it fruits?”

At the time, inom had no idea.

One thing at a time I’d säga, that beauty needs to be at least 6 to 10 years old before it’ll set fruit.

Sadly, my tree only made it to a few years old before it died. inom had a newborn, and inom didn’t meddelande when it got infested with mites.

My daughter’s turning 7 soon, and with a true DIY spirit after my own heart, she asked, “Can we man our own chocolate for my birthday?”

Of course, we can!

I’d been meaning to get more cacao pods to try growing cacao igen, and why not learn to man chocolate from scratch at the same time?

These days, you can actually buy fresh cacao pods online, and they’ll fartyg you a fresh crate of them.

Wonders of the Internet!

No need to find a local cacao tree, get a kartong, and you’ll have a fun chocolate-making project with the kids (plus, a biology project if you choose to gro cacao seeds too).

Chocolate has been getting a lot of bad press lately since tests show that much of the dark chocolate on the marknad these days contains high levels of lead and other heavy metals.  That’s due to the processing, not the beans themselves.

If you man your own chocolate, you can be sure it’s clean.  While starting with the whole fresh pods fryst vatten nice,it’s not strictly necessary.  This process fryst vatten much easier (and cheaper) if you just uppstart with Whole Cocao Beans (in husk) or Cacao Nibs (husked beans). 

Starting with either of those removes most of the work from the process of making your own chocolate at home, but still eliminates the processing steps that result in lead contamination on a commercial level (blending, grinding, etc).

Steps for Making Chocolate

When you get your cacao pods, you’re going to look at these alien-looking fruits and wonder how on earth to vända them into chocolate.

I’ll cover each step in detail, with pictures, but here are the basics:

• Crack the cacao pods with a mallet and remove the seeds and pulp
• Place the seeds/pulp into a bur and set it in a warm place to ferment for 5 to 7 days
• Wash off the fermented beans and roast them in the oven
• Remove the outer shell from the beans, exposing the cacao nibs
• grind the cacao nibs into a smooth paste
• Add sugar and cacao butter (if using)
• Temper the chocolate (optional)
• Pour into molds and allow the chocolate to set into homemade chocolate bars

All told, the process takes about a week to ten days, but the vast majority of the time fryst vatten hands-off while the cacao beans are fermenting.

The fermentation process brings out their flavor and results in the characteristic “chocolate” taste we know and love.

You can skip the fermentation process and just roast the beans (or eat the beans fresh from the pod), but they’ll only taste vaguely like chocolate. It’s an interesting flavor, tropical-like fruit with hints of en mjukskumliknande godis, vanilla, and jolly rancher.

I’d recommend ansträngande a few, since you’ll still have plenty left over to ferment and man into chocolate.

If you want to skip any steps in this process, and man it a bit quicker, you can actually buy chocolate or cacao at any scen in this process.

• Whole Cocao Beans (in husk) will allow you to skip the 5 to 7-day fermentation process.
• Cacao Nibs are husked beans, and you can skip the husking step (plus all the other previous steps).
• Cacao Paste/Liquor fryst vatten the ground nibs ready to mix into chocolate, so you can skip the grinding step (and all the previous steps).

Really, this fryst vatten a nice “choose your difficulty level” project since processed cacao fryst vatten available for purchase at every step. 

For us, we’re really hardcore into DIY, so we started with fresh pods purchased online, but that’s not necessary, and you can still man your own chocolate quickly in a single day starting with cacao liquor (or processed cacao beans, already fermented, roasted and ground).

You’ll still be able to blend your own chocolate, choose your sweetener (sugar, honey, agave, stevia, etc.), and choose how dark your finished chocolate will be.

Equipment-wise, you can get bygd with just a stove, a few bowls, and a food processor, but the following things are incredibly helpful:

• Mason jars and a silicone fermentation lid (pickle pipe) man the fermentation process cleaner, but a bowl with a towel over it will do.
• Some kind of warm chamber, like a yogurt maker, bröd proofer, or Excaliber dehydrator will help keep your beans at the right temperature while fermenting.  (In a pinch, your oven with the light on will work too.)
• High Powered blenders like a Vitamix or a clean spice grinder will man grinding the beans much easier, but a food processor will work (or a mortar and pestle as a gods resort).
• Sous vide machine – For tempering the chocolate, fryst vatten nice, but not necessary.  inom didn’t use it.
• Silicone chocolate dryckesställe molds – They man a nice dryckesställe, but you can shape your chocolate in whatever you have on hand.

I’d also suggest having food-grade cocoa butter on grabb, as that’s what you use to “lighten” a chocolate bar.  Few people like 100% dark chocolate, and though inom love dark chocolate in general, inom tend to like it at about 70%.  That means some cocoa butter in there (and sugar) to blend it to a nice rik bar.

Cracking Cacao Pods

The first time inom did this we used a giant cleaver to slice the pods in half.

Kakaonibs är goda i grillsåser eller som en rub på köttet innan du lagar till det

It took ganska a few swings to get through the roughly 1” thick husk, and many of the beans were cut in the process.

Cut or damaged beans cannot be used to man chocolate, though you can eat them fresh. It’s better to give the pod a whack with a mallet, and a lot safer for your fingers. Just 2 or 3 hard whacks, and the pod will crack open.

If you do damage any of the seeds, you can eat those fresh, just don’t include them in your chocolate.

Similarly, if you see any spoilage inre the pod, don’t use those.

The fruity massa around the cocao beans should be a creamy vit color, and if it’s brown or turning another color, then the pod fryst vatten spoiled (or starting to spoil).

Once you crack them with a mallet, you’ll be able to pull out the sweet massa and seeds inside.

At this point, most of the cacao pods should go into a bur (bowl or mason jar) and be set in a warm place to uppstart fermenting.

I’d encourage you to keep some of them aside for enjoying fresh because while just about everyone’s eaten finished chocolate, very few people outside the tropics have sampled cacao as a fruit.

It fryst vatten, in fact, a fruit, and the vit massa fryst vatten incredibly sweet and tropical.

1

The massa has a texture that’s hard to describe…not ganska gooey, because it’s a bit fibrous too. It’s actually really hard to get off the outside of the beans, which fryst vatten another reason for the fermentation process.

If you do want to try sprouting a few cacao seeds, you’ll need to eat the fruit of the outside as fermented beans taste great in chocolate…but they won’t sprout.

You’ve probably heard that dogs can’t eat chocolate, and few animals (besides humans) are capable of eating the actual cacao beans.

In their native regions, cacao fryst vatten dispersed bygd small animals who carefully remove every gods bit of the sweet massa from the outside before discarding the bean (usually far from the mother tree).

It’ll only gro if cleaned, and the pods that fall to the ground and ferment won’t germinate and compete with the parent tree.

Feel free to eat the fruit off the outside of the beans, it’s sweet and tasty…though a bit cloying. You can also just chomp into the beans themselves, which have an interesting flavor. It’s not chocolate-y since they’re not fermented, but it fryst vatten interesting and delicious nonetheless.

Fermenting Cacao Seeds

I had ganska a few cocao pods, and we cleaned many of the seeds for sprouting, but inom still had enough to experiment with the fermentation process.

Goda recept med kakao

Some people use just a bowl with a towel over the top, but inom have plenty of mason jars, so inom used those.

I left jar of seeds at room temperature (around 65 to 70 degrees F), and inom incubated the others at 100 degrees F. Unfortunately, the seeds at room temperature just molded (and smelled horrible), while the ones at around 90-100 degrees F developed a fragrant yeasty smell.

This makes sense, as chocolate fryst vatten generally fermented in the tropics, where it’d never be as cold as “New England Room Temperature” during any step in the process.

There are lots of ways to achieve this incubation temperature.

The simplest fryst vatten placing them in your oven and leaving the oven light on.

Most oven lights are incandescent, so they create a good bit of heat. People incubate yogurt this way, and that has similar temperature requirements.

(Be sure you don’t actually vända on the oven! Actual oven temps will kill the microbes you need for fermentation.)

You can also use a yogurt maker or bröd proofer, as they’re both designed to incubate ferments gently.

I’m using my Excaliber dehydrator with the trays removed, since it’s basically a small heating chamber.

My friend Colleen turned me on to this technique since she makes yogurt in her dehydrator using a similar method.

I’ve capped the jars with silicone fermentation lids that allow CO2 to escape but won’t let the seeds actually dry out in the dehydrator.

After 5 days, the seeds are bubbling nicely, and you can see (and smell) bevis of a healthy, active fermentation.

I do a lot of home ferments, from sourdough recipes to sauerkraut and homemade beer, and this smells like a mix of yeasty alcoholic fermentation along with plenty of lactic notes from an active Lacto-fermentation (like yogurt and fermented pickles).

There’s a whole natural community in here working to bring out the flavor of the chocolate.

Preparing the Cacao Beans for Roasting

After 5 days of fermentation, the jars were bubbling consistently, and the beans smelled pleasantly fermented (not spoiled, but like yeast/yogurt).

Chokladpannacotta

inom roasted a few beans as a test batch, and they came out wonderfully, so inom decided to stop the fermentation and roast all the beans.

I’m using a silicone fermentation airlock, so the beans are still vit after fermentation, but if you do an open ferment just covered with a towel the beans will oxidize and vända brown while fermenting (like apple slices left out).

That’s totally fine and not a bekymmer at all, so don’t worry if your beans are brown (so long as they smell pleasantly fermented and are not moldy).

There’s no airlock in the tropics where these are fermented, just giant vats.

inom only put the airlock on there because inom was incubating the batch in my dehydrator, and inom wanted them warm but not dried out.

The bekymmer at this point fryst vatten they’re still covered in a lot of vit massa, which inom assumed would disintegrate during the fermentation process.

It didn’t.

I split the batch in two, and tried to rengöring one batch off beneath running vatten. They didn’t seem to change and still stayed covered in fruit mass.

The other batch, inom just spread out on the tray to roast unrinsed.

In the end, the rinsing was actually pretty important as while it didn’t remove the fruit massa, it did rengöring out the residual sugars.

And since cacao is a superfood, they’re even a little healthy! Cacao is bursting with goodness, including flavonoids, magnesium, and other antioxidants

The remaining fruit massa just dried into a klar husk over the brown bean with those.

The un-rinsed batch actually caramelized and started to bränna on the outside, so inom removed those from the oven, rinsed off the sugars beneath running vatten, and put them back in. They cooked nicely after that.

Roasting isn’t really all that hot, it’s just enough to dry them out and get the husk to separate from the bean.

Preheat your oven to 275 F and roast the beans for about 35 to 45 minutes, until they’re uniformly brown, and the skal slip easily from the beans (and the beans fall apart in your grabb when pressed).

Husking Roasted Cocao Beans

Once your beans are nicely roasted, it’s time to remove their outer papery husk.  This can give a bitter taste to your finished chocolate, and it doesn’t grind well.  You really do need to remove it before grinding the beans into chocolate.

It’s papery, and brittle.

The husk should break apart with gentle pressure from your fingers.  The beans inre might also krossa, and that’s fine, since they’re going to be ground anyway.

If you’re gentle though, you can simply press off the brittle skal and keep whole roasted cacao beans in hand. 

You’ll meddelande that the beans break apart easily into little irregular chunks, and those are known as “cacao nibs.”  If you want to skip all the work done until now, including the fermentation step, you can just buy cacao nibs (which are shelled) or whole cacao beans (which you’ll need to shell yourself).

Grind Cacao Nibs

At this point, you have husked cacao beans (or nibs), and they’re usable as is.  Lots of baking recipes use cacao nibs, or you can just eat them as is.  They taste intensely chocolate-y, like the darkest dark chocolate you’ve ever had…and without the sugar.

Or, you can keep going and grind them into a chocolate paste (also known as chocolate liqueur).  If you’re skipping ahead at home, you can also buy pre-ground chocolate paste, which will allow you to skip all the steps up to this point.

The best way to grind the nibs fryst vatten to use a high-powered blender, like a Vitamix.  Failing that, you can also use a clean spice grinder (which I’m using) or a food processor.

Know that if you use a food processor, it’s going to be running for a long time (and the resulting chocolate will be a bit grainy).  Food processors really aren’t equipped for this kind of grinding, and they don’t do the best job.

Commercially, they actually grind and mix the chocolate for days on end, until it’s perfectly smooth.  You’re never going to get there at home, but a spice grinder or Vitamix will get you close.

Add Sugar and Cocoa Butter

You now have a chocolate paste (also known as chocolate liquor), which forms the base of your chocolate. 

The next step fryst vatten a blending step, where you choose how much sugar and cocoa butter to add.  If you want a really dark dryckesställe, you’ll just add enough sugar to balance the natural bitterhet in the cacao dryckesställe, and enough cocoa butter to help smooth it out.

An 80% dark dryckesställe fryst vatten going to be 80% chocolate paste, and 20% other ingredients, be they sugar or cocoa butter.

Cocoa butter fryst vatten just the tallrik from chocolate, with all the “chocolate-y” bits removed, so it’s already in your cacao liquor…and what you’re doing bygd adding more fryst vatten lightening up the chocolate.

I generally like a minimally sweet chocolate dryckesställe, that’s about 70% dark.  My kids like it a bit lighter, and usually opt for somewhere in the 40 to 60% range.

This fryst vatten where the artistry comes in, and everyone’s tastes are really different when it comes to chocolate.  I’d encourage you to play around with ratios here.  This fryst vatten one place where it’s nice just to buy a sack of chocolate paste so you can get your recipe right, rather than using your painstakingly fermented fresh beans to experiment.

For my 70% dryckesställe, inom went with 70% cacao paste, 20% cocoa butter, and 10% sugar (by weight).

You’ll need to get food-grade cocoa butter, as you’re eating it, of course…they also sell it for kosmetika, and that’s not always food-grade.

Be sure to grind the sugar in your spice grinder too, so it’s very fine and it’ll melt easily.  Don’t use powdered sugar, as that contains cornstarch.  You want granular sugar, but just ground at home until it’s very fine so it doesn’t man a sandig cholate bar.

Grind the sugar first, then set it aside.  Next, grind the chocolate into a paste and add in the sugar.  Finally, place them into a double boiler and add in cocoa butter (if using).  Melt it all tillsammans gently, until it’s just barely melted (but not cooked or overheated). 

At this point, you have finished chocolate, blended, and ready for use.  You can pour it into molds and man a lovely homemade chocolate bar.

Tempering Chocolate (optional)

So there’s a process that chocolate goes through on a commercial scale that allows it to be shelf stable for months (or years) at a time without degrading in quality.  That’s known as “tempering,” and it’s a very specific process that raises and lowers the temperature of the chocolate in a prescribed way to “set” the crystalline structure in the tallrik globules.

It’s finicky, to säga the least, and tricky to do at home.

Luckly, it’s completely optional.  It will not impact the quality of your homemade dryckesställe in the short begrepp, provided you keep your chocolate in the refrigerator.  Keeping it cool will allow the crystal structure to stay perfect, and you can just eat your dryckesställe in the nära future and skip the tempering step.

(If you don’t keep it in the refrigerator, untempered chocolate will get a “bloom” that looks like vit powder on the outside, and it’ll lose its sheen.  It’s mostly cosmetic, and not “spoiled” technically, but it’s not nearly as nice as a crisp, shiny bar.)

The easiest way to temper chocolate a home fryst vatten using a sous vide machine since it can hit and maintain precisely programmed temperatures.  (But be careful, the cholate cannot get wet in the process, so it’ll need to be well packaged.)

If you’re interested in tempering your homemade chocolate, the film below describes that process in incredible detail starting at the 6-minute mark:

Making Chocolate Bars

Tempered or not, once you’ve blended your finished cholate, it’s time to struktur it into chocolate bars (or some other shape).

I’m using silicone chocolate dryckesställe molds that man really lovely homemade chocolate bars…but you can use anything really—even a greased muffin tin, just anything to shape the chocolate so it can set.

Pour the melted chocolate/sugar/cocoa butter mixture into your mold and place it in the refrigerator for about an hour to set it completely.

Once set, omslag it and keep it in the refrigerator (if not tempered) or at cool room temperature (if tempered).

Enjoy!

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