We did not get to all of that.
But we all still had raw and roasted cacao beans, so we decided to make another run at bean to bar, still inspired by what Chef Spouse and I had seen in Cozumel in the winter of 2022.
In theory, the process is simple:
Roast beans
Hull beans
Grind beans
Combine with sugar (and, potentially, some combination of honey, vanilla, allspice, cinnamon, and/or achiote)
Sounds easy, right?
Challenge one, which we'd discovered two years ago: hulling the beans takes some serious time.
No problem! Chef Spouse roasted and hulled in advance!
Challenge two: grinding the beans finely enough to be palatable.
When we watched the demo in Cozumel, the guy making the chocolate used a large rectangular molcajete, with a grinder that was more rolling pin than pestle, and it came out great.
We have a mortar and pestle style molcajete, plus a blender, a food processor, and an electric coffee grinder that's reserved for spices. So grinding the beans should be no problem, right?
Wrong.
The taste? Well, it was great - we were adding all those optional flavors to taste, so: YUM. But no matter what we tried - and the electric coffee grinder can easily take coffee beans to an espresso grind - we could not get the grind fine enough for the finished product to be anything other than unpleasantly grainy.
We even tried heating some of the ground beans with a little cream - on the left up there - and all that happened was the fat separated.
BOO!
Turns out, if you REALLY want to make bean to bar chocolate, you need a melanger, a device that's designed to run for 24-48 hours STRAIGHT without burning out the motor, to get the grind fine enough.
Well, damn.
What to do with all those roasted and ground cacao beans?
Chef Spouse observed: They look kinda like coffee. What if we treated them as such?
All by themselves, the brew is too thin. But, as we've discovered in the mornings since, adding 1-2 TBSP to your usual coffee beans makes for a DELICIOUS morning cuppa.
Fortunately, we'd planned a meal of tacos al pastor, frijoles negros, and corn and black bean salad in advance, because the bean to bar experiment was a FIAL.
Mad Kitchen Scientist also brought the ingredients to make homemade Irish cream, and here's where we landed there:
1 tsp cocoa powder
1/2 tsp espresso powder
1/2 c heavy cream
14 oz can sweetened condensed milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 c Irish whiskey (he chose Jameson)
Blend all & refrigerate
For dessert? Chocolate flan, natch.
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