Class - Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Making, Day Two

When we arrived for Day Two of chocolate making class, the refining machine was still churning away at incorporating the sugar and making our chocolate as smooth as possible. (If you missed reading about Day One, you can catch up here.) 

That refining is called conching. The goal of conching is to refine the particles in the cacao mass small enough that the tongue cannot detect them, which means the chocolate will feel nice and smooth in texture.

But let me back up for a minute. At the end of Day One, after our chocolate was in the refiner with the other ingredients, we had time left. So Chef Francois grabbed some chocolate that he had made the day before and we tried our hand at tempering it.

Tempering. That's an odd word if you're like me and have no idea about anything relating to the science of cooking and confection making. They temper steel, I think. Well, they temper chocolate, too. When chocolate begins to cool and become solid, what's happening is that the cocoa butter is turning from a fatty liquid into a crystal. Tempering is, basically, making sure that only very small crystal are formed, giving the chocolate a glossy finish, a nice snap when you break it, and lets it re-melt around body temperature.

Tempering chocolate consists of heating and cooling it to some very specific temperatures, and those temperatures and the order in which they are achieved ensure that only very small crystals are formed. Once that is done, the chocolate cools very nicely, it's shiny, it snaps well, and melts just as you would expect it to. You can temper chocolate very carefully on a stove, but the industry has, of course, created some high tech machines to run through the correct procedures automatically. 

We'd be using the machine to temper ours, but first, Chef Francois wanted us to try tempering some chocolate on the big marble table there in the kitchen.

We poured a little of the chocolate out on the cool table and began spreading it and scraping it back into itself, trying to bring the temperature down evenly throughout. Once it started thickening, we'd put it back in the bowl, and the chocolate that was beginning to crystallize would hopefully cause the whole batch to solidify with the small crystal structure.

For some of us, it worked. For some of us, not so much.

We used this chocolate to make some raspberry ganache-filled bon bons. Since this wasn't the chocolate we made ourselves, I wasn't too excited about it, but it was still fun.

Ok, less talk, more pictures of chocolate making! Back to Day Two!

We drained the refining machine once the conching was done. You can see the thin stream of chocolate pouring into the bin underneath in this picture.

Oh man! That is brand new, sweetened, delicious, molten chocolate! The urge to just put my hands or face into this bin was almost overwhelming!

Still going! We filled this bin just about to the top. I still get chills just looking at the pictures!

One last step before putting it into the tempering machine - sifting. This machine had a fine mesh screen on top, and when switched on, it vibrated like crazy. The liquid chocolate would slowly work its way through the mesh, run down the pan, and drip into the bowl.

I can seriously look at pictures of liquid chocolate all day long. 

You know that chocolate river in the original "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory"? I loved that! I dreamed of seeing that in person! And this, while not quite a river, is 20 lbs of liquid chocolate!

Click on this picture to see the big version. For reals.

Here you can see why we're sifting it. See that grainy stuff? That's the germ of the cacao bean. It's a hard little stem inside the bean, and it's so hard it doesn't really break down through all the grinding and refining we've done. Being almost impossible to grind down, the easiest solution is to sift it out.

Done, everything sifted.

This is the high tech tempering machine I was talking about earlier. You just pour all your chocolate into it, and it runs through an automatic cycle of temperatures so that the chocolate will crystallize perfectly.

Once it's been in here through the whole cycle, it's ready to go! Ready to be turned into candies, molded into bars, or for bathing in-- I mean, molding into... uh... nevermind.

This is how we tested the tempering. We'd run a spoon under the stream, then set it aside for a few minutes to see how it cooled.

The first thing we made were little chocolate candies called mendiants. Mendiant means "beggar" in French, and the original toppings were meant to represent the robe colors of four different monasteries.

They start with just a dab of chocolate. Once the pan was covered, we banged it on the table a few times to smooth them out. Then we started putting on one each of our toppings.

We made two of these sheets. Tons of them! Part of the class is leaving with a pretty huge box of chocolates, and these were a big part of that.

And of course, we'd tasted our chocolate many times by now. Delicious! It was very fruity, almost tangy, with hints of citrus. Insane that all this flavor came just from the bean! And, having tasted every stage along the way, I could very much recognize the flavor of the roasted bean in this finished chocolate.

We made some other things with our chocolate, too!

We made hundreds of these little tasting squares.

We made up a batch of buttery smooth caramel and used these little cacao pod-shaped molds, making caramel filled chocolates. Chef Francois added a touch of sea salt to the top of each when we took them out of the molds.

This caramel was insanely good! I made sure to write down the recipe.

And that was it! We were done! We'd turned 30 lbs of cacao beans into 20 lbs of amazing chocolate, then made candies and tasting squares with it. There's almost no better way to spend two days!

We also made some chocolate mousse the first day, which is what you see in the middle in the picture above. We used different chocolates they had there in the kitchen to make them.

Our finished raspberry bon bons.

The completed caramels, topped with sea salt.

Our tasting squares, just the pure chocolate.

And our mendiants. With the fruits and nuts, and knowing how pure the chocolate was, these almost felt healthy to eat!

Also, during the first day, we all talked about why we were there taking the class, our love of chocolates, and the great variety of artisan chocolate makers that are out there now.

On Day Two, a couple of us brought in some artisan chocolates, and at the end of the day, we had a little chocolate tasting party! Holy cow, this was just astounding! Trying all these amazingly different flavors, and having our own chocolate there to taste with them. The variety was just unbelievable.

Recently, a lot of high end chocolate makers have been giving out chocolate and wine pairing advice, or even chocolate and cheese pairings. You should try them! Or, like we did, just get a bunch of artisan chocolates from around the country (or world), invite some friends over, and taste all of them, compare them, see how different they are. You'll be amazed.

And that was chocolate making class! I left with a big box with over a pound of the chocolate we had made, and if you know me or have been following this blog, you very well know I plan on making a hot chocolate with some of it.

If you're in the Los Angeles area and are interested in taking this class, keep your eye on  Qzina's website. At the time of this posting, they haven't yet announced another class, but I'm sure they will.