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How to Make Homemade Chocolate

by Carmelia Posted on July 28th, 2009
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If you’re a real chocolate lover, you have to try a hand at making your own chocolate. Making your own chocolate may take several tries before you arrive at a recipe and mix that you like, but you will enjoy it every step of the way. Here’s how

Ingredients

  • Cacao or cocoa beans

    • chocolates

  • Milk
  • Sugar
  • Cocoa butter
  • Nuts, raisins, etc. (optional)

Tools

  • Oven or coffee roaster
  • Chocolate molds
  • Juicer (optional)
  • Spatula

Procedure

  1. Set your coffee roaster or oven at anywhere between 250 and 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Let the cacao beans roast from five to 35 minutes at the hottest temperature.

    2. chocolates

  2. Start gradually reducing the heat until you begin hearing the beans to crack. The cracking usually indicates that the roasting is complete.
  3. Let the beans cool for a little bit. Once cooled, start shelling the beans by removing the husk from the nib. This can get a bit tricky, so proper roasting some patience doing this by hand is the most efficient way of shelling.
  4. Once you’re done shelling the beans, start grinding them. Some certain types of juicers can be quite handy for this. If you don’t have one, you can do this by hand, but be warned that this can be quite messy.
  5. Once ground, put the cacao beans in a bowl and add cocoa butter, milk and sugar. Add each ingredients by small increments at a time. Each person making their own chocolate varies in the amounts they put in. Decide on your preferences, and you can perfect the chocolate recipe in subsequent tries.
  6. Add your other recipes such as raisins and nuts to add a little twist in your chocolate.
  7. Use a spatula to gently fold over the chocolate with its added ingredients. Continue folding the chocolate upon itself. This step is called conching, and the more you fold, the oilier and smoother the chocolate will be. The less it’s done, the grittier the chocolate will be.
  8. Once you’re satisfied with the texture, cool them to around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Pour the chocolate into chocolate molds. Let the chocolate harden, and you now have your own handmade chocolate.

* After accomplishing your first chocolate, you should also try making your own chocolate cake, learn how to bake chocolate cake.

Watch The Video

Homemade Chocolate Bars

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Last Minute Christmas Gift: Home Made Chocolates

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  1. Chris Says:
    August 6th, 2009 at 12:09 pm

    Your outline for making chocolate is a good starting point but if anyone is interested in doing this, they will need to do further research. Your statement that one can grind cacoa beans by hand is misleading. To make chocolate as people think of chocolate, you will need a high quality juicer (try a champion brand, they are known to work) to liquify the beans into cocoa liquor. It is not possible as far as I know to produce cocoa liquor by hand grinding, in fact, most juicers cannot even do the job. Step 7 I will point out is not conching as you discribe it, but rather tempering. By folding the chocolate over and maintaining the proper temperature, you are tempering the chocolate, creating even crystalization of the cacao butter crystals and giving the chocolate a nice shiny finish. The process of conching is where you constantly grind the chocolate for as long as 72 hours in a conching machine to eliminate all the cocoa solids from the mixture. You cannot properly conch chocolate by hand, you do need specialized equipement for this. Never the less, unconched chocolate is still delicious even if it has more texture than store bought quality chocolate.

 

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