We are Nibbys, a chocolate family. We love chocolate and want to share with you how to make it yourself, as well as demystify the process. Besides chocolate, we love making deserts the right way, ie knowing the ingredients that go in and making it both healthy and great tasting (at least the little Nibbys think so). Now, lets make bean to bar chocolate.
Making Chocolate (the way it was intended ie. bean to bar) is a 5 step process. We have created the instructions for chocolate making 101 with everything you should already have at home, consider this chocolate making exploration stage. We also created the instructions which we use that requires a modest investment in equipment, lets call this chocolate making 201, consider this a more serious stage. As we continue in our journey likely there will be a chocolate making 301, which we are yet to graduate to.
Five Basic Steps Of Making Chocolate
- Step 0: Get cocoa beans,ideally single source, organic and fair trade (while these are called "raw" they are actually already fermented)
- Step 1: Roast the cocoa beans, you can vary the duration and temperature and same bean will end up tasting a lot different.
- Step 2: Crack the beans
- Step 3: Winnow, this is to remove the husk from the nibs (this is why we are called Nibbys)
- Step 4: Refine the nibs along with a sweetener (like organic cane sugar)
- Step 5:Make it into a bar
At this point you have your first chocolate bar ! (assuming you did not sample a lot in Step 4)
The more detailed instructions are on our Making Chocolate 101 and 201 pages.
