Make Chocolate at Home with No Fancy Tools | ChefSteps

http://chfstps.co/chocolate
Chef Nick Gavin shows us how chocolate is made, and a hack to whisking some up yourself at home with just three ingredients.

There are some sizeable barriers to making chocolate from scratch at home. Professional chocolatiers use a conche (and other high-end specialty equipment) to transform roasted cacao nibs into smooth chocolate. While there are conches available for at-home use (we even put one to work turning coffee beans into chocolate in our Dark Matter recipe), we wanted to find a way to make chocolate without expensive specialty equipment.

When it comes to chocolate, size does matter—micron size, that is. A micron is one-millionth of a meter, and it’s what determines/affects the overall mouthfeel of chocolate. Too big (about 35 μm) and that chocolate will be perceived as gritty on the palate. But if it’s too fine (around 10 μm), that perception switches to sticky. (This is where the conche shines, grinding cacao nibs to the perfect micron.)

We wondered if we could win the grinding game by skipping the conche and using already prepared professionally ground ingredients. The results were surprising. It turns out, you don’t need high-end specialty equipment to make a kick-ass chocolate bar at home that’s shiny, smooth, snappy, and super delicious.

0:00 Introduction
1:27 what's in chocolate?
2:09 the fine grind
2:46 conche vs blender
3:29 our ingredients
4:20 let's make chocolate
7:06 tempering
8:01 making the bars
9:51 a taste test