Home › The World's Kitchen › Home-Made Chocolate
Home-Made Chocolate
(To roast cacao for the chocolate.) Procure a half pound each Caracas and Puerto Cabello raw cacao in shell, being careful to select nuts intact, that is to say, not bruised or broken. Should there be any broken ones among them lay aside for further action. Place cacao in a small coffee roaster, close cover, place over a clear fire on range (the entire barrel of roaster over fire), and gently turn at the rate of twenty turns per minute, continuing for twelve minutes without ceasing. Rapidly take roaster from its stand, briskly shake barrel, immediately replace it on stand and rapidly resume gentle turning at same rate for eight minutes longer. Remove it again, and should there be any bruised or broken cacao left add to the other, tightly slide cover on, briskly shake, replace on fire and roast again same as before, but for six minutes only. Remove cacao from roaster to a tin, cover with a dry cloth and let cool for ten minutes. Carefully shell cacao, place latter in a tin and shells in a bowl, keeping them for future use. Briskly shuffle cacao in tin pan and blow off all remnants of shells. N.B. If no coffee roaster is on hand to roast cacao then use an untinned kitchen basin and roast in oven to a good golden brown.
This is only the first stage of chocolate-making: roasting and winnowing the beans. Everything that follows — grinding, conching, sweetening — is assumed knowledge, so treat this as a roasting procedure rather than a finished recipe.
- What to buyCaracas and Puerto Cabello are Venezuelan shipping-port names for cacao, not cultivars in the modern sense; Caracas beans were the benchmark fine flavour bean of the period. Today the equivalent is raw, unroasted, fermented and dried cacao beans from a specialty supplier, sold in whole-bean form. Two half-pound lots blended is a sensible ratio to keep.
- Sorting broken beansThe instruction to hold back bruised and broken nuts and add them only for the final six minutes is the sharpest thing in the recipe. Exposed cotyledon roasts far faster than a bean inside its shell and will scorch bitter if it goes in at the start.
- The coffee roasterA hand-cranked drum roaster set over the firebox of a coal or wood range. A modern drum coffee roaster works, as does a stovetop popcorn crank pan over medium heat. Twenty turns a minute is a slow, steady rhythm, not vigorous agitation.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none; it says only 'a good golden brown'. Cacao is roasted much cooler than coffee: 250-300F for roughly 20-30 minutes, stirring every five minutes, is the range usually recommended for home roasting. The stated total of 26 minutes over the fire is a reasonable guide, but judge by smell and by tasting a cooled bean rather than by the clock.
- "Untinned kitchen basin"Presumably because tin melts at around 450F and a tinned surface can be damaged by direct roasting heat. Use a bare steel sheet pan or a cast-iron skillet; nothing enamelled or non-stick.
- Cooling and shellingThe ten-minute rest under a cloth lets the shells dry and loosen. Cracking the cooled beans and winnowing in front of a fan is faster than blowing, and a bowl-shuffle in a light draught separates the light husk from the heavier nib very effectively.
- The saved shellsCacao husk was kept deliberately, as the recipe says. Steeped in boiling water it makes a light chocolate-flavoured tisane, called cascarilla in some Spanish-speaking regions, and husk was a cheap commodity in its own right.
- YieldOne pound of whole beans gives roughly 13 to 14 ounces of nib after shelling. To go further you need to grind the nib to a liquor — a melanger or a stone mill; a domestic blender will not carry it past a coarse paste.
Chocolate reached the household kitchen as a bean long before it reached it as a bar. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cacao was traded and quoted by port of origin, and Caracas beans — the Venezuelan criollo and trinitario cacaos shipped from that coast, Puerto Cabello among its main outlets — carried the highest reputation in the European and American trade. By 1900 factory chocolate from Van Houten, Baker and their rivals had made home roasting largely obsolete for ordinary cooks, so an entry like this one may well preserve in print a craft practice at the moment it was passing out of use. The detail about saving the shells is a reminder that nothing in a costly imported ingredient was thrown away: cascarilla tea from cacao husk was a familiar cheap drink in chocolate-producing and chocolate-importing regions alike.