In my quest to expand my culinary knowledge, I signed up for a class on a Sunday morning at Dandelion Chocolate in the Mission. Dandelion Chocolate is unique in the sense that they are one of the few bean to bar manufacturers in San Francisco. Basically, their team sources their beans directly from suppliers in far off places like Belize, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea, and brings them back to their small processing facility in SF where they roast and grind the beans. The only ingredient they add to the ground up beans is sugar, and then they temper the mixture into bar form, so the flavors of the beans stand out on their own!
Most commercial chocolate bars have many more additives, including cacao butter, milk solids, emulsifiers and other mystery ingredients, so the average store bought chocolate bar is low in actual cacao content. Dandelion chocolate just released a bar that is 100% dark chocolate, which is about as “pure” as you can possibly get. We started the class off by tasting various cacao nibs and learned a little bit about the farms they were sourced from, because we needed to decide which cacao nibs we would be using for the chocolate we’d be making that day.
We tried various samples from Madagascar, Belize, Liberia, and Dominican Republic. The Madagascar chocolate was my favorite- it was fruity, with notes of citrus and berries. I ended up picking a mixture of that and the Belize chocolate. The other thing that I learned was that the percentage of chocolate denotes the percentage of cacao bean (duh!), so I opted for a mixture of 70% bean, 30% superfine sugar.
We then put the mixture in a grinder:
And then a contraption called a melanger, which apparently is the one piece of machinery that is essential if you want to make chocolate at home. Basically, you stick the ground up cacao beans and sugar in this contraption, and leave it in for 8-12 hours. It stirs the mixture constantly and tempers it, so its more of the consistency of what you would find in baking chocolate or a chocolate bar.
We then took a break, and our class instructors told us to pick any pastry we wanted from the Dandelion chocolate bakery. I was unable to say no, so I requested a dulce de leche tart and promptly scarfed it down, without any shame or guilt. It was delicious! Decadent, rich and everything a good dessert should be.
Next, we went downstairs to learn a little bit more about the process that happens from bean onwards. We sorted beans from Belize and Guatemala:
And picked out the stones and debris. Apparently, this is all done manually at Dandelion Chocolate by the workers. Certain countries are better than keeping debris out than others- apparently Belize is on top of their game, and Liberia has always been problematic…they end up throwing away 20% of what’s sent to them!They also mentioned that supply was sometimes affected by political or other issues in the countries that supplied the product- basically Liberia was a potential issue because of the Ebola outbreak.
We then stuck the beans in a machine that husked it and then ground them up.
The final step to make our cacao nibs was to stick it in a roaster- and then after 25 minutes, we had fresh cacao nibs! I took a couple bags home, not quite sure what to do with them but figured I could put them in smoothies, or coffee. I also left with a container of fresh baking chocolate- I tried a spoonful and nearly collapsed in joy.
Overall, an illuminating class and maybe a starting point to generate some ideas around my own food business.
Leave a Reply