How to make bean to bar chocolate at home?

It's entirely possible to make your own bean to bar chocolate at home and we'll help you through that process here. Using this guide, you'll be following the exact steps we used when we first decided to start making chocolate. We'll go over each process and suggest which equipment we think you might need. Remember, chocolate is extremely temperamental and can be frustrating at times but stick with it, most of the things that can go wrong, are easily rectified without the need to waste any chocolate. We've learnt many lessons over the years, so if you have any questions, please ask them in the comment section below.

Things you'll need

  • 1: Melangeur

    The most important piece of equipment, a melangeur. This is used to grind down all of your ingredients into smooth, silky chocolate. We started with the Premier Wonder Grinder as did most other bean to bar makers. There are other brands available but we don't have experience with them.

  • 2: Bowl & Silicone Spatula

    You'll need a glass or metal bowl for tempering your chocolate. You'll also need a silicone spatula for stirring and wiping down the walls of your bowl.

  • 3: Thermometer

    Another extremely important piece of equipment. You'll need to monitor the temperatures at the different stages of tempering. You can use a candy thermometer but we prefer the handheld IR thermometers as there's less mess and they read the temperature instantly.

  • 4: Moulds

    You'll need something to pour your chocolate into once it has tempered. We use custom polycarbonate moulds at Heist but you can use silicone ones if you like or anything that has a non stick surface and is suitable for food contact.

  • 5: Ingredients

    The beauty of bean to bar chocolate is that it can be made with very few ingredients. We'll be making dark chocolate in this tutorial to keep things simple. You'll need some cocoa beans, sugar (we'll stick with plain white sugar for this recipe) , cocoa butter. That's it! You can experiment with different quantities of these and make the chocolate to your taste.

  • 6: Other bits and pieces.

    You'll also need a hairdryer if you're roasting your own beans, access to an oven and a sink. A couple of jugs will also come in handy. A drawing pin or something heavy to crack the beans, tea towel,

Melangeur Preparation

You've got your stone melangeur out of the box and setup. It will need a clean before you use it for the first time. To do this you'll need to put some neutral oil such as rapeseed and some sugar into the melangeur and leave it to run for an hour. This removes any of the granite dust that may be present on the stones. You'll only need to do this once. Clean with hot water afterward. Only use hot water to clean your stone melangeur from then on.

Roasting

So, you've got your beans, now you need to roast them. There's many different ways you can do this.Now, as with coffee, different roasting temperatures will get you different flavour profiles. Again, this is something you can experiment with but we'll assume you haven't got huge quantities of beans to waste getting the right temperature so we'll give you a good starting point of 130°C for 30 minutes.