One of my favorite parts of my job is teaching people to make small batches of chocolate in our Chocolate 201 class. It’s not just because it’s fun to make chocolate, but I really love geeking out about chocolate and answering people’s questions.

Every class, I get asked about what else you can put into the mini-melangers—vanilla, cocoa butter, types of sweeteners—and some about inclusions, but people most frequently ask: what is the lowest percentage chocolate possible? Since Dandelion Chocolate only uses cocoa beans and cane sugar, I decided to learn Dandelion-style by making a bunch of test batches to find out.

In class, the lowest percentage that we make is 65%—which describes how much of the bar is composed of ingredients made from cacao. A cacao bean is naturally about 50% fat (cocoa butter) and 50% solids (essentially cocoa powder). At Dandelion, we grind whole beans, but chocolate can also be made by separating the beans into its components and recombining those in different proportions. For example, our 70% chocolate bars are made from 70% cocoa nibs and 30% sugar by weight. A 70% chocolate bar could also be made from 50% cocoa nibs, 15% cocoa butter, 5% cocoa powder, and 30% sugar. The percentage on a bar typically refers to the percentage of ingredients that come from cacao. How much of each component exists, between cocoa butter and non-fat cocoa solids, doesn’t matter.

The limiting factor in making a low percentage dark chocolate bar is the amount of fat available for the solids to be suspended in. Chocolate is a “sol” (a solid suspended in liquid) which is similar to an emulsion (a liquid suspended in a liquid). Without enough fat to suspend the solid particles, the chocolate won’t work.

The lowest percentage of fat possible in chocolate according to the book The Science of Chocolate by Stephen T. Beckett is 25%.  Since I wanted to stick to two ingredients: cocoa beans and sugar, I did some math to figure out a few recipes to test this fact.

Recipe 1: 55% Madagascar cocoa nibs + 45% cane sugar (approx. 25% fat in batch)

Recipe 2: 50% Madagascar cocoa nibs + 50% cane sugar (approx. 23% fat in batch)

The trials are underway.

The first trial is to make a batch of chocolate which contains the “minimum” 25% cacao. The second is to make a batch of chocolate which contains less fat than the claimed minimum. I expected the second recipe not to work, and I suspected failure would either mean the machine would stop turning and the chocolate would seize up, or clumps of chocolate would be tossed around the room (it’s happened before in our R&D space).

Starting both of these batches was painful. Adding that much sugar meant that the chocolate got really thick and as the wheels in the melanger turned, they flung chocolate out of the machine, so I had to put lids on and let them mellow then add more sugar. The entire process of getting these started took significantly longer than normal, and at the end of the night, they looked like frosting and fudge and I was mostly concerned that they would be too thick for the machines to keep turning and that they might ultimately stop over night.

The next morning, I was relieved to find them still running, but they didn’t look quite ready, so I left them to refine for four more hours more than usual and they still didn’t look like normal chocolate.

Normally, chocolate flows, but with this amount of sugar, and not enough fat to hold it all, it seemed like wet sand. The following photos show what it looked like after I spread out the chocolate and after I shook it to get it to settle so I could add more. The resulting “chocolate” reminded me of playing with non-Newtonian fluids (e.g. “Oobleck,” or cornstarch and water) as a child.

The consistency was so thick it resembled “Oobleck.”

When I tasted them, the first thing that struck me was mouthfeel, and the gritty texture of sugar granules instead of the smooth, blissful mouthfeel of chocolate converting from solid to liquid. It felt more like eating Mexican drinking chocolate than a chocolate bar.

There was too much sugar to be suspended in the small amount of fat for both recipes, which made the entire process difficult, so I wouldn’t recommend either of these recipes to someone making chocolate at home. Unless, of course, you get a kick out of pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

The Results:

In the end, it looks like I’ll have to do another round of recipes with a higher percentage of fat. The only way I could see a 55% cocoa batch of chocolate turning into something other than a gritty bar is by adding an additional ingredient like cocoa butter or soy lecithin, and that is a theory for another day. Even though we only use two ingredients in our chocolate and we’re quite happy with our recipes at Dandelion, it’s always interesting to explore how chocolate reacts to different things. We won’t be changing anything, but I’ll still be playing around with this idea in the meantime. If you’re curious about the math I used to work out the recipes, it’s all below.

How to calculate the percentage of fat in chocolate:

Last year, we sent a bar of 70% Madagascar to be tested and found out it had 32% fat. Other chocolate makers who use Madagascar beans will get slightly variable results because when beans are roasted in the husk, small amounts of cocoa butter migrate to the husk of the bean. Since sugar has no fat, all the fat is from the nibs:

.32 fat  x  1 bar   = .32/.7 = .457% fat/nibs

1 bar  =  .7 nibs

Our test batches are 1000 grams.  To make a batch with 25% fat, I needed 250 grams of cocoa butter (fat).  So 250/.457% is about 550g nibs and 450g sugar.

To try a lower percentage of fat, I had to decrease the nibs in the recipe.  50% sugar, 50% cacao which means 500g cocoa nibs * .457% fat/cocoa nib = 228.5g fat, out of a 1000g batch is about 23% fat. Since this is lower than the 25%, theoretically it shouldn’t work. In the end, it didn’t break the machines, but it turned out incredibly grainy and not at all like the smooth chocolate we enjoy eating. I imagine it would be impossible to temper too.

On the back label of each of our chocolate bars, there is a pair of handwritten initials. These belong to the bar’s “owner,” the person who developed the roast profile that we use each time we make that chocolate. It’s an old Dandelion tradition to assign a new owner to each new set of beans, and it’s not a small job. But, as I came to realize over the last few months, it’s a wildly interesting and delicious process that uncovers some mystery, and leaves you with more surprises than you could hope to understand.

When I heard we had bought beans from Tanzania, I wanted to develop the roast profile because I hoped to get closer to the process, but also because I have a sentimental attachment to the place. I have some family in Dar es Salaam, and I lived there with my cousin for a short while a couple of years back. I remember it fondly: the dusty air, the open markets and their heaps of beans and mangoes, milk in plastic bags that I bought with the dubious scraps of Swahili I’d gleaned, and the unfinished dirt roads that, under the wheels of a Bajaji, seemed bent on killing you. It was not a romantic time in my life, but I miss it.

I had been in touch with Simran Bindra, the cofounder of Kokoa Kamili, while we were developing the Sourcing Report at Dandelion, and I’d learned all about the way Kokoa Kamili is raising the quality and the price floor of cacao in Tanzania. I had also learned that he and my cousin were good friends, not a huge surprise given the size of the expat community in Tanzania, but a serendipitous one nonetheless. When it came time to develop the roast profile, I dove right in like it was meant to be.

Sorting the first of the beans from Kokoa Kamili.

To begin the first round of tests, I cast the customary wide net of roast times and temperatures to see what flavors came forth across the spectrum. I collected votes from across the company, and we were surprised to find that the two favorites were a whopping 40° apart, at 180° and 220°, both at 12 minutes (for a single kilo at a time). Both of those test batches were lovely and balanced; the former had an unusual light, sparkling acidity, like young raspberries, and the latter a handful of warmer, more chocolatey notes. And so, I split the focus between those two, and narrowed the parameters around them.

Throughout the first few test rounds, I prepared twenty to twenty-five kilos of the beans at a time (with lots of generous help from other Dandelions). We roasted, cracked, and winnowed the beans when the production team was on lunch or had gone home for the day. When the nibs were ready, we brought them upstairs to the row of miniature melangers that we use for test batches. These baby refiners are called Premier Wonder Grinders, and they live on the mezzanine upstairs.

For each test batch, I weighed out 700 grams of nibs and 300 grams sugar, the right ratio for our 70% bars. In order to give the baby melangers a head start on the refining process, we pre-grind the nibs by running them through peanut grinder first. Depending on the roast and the beans’ natural ratio of fat to solid, the nibs turn into anything between a dry and crumbly mess to a wet and goopy sludge. Next, it must be fed slowly, chunk by chunk, into the spinning grinders. We let those run for an hour, until the nibs are broken down into a thick “liquor,” and then we add the sugar.

Weighing the nibs.

In the earliest tests, we control sugar as a variable, adding the same amount to each batch at the same time. Only when we’ve nailed the roast do we play with the timing of the sugar.

The next morning, after about 14 to 17 hours in the baby melangers, it’s time to pull the batches. This involves a fair amount of spatulas, scrapers, silicon trays, gloves, plastic bags, and, if you’re me, spilling. I poured a little bit of each batch into a mold divided into a hundred little cubes, then poured some more into a plastic bag for record keeping in our “chocofile,” and dumped the rest into a tin pan for cooling, destined for making brownies at home. Once cooled, I popped the little cubes into four or five paper cups for a blind tasting, and politely coerced every person I could find in the factory into tasting and voting. Then, I’d waddle down the stairs balancing tiny melangers on either arm to spray them clean with water in the kitchen.

At each of the six rounds of test batches, I couldn’t find that magical, sparkling balance of tart red fruit and warm chocolate tones. I experimented with roasts that were only five degrees or one minute longer, and that perfect balance slipped away. I couldn’t understand it, and I kept going back and tasting the choco-file to make sure I was remembering right. Would we really stick with a roast from the first round? After all that prepping and weighing and roasting and scraping? But sometimes, that’s how it happens. It could take a year and countless tries to get it perfect, but sometimes you nail it right away.

In the end, that’s what we went with. My personal taste skews more towards warm, chocolatey chocolate. I like smoked nuts, heavy caramel, and even a hint of leather here and there. (In my past life, I must have been an old man who smoked a pipe and drank lots of scotch.) But I love this chocolate. It moves from a sparkling, juicy red fruit to a rich brownie batter finish. Like raspberries dipped in fudge, or molten chocolate cake with a strawberry on top.

We just made our first big batch in a 30-kilo melanger on the production floor, and we will temper the first round this week. If all goes well, it’ll be on shelves before the end of June! Stay tuned.

Flat or cracked, bad beans come in all shapes and sizes.

Crab claws. Baby shoes. Grasshoppers. When shipments of beans come to port, sometimes we get more than we were counting on.

Making chocolate from the bean means, of course, starting with the bean. In the factory, we’ve dedicated an entire sealed room—“the bean room”—to sorting and weighing the beans we receive. If you’ve dropped by the factory and taken a peek, you’ll likely have seen us shaking and sifting mounds of beans, inspecting the husks for cracks and holes, then plucking out the damaged goods and sweeping the rest into bins for roasting. If you’ve been inside the room, you’ll have noticed the cool temperature and the pop music pulsing from the Jambox in the corner. The former is meant to keep cocoa moths at bay, the latter to keep our rhythm steady.

Sometimes, a bean stays attached to the placenta—the fibrous column in the center of a cacao pod.

Sorting is, by far, one of the slower and more time intensive steps of the chocolate making process. So why do it? And why by hand?

A few reasons, actually. Making chocolate from just two ingredients means that everything in the bean shows up in the bar, so we’ve got to make sure we’re not letting compromised beans pollute otherwise good batches. Undesirable beans show up in a hundred different ways—cracked, clustered, flat—and the best way to sort them out is with our good, old-fashioned hands. Like most of the equipment in the factory, the industrial sorters of the world were designed to deal with a food that’s not cacao, and while we’re very close to finding an optical sorter that might help us with this process, it’s all manpower for now.

After we sort the beans, we roast and crack them. So why do we ditch the cracked raw beans? If a bean is cracked, even slightly, it means there is a chance of contamination. This isn’t dangerous on a sanitation level (microbes are killed during roasting), so much as it is a hazard to flavor. Depending on where beans are grown or harvested, they can cross paths with everything from chickens to monkeys to all kinds of ambient bacteria. If a bean was damaged at origin, there’s no telling what it encountered.

If there are no cracks, we look for tiny holes. A small hollow at the tip of a bean suggests one of two things: germination or moths. During harvest, pods are twisted off the tree trunk, usually sliced open with a machete, and emptied into heaps or boxes for fermentation. Over the course of a week, they are flipped and turned at regular intervals until fermentation is complete, and then spilled out onto a deck or screen to dry. During fermentation, acids develop and the temperature rises, effectively killing the bean before it sprouts. In some cases, though, a bean will sprout through the husk just before it dies, poking a perfect circle through the end. Holes are also signs that a cocoa moth may have made its way through. In either case, the disruption alters the flavor development of the bean, so we ditch it.

After fermentation and drying, when the moisture content is low enough, beans are be bagged and loaded into containers for shipping.  Soon enough, they land at the Port of Oakland where they’ll be kept until we show up with a truck to haul them back to the factory. Beans sustain a fair amount of jostling throughout transit, so cracks can happen at this stage too.

Beans that dry in clusters will not roast evenly and must be sorted out.

We can account for most of the damage we find, the cracks and such, but there is still mystery around how some of the things we come upon ended up in a bag of beans. If we could make a highlight reel of the best finds, it would probably look like a cross between the Little Mermaid’s treasure trove of trinkets, a flea market, and a junk yard. In the end, it’s a bit like a scavenger hunt, except this time the prize is a desiccated fibrous mass, the occasional screw, or a piece of a shoe. And though we might ditch them, the bad beans are some of the most beautiful. Twisted, clustered, cracked or stacked, the rogues are striking and whimsical—a poetic little intersection of art and food. Despite all that, it’s still about flavor at the end of the day so we’ll just keep those for the art collection.