TOM'S REPORT, TRIP COTE D'IVOIRE 2023 -- JUNE 17, N'Douci and Cocoa Education Center, Testing new machines, 1ST Batch chocolate

 

SATURDAY, JUNE 17

We started our day with a dish of Garba:  Attiéké (Fermented cassava) with grilled Tuna and a mixture of oil, onions, and hot chillies.  Breakfast of Champions or Champignons (mushrooms), depending on your sense of humor.

Then we went to the cocoa center.  The rest of the day was hot, exhausting, and confused.  We waited a long time for the representative from the torrefacteur manufacturer to come.  But by 10 PM, we had a 15 Kg batch of chocolate going in the mélangeur.

At several points I wasn’t sure it would all work.  And even now, it’s going to take Roger et al. a lot of perseverance to get it right.  At this writing, Sunday morning, we have to temper the chocolate.  I still have one machine to master—the temperer.  

At the very least, we will be able to temper chocolate in the bowl and make disks and bars and wrap them.

We started by waiting for the electrician, as none of the new circuits were live.  While we waited, we got started cracking and winnowing the 5 Kg of roasted cocoa beans that David had sold us.  Without the 5 Kg of roasted unpeeled beans and 20 Kg of fermented dried beans, I don’t know what we would have done.  That 5 Kg of roasted beans saved the day, because we could get started on a small batch of chocolate while we waited for the electrician.

 

 

We started by testing the yield on the beans.  We weighed out 200 g at a pop, cracked and winnowed them, and then reweighed them.

 

Then we set about the cracking and winnowing operation.

 

Using a plunger is not a good idea.  The beans should self feed.  Using a plunger means you’re feeding them too fast or they are too wet and are gumming up the gears or they are too warm and the cocoa butter is making them sticky.

 

Left, you can see , if you look carefully, how separation occurs.  The nibs are falling into the stainless steel pan and the hulls are being blown out the top.

 

 

 

 

Once we had cracked and winnowed the 5 Kg of roasted beans, we did a 2 Kg batch of 70% chocolate:

1.2 kg nibs
0.2 Kg melted cocoa butter
0.6 Kg unrefined sugar

Roger melted the cocoa butter in the microwave and poured it into the mélangeur.  Then we added the nibs gradually but not too slowly.

Once we had added all the nibs and were grinding away and as the heat of the day rose, the little mélangeur started to turn itself off.  This meant that the motor was overheating.   But it would turn back on whenever the motor cooled off a bit.  I checked the little circuit breaker at the back, but it was clearly defective.

Meanwhile, we couldn’t get the big mélangeur to turn on.  Peggie called Balu in Georgia and he walked us through it.  The emergency off switch was just a little flaky and was preventing the machine from turning on.  So we managed to troubleshoot that.  Our number-one concern was addressed. 

 

We went on a shopping trip as we needed some items.  We bought a fan to cool off the little mélangeur.  We had bought this machine to show basic principles and to make it possible to make small batches in order to test the flavor of the beans.

We also bought a new gas regulator, because the old one was spewing propane into the room.  Or, it was a butane regulator being used on propane.

The fan solved the cutting off problem;  we turned the machine around so the wind could penetrate the vent holes and cool the motor.  This worked.

 

And the new gas pressure regulator also worked, so the torréfacteur man was able to get the machine lit up.

As you can see, the gas burns yellow, which is a sign that it is not getting enough oxygen.  This is rather concerning, as a natural outcome of poorly combusted gas is carbon monoxide. 

 

Fortunately, the window is wide open as well as the double door.  

Ultimately, it took 45 minutes to properly roast the beans.  We had to thread a fairly small needle.  If we over-roasted, the chocolate would taste smoky.  If we under-roasted, the soft beans would gum up the cracker.  I had to take many samples, cracking them in my mouth and feeling the texture.

I made a point of passing beans around and talking about the importance of threading the needle—of roasting until the beans were properly dry and would crack easily.

I finally decided the beans met the standard and we opened the door and allowed them to spill out.  At this point, I found out that there is no way to actually completely empty the machine.  You have to make your own wooden rake and thread it through the exit door to scrape out the last beans so they don’t damage the flavor of the next batch.

Also, the cooling motor was cobbled together and the housing protecting the operator from the cooling fan couldn’t even be fastened on as it was from another motor.   So the housing just fell off, and we had to take care not to be cut by the exposed whirring blades.  

Once we opened the end of the roaster, the beans fell out into the cooling tray, but the motor stopped working and we couldn’t stir them.

So, we transferred the beans to a container and spread them out on a piece of cardboard and the rest on a sheet of plastic in a thin layer so they would cool. 

Right: Laying the beans out to cool them.  It was about 95 degrees, but they cooled anyway.

Roger will have to take care of interacting with the manufacturer and request that they install switches on the outside of the machine so that the operator can safely turn off the drum motor and the cooling motor.  Here is a note that I wrote to Roger about the torrefacteur:

 “Roger, the following things have to be changed on the torrefacteur:
1.     Install on/off switches on the roaster and cooler
2.     Make changes so the gas burns blue rather than yellow.
3.     Repair the cooling motor on the bean cooler, as it is broken.
4.     Make a stick for scraping out the last beans.

Otherwise, the roaster is too dangerous to operate.”

We found that freshly roasted beans are hard to crack and winnow, as there is still a little residual softness that causes the cracker gears to gum up.  

It got so bad, that I put the cracker in the refrigerator along with the beans to chill the fat so it wouldn’t bind the nibs together and block the cracker.

Finally, we got a bowl of beans cold enough that we could start the cracking and winnowing process.  We needed to prepare 9 Kg of beans.  I decided to start the batch with 1 Kg of cocoa butter and 4.5 Kg of nibs, get that running, then go out to eat, and then come back and finish the batch off.  

Left: Here are two of Roger’s workers cracking and winnowing.  The man in the corner is our illustrious driver.

 

Right, the enormous mélangeur at 33% capacity.  It holds 100 lbs of chocolate and we were making 15 Kg or 33 lbs.

 

Once we got 4.5 Kg of nibs and 1 Kg of cocoa butter in the mélangeur, we went out to eat—at 8 PM.  Peggie went back to the hotel, as the heat had really tired her.  I had my last dish of carp à l’Abidjanaise and then we returned to the center.  Klaus, bless his heart, had cracked another couple kilos of beans, so I added them to the chocolate, which was considerably smoother and runnier than when we left.  I added the 2 Kg of beans and all the sugar (4.5 Kg of sugar) and then I went to help Klaus finish the last beans.

 

The entire batch was complete and we returned to the hotel at 10 PM, allowing the machine to run overnight.