The Improvement of Chocolate

While I’ve always considered myself a lover of chocolate, I had never made my own before. I can now accurately say that this finished product I much better than the bean it is made from. After smashing the beans on the counter, we tried the beans in order to taste the raw material’s flavors: coffee, banana, wine and worst of all olive, which I personally hate in all forms. After crushing the beans in a mortar and pestle in order to create a dark, cocoa bean paste. The drinks made from this paste such as the hot chocolate with cinnamon sticks or the tea from the bean shells were both much better than the beans alone. After learning about the 24 hour refining process, it was finally time to fill our personal molds with dark or milk chocolate, with milk chocolate being my personal choice. We could fill the molds with almost anything from kiwicha (which tasted really good and made the chocolate crunchy) to salt (which ended up being pretty terrible). The end products were little truffle sized chocolates that in my opinion tasted really good, with the oreo filled ones being the best. Overall, this class was really fun and the chocolate only lasted about 2 days it was really good while it did.