Following on my update from last night (with more photos now).

It all started really well.

Step 1 was to lay the cacao beans on a cookie sheet and preheat the oven.

The oven was preheated to 250ºF but my gauge indicated that it was closer to 275ºF.  The beans were in the oven for 25 minutes. I reduced to 200ºF at about 20 minutes.  The smell started out acidic at first, and smoothly progressed to a deep dark brownie smell.

After those 25 minutes, you could barely tell that they had changed, but could see that they were a bit drier.  If you look closer, you could see that they were in actuality roasted.  The first bean that I picked up was easy to peel, and you could see how the nibs came together.

Step 2 was to crack and shell the nibs.  At first, I tried to keep them whole, but realized quickly that it was a pointless effort.  So I went to town on them and cracked and broke them however I could (I even tried using a cleaned coffee grinder).  The result…

Step 3 was to winnow the husks from the nibs.  I used my wife’s hairdryer to do the trick, outside in 17ºF weather… (Yay!!).  This part of the process was the one that had me the most concerned originally, as I was afraid I was going to blow away a lot of useable raw material.  It turns out that using a shallow mix bowl did the trick.  The only thing that was tricky was holding the hairdryer at the same time as motioning the bowl in a circular pattern with a little lift. After a few minutes, the results:

It was interesting, at this point to notice that some of the beans that had not broken up into nibs had different colors.  I am not sure if it’s a product of the roasting or a product of the batch itself.  I am also not sure how that will affect the taste at the end.

Step 4 was to grind the beans into a cacao liquor.  Now one thing to notice is that the nibs look very hard, and one would hardly believe there is any liquor or liquid material there.  Yes there are oils, but really it looked like you would get only a little oil out of them.

So I pulled out our trusty Breville Juicer which we have not used in a while and were considering parting ways with.

The juicer is pretty robust and is designed to extract juice out of harder vegetables/fruit.  So I thought I could be careful and try it out.  So in went the nibs!

Round 1: Pretty much turned everything to dust…
Round 2: Well I guess dust can be turned into dust further…
Round 3: Ok… more dust… now it’s getting out of the machine…
Round 4: Oh, the dust is start to clump a little… interesting!
Round 5: Ahh Liqui… BAM! A loud popping sound!  At first I thought it was the motor that had gone (it came so suddenly), but the machine was still working with now abnormal noises. So I turned it off, and started to take it apart.  Looking in, I saw that the filter basket had ripped apart.  Likely from the amount of pressure caused by the dense crust of cacao dust that was forming.

But looking in, I saw something else…

The first sign of chocolate liquor!

So overall, I think this was a decent first push, but definitely need to learn from the incident with the filter and find a good work-around.  I may get a manual grinder (cheaper)… we’ll see…

The expedition continues!