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at Tue, 18 Jan 2005 18:07:54 GMT in
>, (Stuart S.
Berr) wrote :

>Does anyone ever try grinding chocolate nibs and brewing them in a
>coffee maker? Then adding sugar and milk (or making this in conjuncton
>with coffee for a choco-coffee blend)?

There are several problems with this.

First, if you grind cocoa beans in a coffee grinder, it will oil up the
grinder fairly badly because of all the cocoa butter. A cocoa bean is,
essentially, a nut, and putting nuts in coffee grinders leads to technical
difficulties. You need to have a grinder dedicated to chocolate.

Second, again, with that high fat content, chocolate is hydrophobic (repels
water). This is why mixing liquid milk with chocolate proved so difficult
for early chocolate experimenters, before they discovered that powdered
milk was much better for making chocolate bars. It's also one of the
reasons why adding water to melted chocolate is a big mistake. What this
means for "brewing" is that, unless you were to grind very fine, the
chocolate just sort of sits there and does little.

But grinding finely brings up its own issues. That starts to liquefy the
chocolate, and then you've got something close to coarse chocolate liquor -
a good drink in its own right but not necessarily what you'd want for
brewing. However, you can stir hot milk into it and this is very good.

An espresso machine could potentially extract flavour, but at the cost of
probable damage to the machine (or at least requiring major cleaning). Not
something I'd be willing to risk.

You can steep ground cocoa beans, a bit like tea, and this produces better
results because hot water will eventually soften the ground beans.

If you place ground cocoa beans in a hot slurry made with something
starchy, the starch draws out the fat and then the flavour gets better
extraction. However, most starches tend to dull the flavour of chocolate.
But it does make for another good, extremely satisfying, drink.

In general, however, using hot water with chocolate yields something that's
really pretty watery, overall. It doesn't have the kind of richness you
might hope for.

>
>>
>>...In fact, you can go all the way and make hot chocolate by literally
>>melting chocolate, either dark or milk. In this case, it's
>>inappropriate to use a mug - instead, an espresso demitasse is a useful
>>size.
>>
--
Alex Rast

(remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)

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