"Jeffrey Chocolate"

Giovanni and Jeffrey discussing pruning techniques

Hello Jeffrey!

While we have been making chocolate this time we have been honored with a guest by the name of Jeffrey Castro Arroyo. So we are naming this batch “Jeffrey” because the chocolate is infused with his good humor and energy.

The fermentation for these beans was a little shorter than usual because we wanted to make chocolate this week and we only had a short time at the Chocolate Farm. This is the first harvest of the season and we wanted to make chocolate NOW. The taste is rich and chocolatey with just a hint of bitterness at the end. So mellow that we didn't have a problem making this batch 80%. Our first ever at 80%.

I think that we are going to have some great tasting chocolate.

We took a part of this batch and added more sugar to make some at 65%. This was also an interesting experiment since we only ran the grinder for an hour extra with the extra sugar. I think this created a problem with the tempering process. The chocolate started getting stiff at 83 degrees when normally it will not start to stiffen up until it gets to about 80 or 81 degrees.

The tempering process is always hard here. Because of the climate, at 8PM the temperature outside is still close to 80 F. That means that inside the house it is a little hotter. We have sometimes had to temper the chocolate outside the house in order to get it down to the required temperature.

We didn't have any fillings this time. No peanut butter, no hazelnuts, just “chocolate puro.” We used local organic sugar, called “tapa dulce.” We added some cacao butter from ChocolatAlchemy.com and that's it for the ingredients – cacao, organic dehydrated cane juice and cacao butter.