Making our own Cacao Butter

This is really exciting.

I have a Piteba oil press which allows you to squeeze your own oil out of just about anything.

I normally buy my cacao butter from chocolatealchemy.com  They have good quality cacao butter (as well as anything else you could need to make chocolate, from beans to machinery to molds,) but I was attracted to the challenge of making my own.

I made some sunflower seed oil earlier today to warm up. Then I made some cacao butter which is harder because of the shells that get into the machine. In fact, I broke a screw that holds the handle onto the press.

If you watch the video you will see I was probably working that handle just a bit too hard.

As Keli said, "Why did you crank it so hard.?"

My answer?

"Because its my nature..."