The Fan Batch

We are rebooting our blog so we can keep track of the different batches of chocolate we are now making at the Chocolate Farm.
On May 12th we made chocolate for the first time in a while. The beans were dark in color and had been fermented and dried by Giovanni and Raul while we were in the US.
We roasted the beans in a cast iron pan. Cacao content is 75% (but tastes like 80%.) We used  Rapunzel organic evaporated cane sugar (imported from Whole Foods in California.)
Cacao butter is from chocolatealchemy.com. The fillings we have for this batch are coconut and raisin and roasted almonds, spicy hearts and some sunflower seed butter fillings just for us (because we left those untempered.)
And we added some vanilla and cinammon to the whole batch.
This batch has a slightly acidic quality which will fade over time as the chocolate ages (just like wine) and the flavors mellow.
We are calling this batch “the Fan” because we needed all the neighbor kids to fan the chocolate to help cool it down enough to reach the critical tempering temperature. In this picture it looks like they are fanning Jim but they are actually working hard to get the temperature down just one stubborn degree. It needed to get to 80.5 degrees F and it seemed to be stuck at 81.5 degrees F.   Perhaps because the ambient temperature was 79 degrees!