It's Time To Play
Alchemist
1120 customer reviews
Have you ever thought of making chocolate at home? Or maybe you simply want to roast your own cocoa beans and do your own thing with them.
While it's getting easier and easier to obtain cocoa beans (some health food stores carry them), it's still almost impossible to get GOOD cocoa beans, unless you visit the farmer directly (expensive), or convince a chocolate maker to part with some of their own (not likely).
Here at Choklat we have spent 11 years developing relationships with growers and suppliers. We even tell everyone where our cocoa comes from, and put the recipes on the backs of our bars. We have no secrets, so why not sell some to you? In the end it allows us to buy more. This helps the grower, and I'm all for that.
At the most basic level there is only one species of cocoa, called Theobroma Cocoa. Over thousands of years, this one species has evolved to adapt to is surrounding, and as a result "varieties" have come about. In one case a number of years ago science stepped in and created another variety.
Please note that this is a 50,000 foot view of the cocoa industry. It is almost impossible to give you a full history in a couple of paragraphs. Having said that, there are essentially three common varieties of cocoa beans: Forastero, Criollo, and Trinitario - with forastero representing 90+ % of the industry, and Criollo being considered the "fine flavour" cocoa.
In fairness to forastero though, I have tasted a number of samples of forastero over the years, and some is absolutely fabulous.
The cocoa beans we offer here are unroasted, properly fermented and dried. To help you along we also provide a roasting profile for each, and some suggestions to help get you started.
We've seen some people eat the cocoa beans with the shells on, but various reasons strongly recommend against it. Once cooled, the shells come off easily, and you are free to snack away or turn your kitchen into the next Wonka Factory!
| Brazilian Forastero | Slightly acidic with notes of black cherry and vanilla. Very nice chocolate flavour. These nibs form the mainstay of all of our in house working chocolate, and are also used as one of our truffle coatings. Highly recommended and versatile for dessert dishes. |
| Cuyagua Criollo | Nutty with notes of cherry, honey, and apricot. My personal experience of smelling this bean is of smelling sweet pipe tobacco. The flavour is very complex and very rich. These would be a great addition to granolas, and will stand up well in savoury dishes. |
| Ocumare Criollo | Slightly acidic with a straight, nice chocolate flavour. These nibs form the foundation of all of our drinking chocolate. They'd be great in icecream, or even to try your hand at a chocolate beverage of some type in your own home! |
| Porcelana Pure Criollo | The rarest cocoa beans in the world, these are unlike anything you have ever tried. They are a creamy, reddish beige color, are quite acidic, and have very heavy raisin and red wine notes. Definitely lots going on in the flavour department. We've found that this bean requires a long, slow roast to give the acids time to dissipate. High temperature roasts have in the past, destroyed a lot of the fruity characteristics of this bean. |