Nacional White Bean Cacao Sadly Over-Conched

This past weekend I discovered how easy it is to over-process the sensational and rare Nacional white bean cacao from Peru.  It’s a trinatario variety with criollo flavors and aroma.  Read also, expensive.  Like, twice the price of other beans. Ah, the trials and tribulations of artisan chocolate making.

Well Batch 8 is not actually ruined.  It still tastes really good, far better than what you readily can buy. Just not as good as it would have been if I’d stopped the conching yesterday.  The total conch time was around 42 hours. I could have stopped probably around 20 hours.

I was very curious about this cacao when I read about the extraordinary, fruity and light flavor profiles.  Not everyone likes it.  Controversial?  Sounds great to me.  It’s the rarest, and most expensive, bean I’ve bought so far.  It’s called a white bean because the skin has a whitish haze compared to other beans.  The crushed bean’s color also resembles milk chocolate even though there’s no milk in it.

When I started roasting it, a Bananas Foster aroma wafted up.  I stopped roasting when the temperature hit 261 degrees.  At crushing, there was still some of the banana, plus a heady floral aroma and this really tart, tropical fruit taste to the nibs…hard to tell what…maybe persimmon? Not quite orange.  Apricot or mango? Really rich, strong citric acid tang.  Red fruit.  And an explosion of flavors that come on so fast it’s hard to decipher them. OK just punch me in the mouth.

This recipe was just 65% cacao, 10% cocoa butter, 24.5% white sugar plus about half a percent Madagascar Bourbon vanilla bean.  I usually like to use one of the less processed sugars but this time I wanted pure bean flavor to check its profile. Loaded up the Spectra melanger, closed it up, and let it rip, scraping down occasionally.

That evening I moved the grinder to our Great Room and closed the doors so I could sleep – the noise keeps me up if I let it run overnight in the kitchen.  I left the lid off in the morning by accident after checking it.  Over the afternoon the entire house filled with rich, dense, tart aromas, interlaced with a mellow chocolate.  I kept catching these remarkable whifs…what was that? and how do you describe it? Tropical Raspberry?  Kiwi Mango?

It was pretty smooth by the end of the first evening but I wanted this batch to be real smooth.   Conching contined through the night, lid on.  John Nancy, the Chocolate Alchemist, says you can conch for up to 10 days, although that is a bit long, and it can get gummy.  There are chemical changes that occur as the different compounds react with one another, and the flavors change, blending more and more, converting the fermented flavors to more mellow ones.

This morning there was some spattering along the bowl, above the level of the mix.  Uh oh.   The Alchemist says you can continue conching well past this point but so far I’ve not had that experience.  The last criollo went this far and lost a fair amount of flavor. Sure enough, probably half the aromatics were gone.

I’m tempering it now (picture above) so we’ll see how it comes out.

Live and learn.

Are there any chocolate snobs out there reading this? Thoughts?  Experiences tasting or making?