How to make cascara chocolate

This is a project I’ve been working on for a quite a long time, and I want to share it now. This is the process to turn cascara into something like chocolate. It’s fun, delicious and I hope that someone else can take it and do amazing things with it.

On that front, I’m sharing the whole thing under Creative Commons. You can use this recipe freely, you can make money from it (I want you to make money from it). I don’t want credit, attribution or money. I just don’t want someone to try and stop other people using it too. Read more about the Creative Commons licence here.

Recipe

Here’s a written version of the recipe:

400g cascara
400g cocoa butter
200g sugar

1. Boil 2 litres of water and steep the cascara for three minutes. ¹
2. Strain. You can use the brewed liquid for another product (soda etc) or discard.
3. Dehydrate cascara for 12 hours at 60C
4. Melt the cocoa butter gently
5. Add the melted cocoa butter to the melangeur
6. Add sugar
7. Slowly add the dried cascara. (If you add it too quickly you can jam the rollers)
8. Conch for 48 hours, up to 96 hours depending on desired results.
9. Temper and set into bars
10. Don’t temper, spread on hot, buttered (slightly salty) toast. Have a great time.
11. Something else… (You tell me!)

Different cascaras definitely taste different as chocolate too, so experiment. I’ve also not completely worked out tempering. It doesn’t temper quite like chocolate – but if you work it out then please share!

Thank you/Credits

Thank you to ChefSteps, their Dark Matter recipe started me off on this project. Thank you to the team at Square Mile Coffee for patiently testing and tasting the iterations over the last year or so. Thank you to Spencer at Cocoa Runners for letting me inside the fascinating world of bean to bar chocolate and for the feedback.

At some point soon I’ll put another video up that has a bit more explanation and back story for this whole thing. If you make the recipe – do please let me know!

This is themelanger/wet grinder I used. This little thing pretty much enabled the boom in bean-to-bar chocolate we’re seeing around the world, but that’s another story…

Cascara Chocolate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

1. It took me a long time to work out that the best way to make this taste good was to brew it, to extract some astringent and acidic compounds.  ↩︎

It took me a long time to work out that the best way to make this taste good was to brew it, to extract some astringent and acidic compounds.