70%. First attempt.

So I took this picture not long after we started the melanger going. I had toasted one pound of nibs on a cookie sheet at 350 for ten minutes. They smelled maybe done at nine and a half but the instructions I’d found online for nibs (the Dandelion book is all about the beans) had said 10-15. Don’t do fifteen. I waited those last thirty seconds and they came out threatening to taste burned, I worried at the time. Which is part of why that’s all that went into the first run: I had to know if I’d wrecked them.

Then I ran them through the food processor (per the book) to cut way down on the conching time.

But wow, the conching does marvelous things to this. No more worries about it being burned. Such a different flavor from raw, and even from straight out of the oven. And that was just in the first hour.

I ran the sugar through the Cuisinart too and added it in slowly, slowly, wait and then a bit more, about 90 minutes after the nibs had gone in, but it was such a small batch that I probably could have just dumped the whole thing in and the machine would have done just fine.

Masonis said that whatever the changing chocolate tastes like when the sugar hits it is what you’re going to get, that somehow the sugar freezes the flavor in place at whatever it is at that point.

(Turning it off briefly an hour later and sampling.) I can handle that. Wow. Yes. This will most definitely do. It reminded me of the time years ago when I asked someone why she went to the effort to knit socks, which would just get worn through anyway and wreck her work?

In response she handed me one to try on.

I had had no idea. I’d never had a sock feel like that on my foot in my life. So comfortable: it was revelatory.

That sense of epiphany was what tasting the tip of that spoon of fresher-than-anything-in-your-life chocolate was like, and it isn’t even done yet.