Can cocoa beans be roasted like coffee beans?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “coffee beans vs cocoa beans“
Can cocoa beans be roasted like coffee beans?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “coffee beans vs cocoa beans“
Sure, and in fact they are roasted like coffee beans in order to make chocolate.
Like coffee beans, cocoa beans grow inside a fruit (with cocoa it’s in a big pod, with coffee it’s a small cherry for each bean). They get fermented, dried, then imported and shipped to roasters. There’s some milling, hulling, and winnowing, and roasting (in various orders) to get the final roasted bean. From there, coffee gets ground and brewed; cocoa nibs (broken up roasted beans) get milled, stirred, mixed, and generally fussed over to make different types of chocolate products.
Cocoa roasts at a much lower temperature and for less time than coffee, and the beans are a lot bigger. Still, a lot of home chocolate makers and small chocolate factories use coffee roasters, sometimes modified, to roast their cocoa.
Home hobbyists can use the Behmor 1600 coffee roaster. It’s versatile enough to roast chocolate.
Here is the roasting machine at San Francisco’s Dandelion Chocolate , a modified coffee roaster.
The old Scharffenberger factory, a much bigger operation, used this beast when it was still based in Oakland — the same machine used by Peet’s Coffee.
The Hershey’s roaster is big enough to roast people. Just kidding, this “roaster” is part of a ride at Hershey’s Chocolate World amusement park.
In 1906 Hershey’s used a bunch of smaller roasters.
Out come roasted beans…
You can’t grind them because they’re half fat and that just wouldn’t work. So they get crushed, winnowed to separate out the hulls, and the result is chocolate nibs — you can buy retail chocolate in this form.