For better or worse, the hubby and I go trough a lot of nut butter. What can I say, it's yummy! We've been playing with different types of nuts like pecans, walnuts, cashews, along with some various flavorings; all of which got me thinking: if we can make nut butter from grinding down the raw nuts, could we make a cacao butter or spread by grinding the cacao nibs...? My curiosity was piqued, and after weeks of this idea bouncing around in my head (and needing to buy more cacao nibs), this past weekend I finally got around to experimenting!
The results were not quite what I expected. At first glance it was working pretty well, and the smells emitting from the food processor were simply divine! The cacao nibs ground down to a fine powder, which had the most rich, chocolatey smell, and eventually turned into a very thick paste. This was exciting to me, had I really made a chocolatey spread out of the nibs? The answer: sort of. The hubby and I took a quick break for lunch and left the chocolate paste in the food processor to deal with after. What we found was a very crusty mess. The paste had hardened, and required some heavy chiseling to get the food processor blade free. A minor set back as I was once again able to grind the dried up cacao and get the paste back. With that, I decided to take the paste and flatten it out into a bar form, making our very own 100% cacao bars! That in itself, was pretty amazing, and well worth the effort!
For my taste, the broken down nibs have a slightly more mellow taste than the raw nibs, but both are equally delicious. But since they were able to grind into some sort of pasty butter like consistency, the hubby and I started thinking, what if we added some oil to it, maybe some coconut oil? Or perhaps a 50/50 mix with other nuts like cashews to make a more spreadable chocolate confection. So many possibilities! I will definitely continue the experimentation, and post the (hopefully very delicious) results!
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