Cocao butter from cacao nibs? Experiment!

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!

At long last: Pulp Chips!

Sometimes, there's just nothing like a good crispy chip! As a life-long carb addict, after switching to the GAPS diet, I found myself sorely missing that crispy texture I'd grown to love by way of crackers, cereal (LOTS of cereal), toast, etc. I needed something to satisfy that crunch without over doing it on the good stuff like almonds and other nuts and seeds.

Fortunately, with GAPS, especially the intro, we started doing more juicing, which left us with an abundance of a food product that we didn't quite know what to do with, but also didn't want going to waste. I just couldn't justify disposing all that pulp, so I started perusing the interwebs for ideas on how to use it. There were some interesting recipes, many of which I still need to try, but one in particular stood out as it seemed to be rather GAPS friendly: the Detoxinista's Italian Meat(less) balls. With a couple modifications for GAPS, these veggie balls worked quite well. The hubby and I used them on our 50(+) mile bike-ride as a take-along snack. Without a good sauce though, for us at least, the veggie balls seemed to be a little dry and flat tasting. We both really liked the concept though, which got me thinking: what if we just flattened these out and make them into chips?

I'd seen enough recipes online for juice pulp chips, and since we already had a pretty tasty recipe that just seemed to be missing that little extra something, we went for it! I adjusted some of the quantities to make it work better on the flat baking sheet, and after some trial and error with bake-time, ended up with a dang tasty chip recipe! This has become another one of our go-tos. Since we're juicing on a daily basis, we rarely have a shortage of pulp, so the chips are on a pretty heavy rotation throughout the week. Besides the fact that they are a great snack, the pulp seems less likely to go bad when it's all crisped up. One day I will give this a try in a food dehydrator for a more "raw" version and do more of a side-by-side comparison. Now I just need to get the dehydrator!

As for serving, they are of course great on their own, but they go particularly well with guacamole (especially our go-to, extra garlicky, extra oniony guac), cheese, dip, nut butter, just about anything! And the pulp does not need to be strictly vegetable base, as ours consistently has some type of fruit in it, and still works well with the more savory seasoning. With that, I'm hoping to try making a more pumpkin spice-like recipe soon, so stay tuned for those results!

Pro tip: start with the egg. I use an immersion blender with a whisk attachment.

Once the eggs are scrambled, everything else gets added, in no particular order.

Flatten everything out on the pan. I find parchment paper is almost critical for non-stick results.

After a good night in the oven, break apart and enjoy!

The Recipe (makes two baking sheets):

• 5 Cups Juice Pulp (very rough measurement)
• 3 eggs
• 2 tsp Onion powder
• 2 tsp Garlic powder
• 2 tsp Oregano (dried)
• 2 tsp Basil (dried)
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 Tbs Parmesan Cheese
• 1 oz Olive Oil

The Process:

• In a large bowl, mix eggs until well blended.
• Add pulp, seasoning (onion powder, garlic powder, oregano, basil, salt), cheese and olive oil. 
• Mix ingredients by hand start dividing between the two prepared baking sheet (I use parchment paper and it works fabulously!).
• Flatten the mixture out so that it fills the full baking sheet.
• Place in the over on a low temperature setting (for my oven, 200 degrees is ideal) and let sit for at least 8 hours (overnight or during the day while at work). 

As the pulp mixture dries it will detach from the parchment paper making it easy to break into bite-size pieces.