Level: Apprentice
Reading Time: 10 minutes
Another Great video on brewing cocoa. Have a few questions.
1. I am embarking on cacao for weight loss and all the health benefits. I was told that if your roast or heat the cocoa beans they lose a lot of phytonutrients. I live in India and my cocoa beans are thoroughly sun dried and the skins are easy to remove. Do I still need to roast them.
2. After I brew the cocoa, can I use the grounds in say another dish, hate wasting anything so nutritious.
3. I have stopped using processed white cane sugar, I only use palm jaggery because it's full of minerals and had a different type of carbohydrate. Can I use that instead of sugar in making chocolates.
4. At what stage should I add things like coconut, nuts, roasted millets, puffed rice etc. Am trying to create Indian healthy version of chocolate for my children. Subscribed to your channel and love your video. As a chemistry student I really appreciate your presentations.
Thank you for your praise on the video.
Whenever I hear about this loss of nutrients I can’t help but think about where this all started. Dark chocolate was found to improve heart function through vasodilation a number of years ago. The semi-subtle corollary that you need to pull out of those findings is that this was in relation to chocolate made from everyday, classically fermented and classically roasted cocoa beans. Maybe (more on that in a bit) some of the flavonoids and other phytonutrients are degraded but clearly enough survive under many circumstances that positive benefits were found and replicated.
100 g of chocolate typically has 50-100mg but can be as low as 15 and as high as 200 mg of total flavonoids. What does that actually mean? Many people seem to be under the impression there are just a couple well defined flavonoids but really it is a huge class of chemicals broken up into subcategories of flavonals, flavones, flavanones, flavon-3-ols, theaflavins and anthocyanidin, each of which contain many variants. Have a look.
Sure, some of those might drop during fermentation, but there is very little showing that it actually matters. They all don’t act the same in our bodies or degrade evenly across the board. I’ve said for years that flavonoid loss is not cut and dry and that I recalled from many years ago studies I read indicating that although certain compounds can be degraded in fermentation and roasting, bioactivity and biological effect were often increased and/or unaffected. A cursory look on the web now pulls up quite a few studies backing that up or at least showing that it is not as simple as the total concentrations. Here is an excerpt from one such study:
“It is known that oxidation, condensation and other reactions that take place during cocoa fermentation and roasting reduce levels of native flavonoids, warranting investigation into how these reactions ultimately impact cocoa’s health benefits. The widely-accepted assumption is that preservation of native flavonoids is critical for retaining bioactivity. However, reactions (oxidation, epimerization, condensation, etc.) during processing may generate compounds with novel activities, potentially preserving or even enhancing health benefits despite flavonoid loss. Recent findings by Ryan et al. contradict the widely-accepted assumption that loss of native cocoa flavonoids corresponds with reduced activity in some cases. In their study, lower concentrations of flavonoids and total polyphenols in fermented cocoa products were not found to be associated with reduced bioactivity in in vitro digestive enzyme inhibition assays. These findings indicate the potential for optimization of processing factors such as fermentation and roasting to maximize the health benefits of cocoa.”
In short, so much of this is more complicated that people make it out to be. All heating is not bad and could well be good. The same goes for fermentation. In a similar fashion, more is not always better. We generally need some minimum amount of nutrient to get benefits from it but in many cases, more is not better. In some cases, too many nutrients can actually be harmful. Vitamin A toxicity is a great example Now, I’m not saying levels in cocoa can be harmful. I’m just making the point that in line with the 2nd sentence bolded up above, just because a concentration is lower does NOT have to correlate to lower bioactivity. There is the concept of enoughness. It is also well documented that many excess vitamins and such are excreted instead of being used or stored.
So should you roast your cocoa? I 100% think you should roast to both reduce potential pathogen contamination, develop flavor and to increase digestibility. And I even have trouble warning you not to over roast. Although I can’t share the source or data due to an NDA I can share with you that some of my very heavily roasted brewing cocoa was analyzed for a suite of flavonoids and quite a few showed higher concentrations instead of lower concentrations as expected. Do I know why? Not really but I suspect it had something to do with extra cellular breakdown which then allowed the release of more nutrients.
As for using what is left, I would say do it if it makes you happy but you are making an assumption that what is left is particularly nutritious. Many, if not most, flavonoids are water soluble and so those are already gone if you have brewed the cocoa properly. After that, sure, you are going to have basic nutrients like fats and proteins there still, but I’m just not excited by how it is going to taste. For me it seems like a bit of work for not a lot of reason.
I would be cautious with jiggery. Pulling from Wikipedia "It contains up to 50% sucrose, up to 20% invert sugars, and up to 20% moisture, with the remainder made up of other insoluble matter, such as wood ash, proteins, and bagasse fibres”. That is WAY too much water for chocolate if that is how much yours has. I know when I have played with it, it was as a hard mass and I could not get it to break up very well to dry it. If you can get it granulated already then try that but make sure you dry it further in an oven for a few hours on a low setting (150-170 F). Also, the insoluble matter and fibers can very well mess with your viscosity. If it does get extra thick, you are going to need more cocoa butter over the 35% recommended minimum. And noting the maximum sucrose content in there is 50%, you are going to need more to get the same sweetness which will then decrease the amount of cocoa you use, resulting in less of those flavonoids you are trying to maximize.
Finally, I would add those inclusions right at tempering time. Get your chocolate tempered, have you inclusions at the same temperature, mix them in and pour up.
And although I laud your efforts for trying to make something healthy, chocolate is not unhealthy to start with. In so many cases with made from scratch items like this (high fat sweets I mean) healthy comes from how it fits into your diet and no so much from the item itself. In my opinion you should not be eating so much chocolate that it makes a huge impact in your overall nutrition. To eat enough to make an impact is probably going to add in more fat and sugar (the sucrose in jiggery is still sucrose) than is probably good for you. Just food for thought.