Missing Bean Chocolate

From bean to bar

Every bar of Missing Bean chocolate starts as raw cacao beans and finishes in our East Oxford roastery.

Every bar of Missing Bean chocolate starts as raw cacao beans and finishes in our East Oxford roastery. We don’t buy in ready-made chocolate to remelt. We sort, roast, grind, temper and mould every batch ourselves.

Our pure bars contain just two ingredients: single-origin cacao and British beet sugar. Keeping the recipe this simple lets the character of each farm’s beans come through. Here’s how it happens.

Step 1

Sorting

Our cacao is harvested, fermented and dried at source by the farms we work with, then bagged and shipped to us. When it arrives, we sort every batch by hand and take out any defective beans, so only the good ones make it into our chocolate.

Step 2

Roasting

We roast the beans in a Giesen coffee roaster that we’ve repurposed for cacao. Each batch takes around 20 minutes. Just like with coffee, the roast does a lot of work, developing the flavour and aroma of the finished chocolate.

Step 3

Cracking and winnowing

Once the beans have cooled, they go through our cracking and winnowing machine. It breaks them open and blows away the papery husks, leaving the nibs. Those nibs hold the cacao solids and natural cocoa butter that everything else is built on.

Step 4

Melanging

The nibs go into our melangeur, where two heavy stone wheels slowly grind them down.

For the first 24 hours, it’s just nibs. As they break down, they release their own cocoa butter and turn into a flowing paste called cacao liquor. The friction warms everything to around 50°C, which keeps the cocoa butter fluid.

Then we add British beet sugar and let it run for another 24 hours. This mixes the sugar evenly through the chocolate and keeps refining the particles until it’s smooth. After about 48 hours in total, it’s ready for the next step.

Step 5

Sieving

We pass the chocolate through a sieve to catch any unwanted particles, so every batch comes out consistent.

Step 6

Tempering

Tempering is what gives a good bar its snap, its shine and its smooth melt. Our tempering machine heats the chocolate to around 55°C to melt all the cocoa butter crystals, then cools it to between 30°C and 31°C in a controlled cycle. That encourages the cocoa butter to form stable crystals.

A well-tempered bar sets firmly, releases cleanly from its mould and is less likely to bloom. Bloom is the pale, streaky look chocolate can sometimes get.

Step 7

Moulding and cooling

We fill the bar moulds and set them on a vibrating tray for a few minutes to level the chocolate and shake out any air bubbles. Then they go into our chocolate fridge at around 13°C. After about 30 minutes, the bars are set and ready to come out.

Step 8

Checking and wrapping

We pop each bar out of its mould by hand, check it over and weigh it. Then it goes into its protective inner sleeve and its outer wrapper.

A note on inclusions

Where an extra ingredient goes in depends on the bar. Some go into the melangeur so their flavour runs right through the chocolate, like the coffee in our Coffee & Walnut bar. Others are pressed into the top of the bar in the mould for crunch, like the blanched walnuts on that same bar.