Bean-to-bar equipment

Roasting: a domestic oven works for small batches, and roast profiling by hand is entirely possible. A convection oven is better than a static one.

Cracking and winnowing: beans can be cracked with a rolling pin or a coarse grain mill and the shell separated with a hairdryer and two bowls. It is slow, it is messy, and it works. Dedicated small winnowers exist and are a convenience rather than a necessity.

Moulding: polycarbonate moulds are inexpensive and are the one piece of equipment where buying properly is worth it immediately, because a good mould is the difference between a piece that releases and one that does not.

Refining and conching is the stage that requires real equipment. Chocolate has to be ground until the particles are below the threshold at which the tongue detects them, and that takes many hours of continuous grinding with stone or steel.

A stone melanger — a wet grinder with granite rollers — is the standard small-scale answer, and it does refining and conching in one vessel over a day or more. Nothing domestic substitutes for it. A food processor produces a paste that is unpleasantly gritty and will stay that way.

The practical consequence is that the melanger is the buying decision, and the batch size it takes determines the scale of everything else.

Tempering can be done by hand on a marble slab or by seeding, and needs only an accurate thermometer. A tabletop tempering machine removes the labour and the variability, and is worth it only once you are making chocolate regularly.

Budget-wise the order is: melanger first, moulds second, thermometer third, everything else improvised. And expect the first several batches to be poor — the learning curve is in the roast and the conche time, and neither is discoverable without making batches you do not much like.