Grinding
Milling the nibs until the friction releases their fat and the solid turns liquid. The result is cocoa mass — chocolate liquor — and it contains no alcohol.
Cocoa nibs are around half cocoa butter by weight, held inside cell structures. Grinding ruptures those cells and the released fat, warmed by friction, turns the ground solid into a thick brown liquid: cocoa mass, also called cocoa liquor or chocolate liquor.
This is the branch point of the whole industry. Cocoa mass can go forward into chocolate with sugar and possibly milk added, or it can be pressed to separate cocoa butter from the remaining solids, which are then milled into cocoa powder. Everything cocoa-derived on a supermarket shelf comes from one of those two paths.
What it does
Ruptures the nib's cell structure, releasing cocoa butter and converting the ground solid into a fluid mass.
Why it matters
It is where the chain divides between chocolate and cocoa powder, and the point at which a maker first has something they can taste as chocolate.
Variants
- Stone melangeur. Granite wheels on a granite bed, running for hours or days. Grinds and conches at once, which is why small makers can skip a separate conche.
- Industrial mill train. Ball mills and roll refiners in sequence. Faster and more precise about particle size, and used at volume.
Commonly misunderstood
That 'chocolate liquor' contains alcohol. It does not. The word is used in its older sense of a liquid, and the mass is nothing but ground cacao.
Related
Defines
- Drinking chocolateGrinding is the branch point of the whole industry: cocoa mass either goes forward into chocolate or is pressed into butter and powder, and drinking chocolate exists on both sides of that split.
- Chocolate liquorGrinding is what turns nib into fluid mass, and the mass is where the chain forks between chocolate and cocoa powder.
Covered in
- From pod to barThe stage where the chain forks between chocolate and cocoa powder.
- Chocolate liquorThe stage that produces it.
Compared in
- Pressing vs grindingSet against Pressing, with the practical consequence of each difference.
History and culture
- The invention of the industrial barMechanised grinding is what took the texture of chocolate out of the range a metate can reach.
Sources
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- The Science of Chocolate — Royal Society of Chemistry(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)