8 Tips to Infuse Chocolate
Welcome to “Tricks of the Trade”!
The Cannabis Business Times team is excited to share this four-part video series that spotlights the day-to-day operations of cannabis industry professionals through “how-to” demonstrations at Buckeye Relief, a vertically integrated medical cannabis operator in Ohio.
We’re kicking off the series with “How to Infuse Chocolate” (video above) and will continue next week with “How to Fill Vape Carts,” followed by “How to Defoliate a Canopy” and “How to Freeze Dry Cannabis Flower.” Stay tuned for those episodes.
In this Jan. 23 premiere, Buckeye Relief Executive Chef Marc London and Kitchen Production Manager Emily Rollo show us a few secrets behind their chocolate infusion process. But before Buckeye Relief received an extraction license in 2019, and before the kitchen team dialed in that delicate process, London traveled the world in search of the best chocolate he could find.
That excursion led him to South America, specifically Ecuador, before London and his team eventually decided on a Belgian chocolate to bring back to Ohio’s medical cannabis patients.
“I like to tell people as they come through the kitchen that nobody is crazy enough in the cannabis business to take the best chocolate you can find on the planet, a really great 72 [percent] cacao chocolate, and try to infuse it with cannabis and add all that plant material to it,” London says, “except for me. We have successfully accomplished that.”
RELATED: Buckeye Relief Finds Top Shelf for Carefully Crafted Edibles
In addition to starting with a fine chocolate, London lauds Buckeye Relief’s extraction team for providing a clean distillate that’s “odorless and tasteless,” which he says allows the kitchen team to take a quality chocolate product, infuse it, and keep that same quality with the end result.
In addition to starting with quality ingredients, London and Rollo share 8 key tips from Buckeye Relief’s chocolate infusion process:
1. Environmental Control: Invest in a purpose-built kitchen space that has strong control over temperature and humidity, as well as the necessary appliances, like a reliable tempering machine and chocolate depositor.
Chocolate is one of the most volatile products to work with in the kitchen, and temperature and humidity can affect its ability to cool down and harden properly, London says. Summer humidity, for example, can create a bloom, or a white, shadowy appearance on chocolate—especially milk chocolate—that makes an eyesore out of the presentation of each bar, he says.
“One of the things to understand about chocolate is every batch isn’t going to be perfect,” London says. “You’re going to have issues, and every chocolatier knows that, because of the environment. What’s great about chocolate is you never lose it. Even if it gets bloom, it’s still good chocolate—it just doesn’t look as good—and we can repurpose it and remelt it down.”
2. Ingredients: Use cocoa butter as a catalyst to encase the THC molecules.
Cocoa butter is a natural ingredient to chocolate, so it’s a natural product to use as the catalyst to encase the THC molecules, which helps in the homogenization process, London says.
3. Slow and Controlled: Heat up the distillate and cocoa butter in short increments.
Overheating the distillate before infusion can affect the integrity of the cannabinoids in the final product, London says.
Conversely, underheating can disrupt the homogenization process. “That’s where we run into the issues where we don’t get homogenization, where we could have a clump of distillate that just doesn’t blend properly together into the chocolate,” London says. “So, you want to make it really pliable, really liquid-ish.”
After heating up the distillate and cocoa butter in a microwave, London combines the two ingredients in a bowl and uses a spatula in a touch-and-feel technique. If the mixture is too thick, he’ll heat it up a little bit longer to ensure it has the right consistency to homogenize with the melted chocolate.
Rollo points out the slow-and-controlled heating method in that process. “We heat it up in 20- to 30-second increments at one time so we’re not overheating our distillate to the point where we lose any major cannabinoids in it as well,” she says.
When the distillate and cocoa butter mixture is roughly 135 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s ready for homogenization.
4. Homogenization: Have a small-batch mentality to create consistency.
The biggest issue with infusing any product, let alone chocolate, is homogenization—the process used to make a mixture of two mutually non-soluble liquids evenly distributed throughout—London says. First, he incorporates a few scoops of the melted chocolate into the bowl containing the distillate and cocoa butter mixture to homogenize manually with his spatula, before pouring the bowl into the larger batch of melted chocolate to further homogenize in the tempering machine.
Rollo points out that the process in not just specific to chocolate.
“This relates to our whole small-batch mentality in the kitchen that we have embraced in our entire kitchen,” she says. “We infuse things in a very small form first, before we incorporate it into the large bulk batch of chocolate. So, we know for sure that we are 100 percent confident that it is homogenized.”
Once the small batch in the bowl is added to the larger bulk batch of melted chocolate and further homogenized, Marc hits the temper button on his machine and brings down the temperature of the melted chocolate from 108 degrees to 87 degrees for his run in this demo.
5. Chocolate Seed: Don’t run out of chocolate seed during the tempering process and use the correct potency.
Chocolate seed is one of the most pivotal aspects of the chocolate infusion process, Rollo says. Buckeye Relief’s kitchen team infuses its chocolate seed blocks at the same potency as the chocolate bars being produced before each run. “We want to make sure that these are always in spec in potency,” she says. “Anything too high or anything too low can either overdose our chocolate or dilute it too much.”
The seed blocks are put into the back portion of Buckeye Relief’s tempering machine during the tempering process to release the cacao crystals back into the chocolate to help solidify the chocolate. “If chocolate is not tempered with the correct amount of seed, and it is not seeded the entire time, you will hold it in your hand and it will start to melt,” Rollo says.
When working with what London calls “real” chocolate (not compound chocolate), it requires the breaking down of fats and waxes before being tempered back to its original state with the cannabis extract infused, he says. “If you don’t have good seed and a good temper, you’re not going to get that nice shiny look on the bars,” London says.
London adds the chocolate seed into the machine throughout the tempering process until the final 60 seconds, when he takes the remaining seed out and lets the machine work its magic.
6. Calibration: Invest in a reliable chocolate depositor and double-check your weight.
Before using a hand-crank depositor to fill the mold trays with the tempered chocolate, London calibrates his machine to make sure that each bar is coming out to the proper weight. After pumping a few cranks of chocolate out of the depositor to remove any air in the machine, he begins filling the mold trays and double-checks the weight multiple times throughout the process.
“If [the weight] was a little high, a little low, I can tweak [the depositor], take it up or down a little bit so we’re not losing the entire batch and finding out at unmolding time that our chocolate is all out of weight,” London says.
7. Presentation: Use a vibrating machine to help the chocolate settle into its molds properly.
Once London pulls four cranks of tempered chocolate into each mold and checks the weight, Rollo uses a vibrating machine to level out the product before it cools and hardens.
“It’s going to give us even more of that chocolate shine,” she says. “It is going to vibrate the chocolate, so it takes out any remaining air bubbles out of the chocolate bars.”
Vibrating the trays also makes sure that each bar is 100% level so that each piece of chocolate within the bars is even and weighs the same, Rollo says. For the run showcased in the video, each chocolate bar has 10 squares with 30 milligrams of THC—300 milligrams for the entire bar.
“We want to make sure that one piece on the end of the bar isn’t slightly thicker or slightly thinner, because that is also affecting how somebody can dose themselves,” she says.
After vibrating the molding tray for roughly 30 seconds, Rollo takes the tray straight into the cooler where it takes approximately 15 to 20 minutes to harden.
8. Start Slow: Provide yourself a timeline that allows for mistakes and corrections.
First and foremost, greenhorn chocolatiers are going to make mistakes, and that’s OK, London says.
“We all do,” he says. “As good as you get with chocolate, you will still have batches that won’t work because of your environment. So, I recommend to people: take your time, go slow, do small batches, know your environment, and understand mathematics, as well, if you’re going to infuse.”