For intrepid hobbyist chocolatiers, making chocolate bars from scratch is a pursuit rooted in proliferation of small-batch food production around the nation.”
ATLANTA — Obsessives are common in the world of cooking. They go down the rabbit hole of jury-rigged sous-vide machines, or spend two weeks lost in the 38-page bread recipe from the Tartine Bakery. They have cases of homemade lager in the hall closet and roast coffee in a wok.
And then there is the kitchen-counter chocolatier.
These are people like Louis and Kathy Cahill, an Atlanta couple who recently nursed a few pounds of cacao beans for three days and ended up with nine chocolate bars. They started by roasting raw cacao beans, which look like almonds that have had a really bad night. They cracked them and sprayed away the hulls with a blow dryer in their backyard. Then they sent the rough little nibs that remained through a juicer.
The beans, by then a lumpy brown mass that smelled vaguely of burned peanut butter, were poured over the granite wheels of a countertop wet grinder originally intended to help cooks in India turn rice and dal into batter for idli and dosa.
The grinder would hum for the next 24 hours to refine and conch the chocolate, pumping the smell through the house. And they weren’t even to the hard part yet.
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“I was buying stuff from all over with different percentages and origins, and I thought, ‘Why can’t I just make this stuff myself?’ ” he said. His first batches were terrible, so he has a lot of sympathy for people trying to figure it out at home.
So does Dan Brown, who along with his wife, Jael, makes and sells French Broad Chocolates in Asheville, N.C. Although their empire has expanded to include a shop stocked with some of country’s best craft chocolate, a pastry shop and a working cacao farm in Costa Rica, Mr. Brown does not forget the thrill of making his first batches of chocolate at home.
“It is one of the most exciting things,” he said. “It might not be world class, but you freaking love it because you made it yourself.”
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A version of this article appears in print on February 11, 2015, on page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: The Kitchen-Counter Chocolatiers. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
