CocoTerra

The pulp is delicious! There are suppliers that are starting to sell cocoa pulp, so now you can enjoy without all the work!

https://cocoasupply.com/cacao-fruit-pulp-puree-nectar-pouche...

The seeds can be very finicky at the early stage. Too much water and they rot; too little water and they dry and die. Since the seeds are sticking out of the dirt when you plant them, make sure to water the seeds and not just the surrounding dirt. Good luck!

There isn't a port, but there is an app with a recipe system that allows you to control the hardware. You can either use a guided recipe creation mode or you can dive into expert mode which lets you set most all the of recipe making parameters so people can got to town.

Agreed. Because roasting is such an important step, we leave that to the professionals much like in the coffee industry. This way, people can select different origins with different roast profiles for different recipes and end up with a variety of premium chocolate flavors. And much like coffee, if you decide that you want to roast your own beans, you can use your coffee roaster and come up with your own roast profile to experiment with flavor development.

A source of quality ingredients from around the globe is essential to experiencing the variety of flavors you can get from the native cocoa bean. We plan to work with craft chocolate makers, specialty importers, and farmers/co-ops to supply a variety of nib options. Of course, if you find your own source of ingredients, that works too.

Since the chocolate comes out of the machine tempered, you can pretty easily use the seeding method to maintain temper when melting for other molds. This is much easier than wild crystallization which is required when starting with a fully untempered batch.

Hi Justin. We appreciate your criticism. It's not intended to be a "lie" but rather an explanation of how people can use existing molds if they have them. You are correct that you can't fit a third party mold onto the CocoTerra machine, but you can either pour the chocolate while still liquid into your own molds or remelt. Many people don't know whether or not you can remelt the chocolate while also maintaining temper. We'll take a look at the language in the FAQ. Thank you.

Thanks for the support, Sam. We hope to give you more than a couple reasons to pull it out of the cabinet!

Regarding price, the initial CocoTerra release is priced in the range of other new, breakthrough appliances. We expect that there will be a variety of price points over time, as we expand our product line and ramp our volumes.

Hopefully, we can make you into a chocolate maker.

Hi Max - Thanks for the good wishes. I wanted to clarify that one of the major benefits of the CocoTerra machine is that you CAN fully customize the chocolate. You can choose the type (white, milk, dark, % cocoa), choose the origin (cocoa beans from different farms taste completely different - much like coffee or wine), choose different roast profiles (much like coffee), use different sugars (cane, palm, allulose, etc.) add different flavorings (spices and oils) and add different inclusions (nuts, raisins, puffs, etc.). On top of that, you can decorate the chocolate (using transfer sheets) and we plan to support different mold designs. I hope that people will learn to savor their chocolate too!!

We hope that people will use it to make a variety of delicious treats... it starts with personalized chocolate from particular origins, with desired flavors and inclusions (low sugar, vegan, Keto, etc.). But we've also made the most delicious hazelnut chocolate spread as well as coffee bars (think edible coffee). More to come... We hope and expect people to get creative!

Yes, Chocolate Alchemy is a wonderful resource for anyone who wants to learn how to make chocolate. To answer your questions about cleaning the CocoTerra machine...

There are only two parts of the machine that require cleaning: the mold ring and the processing chamber. The mold ring can be rinsed in the sink with warm water or simply put in the dishwasher. Our goal is to make the chamber dishwasher safe as well. But even without using a dishwasher, the processing chamber is easy to clean. You simply flush warm water through the chamber while swirling around the processing media (the balls) to clean the system. The balls on the inside of the chamber will clean the interior surface of the chamber, while the water comes out the opening in the bottom taking the remnant chocolate with it. The outside lip of the chamber can be cleaned with a small brush. The entire process takes a couple minutes.

100% agree that people shouldn't be scare to try.

Hi Peter - This is Nate, the founder of CocoTerra. I just stumbled onto this thread and wanted to answer your questions. The first big difference has to do with efficiency of the grinding and refining process using a ball mill. The stone systems are not very efficient (they only process ingredients at the intersection of the stone cylinder and the bottom platform - a line). It can take many, many hours or even a few days to make chocolate that way. Also, it can take 45 mins to pour the ingredients into a melangeur while you can pour the ingredients into the CocoTerra maker in about 30 seconds. The 250g is the equivalent of about 3-4 bars of bean-to-bar chocolate which we thought was a good amount for a dinner party or for someone's weekly consumption. These ~1/2 lb batches also allow users to get creative and make custom batches with all sorts of different flavorings, inclusions and designs. 2kg of chocolate is a pretty significant commitment. The goal/hope is to simplify the chocolate making process so more people can experience it and create chocolate that is unique and fun.