For our first eighteen months every dark bar had between two and four per cent added cocoa butter. It is what you do. It thins the liquor so it flows through a mould cleanly, it makes the bar melt faster on the tongue, and it forgives a grind that has not quite come down to twenty microns.
The tasting that changed it
We ran a blind flight of the same Rio Verde liquor at zero, two and four per cent added butter. Everyone picked the four per cent as the nicest texture. Everyone also described it with fewer words. The fruit notes that people found in the zero-butter sample simply stopped being mentioned.
That makes sense. Cocoa butter carries very little flavour of its own — deodorised, it carries none. Adding it dilutes everything the ferment built, and buys texture with taste.
What it cost
Our reject rate at moulding roughly doubled for two months. Thicker liquor traps more air, so we had to extend the vibration cycle and warm the moulds. We also had to take the grind further, which added six hours to every conche and about eleven per cent to the energy bill.
What we got
Bars that taste of the bean, and a melt that is slower rather than worse. A slow melt is not a defect. It is what happens when the only fat in the bar is the fat that grew in the seed, and it is why our chocolate takes a moment to open up.
The one place we still use it is tempering seed, and we sell the same butter we press for that. It never goes into a bar recipe.