Shelling a few roasted cocoa beans from a new origin and I'm finding a lot of what looks like rust.
The beans don't taste bad and I'm having trouble describing the taste. It's pretty muted, the texture might be a bit chalky.
Does anyone know what this is?
Daniel -
Did you buy them roasted or did you roast them yourself. If you roasted them yourself, did they look this way before you roasted them?
It's one of two things. It's either remants of the polysaccharide material that holds the shell to the nib, or it's mold. It's probabaly the first one, but do me a favor.
Attempt to quantify how many of the rusty beans you see (edit: i mean, give me a rough % - is it 5% of the total bean? 30% etc), and then take 20 of them, break them in half, and take a photo of what you see inside and repost that?
Clay: I bought them raw. Exterior rust appearance isn't a perfect indicator - some that looked fine had rust, others that didn't had some inside.
Sebastian: I had to shell 47 beans to get 20 with "rust", so about 40%. Attached is a photo of 21 beans, one that looked diseased (but had no rust colour), and the 20 that all otherwise seem fine.
Daniel - those look completely fine to me. I'm going with #1 above - just polysaccharide reside - i don't see any visual indicators of other defects from that photo.
Thanks, Sebastian!
De nada. Happy Easter folks.
