Herbal Chocolate Challenges

Hello again chocolate lifers!

So just back from another round at the factory and I want to share some of our experience and get some feedback.

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So we are starting an herbal chocolate business and we are in the midst of testing/refining our process so we can be selling asap. Tonight we noticed challenge which we think we have remedy for but I will run you through the journey of our latest batch.

This is our process;

We use a cacaotown melange to grind our raw nibs for 48 hrs. At hour 24 we add our sugar and herbs. Our ratio is 64 oz of nibs to 18 oz of butter with 32 oz of sugar and 160 grams of dried powdered herbs. That makes a 60% herbal chocolate bar.

When we arrived, the chocolate was quite thick in the melange but we figured we would see where we were at once tempered and warmed to working temperature.

We brought the chocolate up to 120* then started to temper by hand on our granite slab. We seeded about 50 grams of chocolate at about 95* and continued to reduce the temperature on the slab. This is when it started to thicken up on us and once we got to proper temperature it was hardly workable. After raising it back up to 90* it was still very hard for us to pour it into our molds. We ended up having to spread it into the molds with our flat spatula, forming many bubbles which we were unable to remove through agitation.

Then we placed the polycarbonate molds into the fridge and waited about 25 minutes. We couldnt get the bars out of the molds even with vigorous whacking on the table.

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My thoughts are that we need to add more butter. Were hoping that adding maybe another 5 oz might give us the proper viscosity we are looking for. Does this sound like it would remedy our thickness issue as well as our ability to get them out of the molds??

The chocolate tastes great but the production needs some more fine tuning and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers