Controlling Relative Humidity when Polishing Panned Chocolate

To get a good lustre on panned products I need to attain a Relative Humidity of aroung 45% and a temperature of around 17 degrees C. However the two seem to contradict each other - the lower the temperature the harder it is to reduvce the R/H.

What are others doing to achieve this? I have two dehumdifiers and they battle at the lower temperatures, cycling in and out of de-ice mode for 20 minutes in every 60 giving a see-saw of low/high RH.

The dehumidifier people say that I have to increase temperature to 18-20 degrees C but I would rather stay at the lower levels. My chocolate won't polish as well as I'd like it to.

Any thoughts please?

Thanks!

Colin

According to my old (very old) gr. 10 Physics teacher, the higher the temp, the more humidity it will carry. Thus, when I lived in Singapore, with an ambient temp of 30 C, the rh was around 95 %., but when I lived in Saskatchewan with winter temps of - 30 C the air was so dry my skin would crack

What kind of polishing agents are you using, and high of a cocoa butter content will they tolerate?

Hi Edward,

I think that your physics teacher was right but something makes it much harder to get to a low RH at a low temperature. I don;t really understand it but I think it has to do with RELATIVE humidity versus absolute humidity.

I'm away from my business at the moment and don't have the cocoa butter content to hand right now so will get back when I return. The polishig agent is from CAPOL (5021 as I recall) and there is also the shellac layer to consider too.

Colin