I've been making a peanut butter meltaway using peanut butter, milk chocolate and coconut oil. There are times when that meltaway center develops a...texture. It's not quite gritty, because the little lumps melt away, but it's not as smooth as I'd like it.
I'm not sure if this has something to do with the temps of each item in the meltaway, or the order in which they are put together.
Can anyone shed light on this? Most often they are perfect.
Meltaways need to be tempered. You may have lucked out in the past. Combine tempered chocolate and cooled coconut oil. stir in peanut butter and place over a bowl of ice. Keep stirring until mixture thickens. Pour into frame. That should get the correct crystals forming. You can always remelt the grainy batch and retemper.
What Ruth said!
There is a eutectic effect of one fat on another. So if you combine chocolate and coconut oil the cocoa butter and the coconut fat interact. Ditto with the peanut butter fat. The melting point of the new fat produced is different from the melting point of the starting fats and it will not necessarily be a temperature half way between the two - it can be higher or lower than either alone.
The tempering allows that fat to crystallize in a stable form.
Is it possible to get your recipe amounts for the peanut butter meltaways?
Thanks
