I could REALLY do with some help please.

I need to thin down chocolate in order to apply a thin layer to enable me to pan freeze dried products. It holds the center together so I can then pan - which is otherwise impossible.

It's been quite a journey and I have been very sucessful with dark & milk chocolate. I am using the best chocolate I can find - no compound product. It's Sicao which is owned by Barry Callebaut - hard to do much better for commercial chocolate I think. I have even won a gold medal and a trophyfor the end product.

My method is to combine chocolate and cocoa butter ina baine marie and melt them at 45C (48C for dark).Proportions are 66% cocoa butter, 33% chocolate. Then I have been able to temper this by adding another 25% of the total volume with chocolate callets of seed chocolate and dropping to 30 or 32C (milk or dark). This makes a nice thin mix which tempers very well and holds everything together for subsequent panning.

I can hold that in temper easily by staying at 30C for milk or 32 for dark chocolate. It lasts for ages.

Now I want to do the same for white chocolate and I did the same as for milk (only difference is the temperatures - I used 43/30C as for milk).

Firstly the seed callets didn't melt entirely so I had to keep stirring for a good while. Then I got a call and had to leave the job and returned in about an hour. With earlier jobs this would have been no problem as it's easy to hold at the required 30C.

However when I returned the whole thing had gone quite solid! Not at all what would have happened with my milk or dark. I guess it had pretty much tempered but I did think that holding at 30C would have prevented that.

The specs of the milk and white chocolate are very close excepting (of course) that the milk has 11.5% cocoa mass and the white has none. The milk has 4.5% skimmed milk powder too. The sugar, cocoa butter and whole milk powder composition of both are almost the same.

I can't really see what the melting point of the two chocolates are - it's not on the spec sheets. But it can't be far below 30C. Maybe 25-28 - but my temperature is above that at 30C. But I HAVE to stay at 30C to keep temper - I don't think I can increase it anyway.

Am I using too much cocoa butter for the white chocolate?

Any thoughts please?

Thanks sooo much!

Colin

updated by @colin-green: 04/09/15 14:21:58

If you have pure cocoa butter you can't add too much unless it becomes cost prohibitive, or flavor prohibitive. Keep adding until cost or flavor no longer works. Additionally, you can try adding 0.1% fluid soy lecithin.

Thanks for that Sebastian. I was concerned that I may alter the characteristics of the white chocolate by taking it that high. Cost and flavour are not too concerning as this is only a very thin pre-coat. Appreciate your help on this.

Colin