I am getting issues with my molded bars looking mottled on the side open to the air. I am not sure why this is happening and it only seems to happen to about 8 of the 16 bars I can mold at one time. So not a great success rate.

I have been molding chocolate for some time now and have been doing it by hand until recently. I bought a ChocoVision Revolution 1 ( I think it is now called a Rev Mini) in July 2014. I have been using it pretty heavily and up until a month ago it has done great. No issues, it tempered fine and I never doubted it, but now I am loosing nearly half my batch each time I run it. What baffles me is that some may come out completely perfect and then others exhibit the streaking and mottledness seen in the photos. 

I have numbered the molds to see if it was in the beginning or end of the batch and they occur randomly, one mold may be fine, the next not fine. One bar out of my 3 bar mold may be perfect while the others look shotty. I am at a loss. I read somewhere that washing the baffle with the temperature probe on it in too hot of water may damage the reading of it, but I have checked the temper with 2 independent thermometers while it is tempering and everything seems to be spot on for the machine. 

Lastly, I can tell if the bars are going to be mottled or not after about 2 minutes of them being in the mold. So my workflow is I laddle the chocolate into the mold. Tap on table to release any bubbles, and use an offset metal spatula to scrap off the excess chocolate to make the bars flat. Then place them on the table while I finish my batch. When I pick them up to put them into a wine fridge (set at about 61-65F) I look at them and can instantly see which ones have the mottled look and can see where the others are going to getting the streaking...

 

Any thoughts? 

updated by @ian-horvath: 04/12/15 13:22:55

Some more photos.

Without knowing more about what's going on I would say the issue is that the crystals are not evenly mixed in the chocolate. What you may be seeing is regions of different crystal formation.

This is a problem I had with a couple of smaller Chocovision machines (Rev 2s). It usually occurred at the begining if I didn't want a while after the machine beeped and said it was done for the crystals to spread (I usually helped it along by stirring) and at the end when there wasn't enough chcoolate in the bowl to maintain temper.

It didn't happen all the time - usually it was because I as working in the kitchen and it was either much warmer (late-afternoon sun) or much colder than normal.

HTH

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clay - http://www.thechocolatelife.com/clay/

I am working in a kitchen it is about 70F so I would think that would be optimal. Anyways I was trying to figure it out last night and came aross that if I put a blowdryer on it while it is still in the heating up stage then the temper came out perfect. In conjunction with what you are saying about the mixing it was helping it to mix a little more. I am not sure what the problem is but this is a fix for now. Have you experienced this problem with the larger ChocoVision machines such as the X3210 and Delta Series?