How you roast can significantly impact flavor of the nuts. My guess is that since hazelnuts are a more delicate flavor, the fact that you're putting them in a HIGHLY flavorful base (dark chocolate) they're just getting overpowered. Hard to say for certain w/o details.
Have had good results with wagner power paint sprayers. make sure you use a very low viscosity chocolate. may need to dilute it with cocoa butter to further thin it.
Generally speaking, the more water you add to your chocolate, the lower it's shelf life will be. It's hard to discern your exact goal, but if i'm inferring correctly, you've got a solid chocolate (bar, someother form - you're not talking about a ganache center i don't think). If that's the case, iand by smoother you mean you are not happy with the melt quality - i'd be sure you start with a fine particle size chocolate (< 20 um) and you can begin to modify it by adding anhydryous milk fat (or ghee). milk fat will make it softer, harder to temper, and melt more rapidly (often referred to as 'smooth').
Do not add much - perhaps 1%, learn how to work with it, taste it and see if you're happy with it. if not, add 1% more, repeat..
Remember, invertase is an enzyme. Enzymes can go bad (if old, or if hot). Enzymes will work much more slowly when they're in a cold environment (ie they will work slower in a fridge than they do at room temperature). Enzymes require some moisture to work (if you've got a formulation without any water in it, for example...), and invertase will only do much for you if you've got sucrose present (ie if you're formulation is with other sugars or sugar free, don't expect much)...
Keeping the invertase in the fridge will extend it's shelf life; however if you've got 10 year old invertase or invertase that spent the first 2 weeks of it's life in an egyptian garage at 140F, it's not going to much matter....
well, sure.... your vintner should be able to tell you the alcohol content of the wine they want you to use - let's say it's 12%.
Put together an excel spreadsheet, and list your ingredients for your truffle. Weigh your centers both before and after dipping (shell moulding, whatever) 10x to get an average of the amount of chocolate shell. If the wine in your finished chocolate works out to be, say 10% (that's awfully high, but the math is easier), and the alcohol of the wine is 12% - your ABV of the chocolate = 1.2% - and that's going to be on the high end, assuming no alcohol boiled off during the ganache preparation (better to estimate high with the liquor control board involved).
That's a little bit more than a patent for simply washing, it's an alkali treatment, claiming to reduce FFA's. Of course treating high acid materials with alkali reduces the acid 8-)
There is little technical advantage to washing post fermentation, and as jim notes, there are logistical reasons as to why it'd actually be dis-advantageous. You can certainly do this, however you'll get the same result as you would had you not done it, from a finished product standpoint. Depends if you want to create more work for yourself or not.
Shalom! Your problem, if i understand correctly, is that when you cycle your small display case on/off, it forms condensation. 14C is pretty cold if all you're trying to do is prevent bloom. One possible way to rethink this is to set it to a higher setting - say 25C - would that enable you to leave it on longer?
Of energy usage is your concern, you may wish to consider a peltier chiller for those times when you can't run your conventional air conditioning unit - i've never tried this, but perhaps get someone to modify your AC unit to switch back and forth between AC and Peltier heat removal? Thinking out loud here - i know both approach on their own will work, but require transferring of good from one to another. A hybrid unit may eliminate that - would need to test it to see if condensation is still a concern or not...
One of the most difficult things to do when discussing flavors is develop a shared lexicon - ie, when you say something, have your readers understand what you mean. Astringency is the drying feeling you get on your tongue, not really a flavor. As it's a sensation more than a taste, you can't really have an astringent smell i'm afraid. Astringency is very, very different than acid.
No hard and fast rules of thumb. often inclusions will be in the 7-15% range (ie if you've got a 100g bar, you'll have 85-93g of chocolate). One thing you can try to do is pre-warm the inclusions to the temperature of your tempered chocolate to help prevent the cooling effect you're seeing on your chocolate as a result of the cold inclusions taking the heat out of the chocolate, resulting in it's solidifying prematurely. take care not to over warm them as doing so will detemper your chocolate.
http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm303012.htm
It should be obvious to everyone what my position is on this matter by now. It's good to be aware of enforcement efforts to emphasize that the danger is real. We will be seeing increased enforcement activities in this area.
I have no direct knowledge of it's use for bp reduction - however, since caffeine is also a diuretic, given the structural similarities between it and theobromine, i suppose theobromine could also be a diuretic. Again, i have no direct knowledge of this application personally, and while the wiki may be right, i've seen far too many things on it that are simply inaccurate for me to trust it as a good source 8-) (i've not looked at it in ages, but the chocolate wiki, for example, was (is?) riddled with inaccuracies).
I would unequivocally NOT make a 'tea' from the shells and drink that. You're going to get all sorts of unwanted nasties that you absolutely do not want to ingest. The entire point of crystallization is purification. At some point, you're going to need a separation step to help discriminate the theobromine from the other water soluble stuff - if you went straight to xtallization, sure you'd xtallize theobromine, but also precipitate out lots of other stuff.
It's the kissing cousin to caffeine. Stimulant. Also some evidence that it's pretty effective at suppressing the vagus nerve, which is what kicks off the coughing reflex - making it a natural cough suppressant.
Side note: you've heard not to feed chocolate to your dog as it could kill them - it's the theobromine that does this - small amounts can easily put a dog into cardiac arrest. Horses too, for that matter.
Callebaut was trying to commercialize something akin to this a few years ago, but it was never commercially available and it's terribly expensive (it's callebaut, after all...). I've not seen it anywhere else. If you're handy, average theobromine in shells is 2%, you can do a water extraction followed by a crystallization and produce it yourself.
Interesting stuff guys - thanks. The notion of H202 as a preservative in a highly oxidative susceptibility product such as milk powder is strange to me at first blush, given that H202 is SUCH a strong oxidizer. Certainly it's an effective microbiological suppressant, but it'll absolutely destroy the flavor of the fat in the milk. There are much, much better ways to protect quality than the use of this. My guess - it's the cheap option!
Ramya - many modern chocolate factories are still using stone grinders, which are quite effective - so just because something's old doesn't mean it's not useful 8-) For something like H2O2 in milk it surprises me as there are much more effective ways to do the same thing, w/o making it taste bad.
Interesting document - i've never seen this actually practiced in western milk plants, nor in New Zealand. Is this common practice in India? Looks like it's an early 60's publication.. i didn't read nearly the whole thing (only 1 page) so i'm certain i've missed context - i'm wondering if it might have been historical practice?
I would say that I'm *completely* unconcerned with H202 levels in modern chocolate processing....
Store brand milk powders in India are often fortified with additional calories by adding vegetable fats to them. Often times those fats are susceptible to oxidative randicity. Might want to check your supply to see if that's causing the off flavor.
And a note, cooking milk powder in cocoa butter will likely only increase the off flavor. In order get generate the caramel flavors, you need 3 things: protein, reducing sugar, and water. Cooking in cocoa butter means you wont have the latter, and lots of heat, generally speaking, does bad things to the flavor of fats.
Your all natural, food concentrates, will fade faster i'm afraid.
Package them in something that doesn't let the light pass through. What you're seeing is a photo-catalyticdegradation.
Many people don't clean their molds - they'll use the same one over and over for a given type of chooclate. Of course that only works if your temper is perfect each time, and if you're using the same colors each time.
I'm a fan of just using hot water. If your water is hard, you'll have to find a way to remove the minerals that are deposited behind - sometimes a cotton ball to buff it out works, but over time even that'll scratch up the molds.
Try to frame it in terms of glycemic index - there should be plenty of charts on the internet that already exist - it's a way to assign , essentially, a number that measure 'how sugar like is xxx'. The lower the GI, the more diabetic friendly, generally speaking.
For these, you just melt them and dip things in them, let them cool and they'll solidify. Next step: eat 8-) They're not really chocolate, they're coatings that are made to be easy to use. Originally, Harald's approach was to make low cost coatings that are easy to use to allow (very) small business owners a way to sell confectionery products. Over the last 10 years, they've grown the home use market, which is what these are.
One of the greatprivilegesI have is to taste lots of things - some of it very good, some of it very bad - however they all add to the richness of the experience in total. I've had (even made) some of the rarest beans in the world (ie hand pollination of single flowers) - where there literally is no other pod (ie beans) like it in the world. Sometimes they've even been crossed with close cousins of cocoa, geneticallysimilar, but a different family. Now, that's about as rare as rare gets. Most of the time,albeitrare, the product is unremarkable from a flavor standpoint - sometimes evenawful. Sometimes they're remarkably remarkable. However, in each experience, one learns something & deepens the richness and depth of the experience as a whole.
For me, if i'm doing something I love with people i enjoy, learning along the way, and leaving a wake behind me that betters the lives of those i touched, I findfulfillmentin that intersection. Chocolate, generally speaking, is a consumer experience that can dovetail nicely in that equation! The otherintriguingpart is that no matter how much i know, or how much i think i know, there's always something new to learn, another way to look at things, and great people to work with.
No disrespect meant Brian, just my honest opinion. I'm quite familiar with the particular material you're using - in fact, i can tell you just about anything you'd like to know about it. It's precise genetic code. It's variability from tree to tree, or from pod to pod on the same tree. It's self compatibility. It's variation from generations F1 through to F12. I can tell you the top 10 most prevalent microorganisms that were present and active during fermentation. If i needed to, i could probably give a pretty good approximation of how you dried, roasted, and milled them as well.
The generational phenotypic differences that present at any given generation are indicative of an inherent genetic 'blend' in the bean genetics - when i indicate there's a blend occurring, i'm referring to the fact that any chocolate made from that clone will be, inherently, a blend - unless you manually segregate out the phenotypes (which still would result in a blend actually, just less of one) - but that makes it financially unviable as you don't have access to sufficient volume to justify doing so. It's a bit like breeding 2 non-purebred animals - their offspring will be a blend because that's the nature of their parents.
I wish you all the best in your venture! Remember, mine is just one opinion amongst many. There's plenty of people who think Apple computers are less than desirable, yet they're one of the most successful companies on the planet.
Due to the fashion in which genetics express themselves, there will be variation even within single pods - the impression Maranon would have one believe (at least the impression i'm left with after reading/viewing the marketing materials) is that the chocolate is made from these pigment free beans. The reality is that only a very small % of the beans inside the pod are of this phenotype, the majority of them are phenotypically 'typical' beans. Meaning they express their traits largely as any other bean would be expressed.
I've had this chocolate, and it's ok. There's nothing wrong with it. But it's very clearly a blend to make it commercially feasible - one could separate the beans from the pods to segregate them, however they'd be left with a very, very small pile of white beans. To be honest I expected more, and I've had much better chocolate (some of it from the fine folks who hang out here). But taste is quite the subjective qualitative attribute.
I've never met the folks at Maranon, and know nothing about them. I'm quite sure the beans, even with their phenotypic mixtures, are quite capable of producing a wonderful chocolate. Perhaps their sensory definition of a great chocolate simply differs from mine; or perhaps they're in the process of learning what fermentation and drying protocols are necessary to get the beans to express their flavors differently (i'm sure they're working with a pretty small quantity, so trialing is going to be a slow process). They appear to be selling to high end pastry chefs, which means the chocolate can't be too remarkable, as it will be used as a component of something else, and the more remarkable a given element of a pastry design is, the more difficult it is to incorporate other highlight ingredients. Too remarkable, and it becomes limiting.
I would also note that Dr. Meinhardt is a geneticist, quite knowledgeable as a geneticist, but he's not a chocolate guy, a bean guy, or a post harvest guy. Not to detract from any work he's done; only to point out where his competencies lie. From an industry standpoint, it highlights one of the gaps in terms of how breeders interact with growers, and industry. Breeders, geneticists, farmers, and industry are all motivated differently, and i've yet to see all 4 groups together at the same time to discuss how to best plot a path forward for the future. Why is this a problem? Because if breeders give the farmers something that industry doesn't want (but the farmers do because it's high yielding - but tastes terrible only the farmers don't know this because 99% of them have no idea what chocolate even is) - we're not going to have a sustainable industry.
You're certainly headed in the right direction with that approach, which is why i didn't say anything earlier. The comment was most directed to Felipe's request around getting individual components, which, in my opinion, if one doesn't have a certain level of background understanding of what drives flavor perception in chocolate, isn't going to be very useful - because while that one compound may be present, it may not be perceived very, very differently in it's pure state at a given level than how you perceive it in chocolate. It's a terribly, terribly complex field - some parts of it are fairly well understood, others less so. You're going to have a hard time finding much publicly published; however that doesn't mean the work's not been done 8-) only that it's a closely guarded valuable! I've been doing this for a long time, and there are many things that i understand pretty well. I'm not even going to let the ink dry on that statement before i follow it by saying there's also lots of things that i don't understand very well, which is part of what makes the world of cocoa so exciting - there's always lots to learn! I need to parse my time somewhere here, because i dont have much of it, and as you point out, many of these topics can easily be a lifetime of study for anyone. I need to be somewhat judicious in what areas i get involved with, as i don't want to leave someone 'hanging' by giving a partial response, knowing that i often disappear for long stretches at a time where i simply don't have the physical means to respond, much less the time to do so 8-)
A few points to consider Felipe:
1) Some of the chemicals ID'd in chocolate are not commercially available via food safe production methods
2) Often times, a chemical's flavor will vary by it's concentration. That is, if you have a very little bit of it present, it may taste 'earthy'. if you have that same chemical present at higher concentrations, it may taste 'moldy'.
3) Often times, flavor perception changes with the addition of other chemicals. A chemical that, by it's self, may be perceived as, oh say toasted bread, may when in the presence of other chemicals taste like fruit.
Flavor chemistry in chocolate is very, very complicated. It's one of the reasons there are no good artificial chocolate flavors out there - very few folks know chocolate flavor chemistry well enough to pull it off.
That's not going to do anything to mitigate sugar bloom, and will likely only induce fat bloom i'm afraid...
If it really is sugar bloom, you'll be able to brush/wipe most of it off. Will it ever look as if it didn't sugar bloom in the first place? Possibly, depends on a lot of factors. If the product still has good snap, and you can brush most of it off the top w/o the chocolate melting when you touch it, it's probably sugar bloom.
No one's suggesting it's not possible to physically make a product with raw agricultural materials; only that it's a terrible, terrible idea from a food safety perspective. One that once it's officially looked at through a regulatory lens, will be quickly legislated into illegality. Having been part of the preliminary discussions that have already occurred w/in the FDA, I can tell you that it's on the radar, but not prioritized.
Bottom line - just don't do it. It's foolish. If you choose to expose yourself to the risk, do so knowing what that risk is; under no circumstance should you offer it for sale to the consuming public who has an expectation of food safety, and has exhibited very little willingness to educate themselves.
1) W/o having a universal definition of what 'raw' is, it's a moving target
2) I find it implausible that anyone claiming to make raw chocolate is actually doing so. at best they likely don't know what they're doing, at worst they're intentionally misleading their consumer
3) Almost no matter what your definition of raw is, it represents a huge. huge. huge. huge. safety risk from a microbiological standpoint. Unless your irradiate. Which i'm almost equally positive no one's doing. Killing your customers has been scientifically proven to be a terrible business model.
Slight modifications: the bitterness is largely due to the flavanol content, not minerals. Also, singling out any single nutrient as 'good' or 'bad' is an oversimplification. Much like a healthy 401k, your body requires a balanced portfolio of nutrients, including sugar. Consuming more calories than you burn is what lays down fat. Fat is simply excess calories that are stored for later use - not mycotic organisms.
Thanks Kit - I know i say things tongue in cheek sometimes, the intent isn't to be jarring. I've only ever seen one 'raw' chocolate being sold (in NYC), so i'm left with the impression there's not a huge demand for it, but then it's hard to square that with all the requests. Would love to hear more about they 'whys' of the requests that come in and what is driving them. Your request appears to be driven more out of a desire to somehow differentiate the product, and not necessarily demand or belief based i think..
I'd love to understand what the draw is behind the 'raw chocolate' movement. Every 2 months or so for years a handful of the exact same questions pop up. While i'm not going to spend any more time answering them again, i do wonder why the question arises. Is there a movement, in general, of low heat processed foods? Why? Is there a belief that life is just too long?
Or is it specific to cocoa? If so, why? What's the attraction/belief centered around? I can't seem to parse that out of any of the questions...
Little help?
Simply put, i don't believe it. They may not be exposing it to those temperatures (however, it's the temperature of a loading truck, so even then...) - it doesn't mean someone else isn't, and how in the world would they know. I'm a huge skeptic.
Only have a few moments now i'm afraid, not much time to get into it.
Lecithin is an ampiphillic emulsifier - one end of it is hydrophillic (attracted to water), end end is lipophillic (attracted to fat). One of the (many) reasons chocolate can get thick is as Mark notes, there is a small amount of moisture present - sugar carries a monolayer of moisture with it, milk has some adsorbed to it's protein, lactose has water of crystallization, etc. Where that moisture comes into contact with, say, sugar you get a phase transition (your sugar goes from crystalline to solution - forms a syrup), and anyone who's ever spilled a soda and missed a spot in cleaning it up knows well that it can get sticky as all get out. The hydrophillic end of lecithin will, essentially, 'stick' to that syrup phase, whereas the other end of lecithin will 'stick' to the cocoa butter (a bit more complicated than that but you get the jist) forming a bridge between the two, essentially making it less sticky.
Now, conching generates (or can, dependent on your process) a lot of heat, and some of the moisture can be volatilized off during conching - so if you've got a process that does this, adding lecithin too early may tie up the moisture, making it harder for it to go away. However, not all processes blow off moisture very well, so it's good to know your process. Some processes get hot enough that you hit what's called the glass transition point of a crystal (sugar), and you can shift it from a crystal to an amorphous state (glass). Amorphous sugars like to collect ambient moisture.
Afraid i've never looked at hardness as a function of lecithin. My gut tells me that the more lecithin you use the softer your chocolate gets (by just a tad) as lecithin is 50% fluid oil, but again i've no direct experience measuring it and as such don't know for certain.
First, remember that lecithin is all about reducing the amount of cocoa butter you use; therefore as Journey notes, it's not essential. If you choose not to use it, you simply compensate by adding more cocoa butter.
Second, it's awfully difficult to tell you when to use it w/o knowing more specifics, such as:
- in your formula, you need to first calculate what the % fat is. it's impossible for me to do so with the information provided (ie you say milk powder - is that skim milk? whole milk? and if whole, is it 26% or 28%?)
- would need to know more about your process? how are you mixing and grinding? if it's the stone melange, the answer is 'it depends'. if you add all your nibs and dry materials and the amount of fat that you want to add up front, and the unit is struggling to grind, then you'll need to add lecithin (or more fat, or get a bigger motor...) simply to aid in the mechanics of grinding.
Can a milk chocolate be made w/o lecithin? absolutely. it will just cost you more to do so.
