People also swore for centuries that using leeches to suck out the bad blood would heal their ailments, when in fact it simply made it worse. Simply because someone beleives something is good for them when all the evidence points to the contrary doesn't mean we should embrace it.
A colloid mill could easily handle that. search JKV colloid mill, but be prepared to clean the living daylights out of it.
yes. lecithin makes the chocolate 'thinner' (more like water when you pour it - less viscuous) - it's a way to use less cocoa butter and make the chocolate easier to work with. It's an emulsifier.
It is Chinese. I've had very good luck with it, but it will arrive very dirty.
Order of ingredients can vary greatly depending on what equipment you have and what you're trying to do. If you're using a wet grinder (the stone mill), add your liquor, dry ingredients, and perhaps some cocoa butter (it's difficult for me to say w/o knowing the exact formulation - youll need enough cocoa butter to keep it fluid during mixing). Always add lecithing if you choose to use it towards the end of the process.
You might want to consider a JML colloid mill (JML 65 is the smaller one, JML 120 is the larger). Both will require EXTENSIVE cleaning when you recieve them, but are quite effective at a lower cost than $5k ($1.5-3.0k).
The water cooling will be important to ensure you don't burn your liquor during grinding.
Can you give a sense of what you consider to be 'not too expensive' and the quantities that you're looking to mill?
Most 'off the shelf' vanilla extracts are what's called a single fold (1x) concentration, and use alcohol. alcohol based flavors will be just fine in chocolate, just keep the concentration less than 1%. As there are higher concentrations of alcohol (2x, 4x, 6x, etc) one can't really say how much is the right amount, you'll need to p lay with levels a bit to find that out for yourself. Other oils have differenet strengths - essential oils for example can be very, very, very potent - to the point where you may have a difficult weighing out a small enough quantity accurately to be consistent. If you're getting oils from grocery stores (ie consumer type flavorants) those have already been heavily diluted to make it easier for the home cook to manage.
A cut test is *always* a good thing to do if you're looking for quality control. The thing is - there's no right answer, what you're looking for and willing to accept is a function of what you want in your end product. Purple beans indicates either the beans were unfermented or lightly fermented, and they will be higher in bitterness, astringency, and lower chocolate flavor. Brown / dark beans indicates they are well fermented - how well is difficult to say from the cust test alone, but they'll likely have higher chocolate flavor, and less astringency and bitterness. Very dark and crumbly probably means they're very old beans that have been in the pipeline for a long time.
Are you happy with the chocolate those beans are making for you? If so, then do taht cut test 10 times and use those results as your baseline fo what you want to see. Sadly, doing a cut test *after* you've recieved your bulk shipment makes it very difficult to do anything about your bulk shipment if you're dissatisfied. I have no idea what your scale is, but you may want to consider setting up a sampling/preshipment program where your supplier sends you a small amount for y ou to test, after which you give the green light to ship based on the results.
The issue i suspect you're having is one of sugar bloom, and that results from condensation. You get condensation when something cold runs into warm air (warm air contains more water than cold air) - and when the warm, wet air hits the cold chocolate, that decrease in air temperature means the air can't hold the excess moisture, and it promptly deposits itself on your bar. When it does so, it dissolves some sugar in your chocolate, and then it eventually evaporates and leaves behind the dissolved sugar that looks now like white film.
Your typical consumer fridges have thermostats that aren' meant to go as high as 55 - some models have a cowling that, if you remove the cover, there's a set screw that you can turn to further adjust the range of the condensing unit to enable it to achieve warmer temperatures - its a trial and error thing as there's no gradations on the set screw (and not all modesl have it) - you just have to turn it, put a thermometer in there and read it 4 hours later to see what's happened. If yours has the set screw, it's the least expensive way to modify your fridge. If not, you can replace the thermostat - it's not hard to do, but not everyone's comfortable cutting wires.
A very helpful tool for managing condensation is a psychrometric chart - big scary word, the chart itself is also scary looking, but once you understand how to read it, will help you understand what the temperatures of your fridge (or the room your fridge is in) need to be to minimize the odds of condensation.
there's sufficient moisture in your chocolate to allow acids and bases to work together, if that's what's really causing your taste problems. adding water to chocolate is never advised. Remember your goal here isn't to dissolve anything, it's to adjust for flavor. if flavor required soluability, you'd never taste your chocolate in the first place 8-)
Quite welcome
Ghee, is very similiar to anhydrous milk fat. It's often heat treated much more significantly than AMF, so it's color and flavor may differ. Since Ghee is much more regional than a more standardized AMF, there's going to be a much wider range of what any given Ghee actually is. Conceptually, very similiar to AMF - but there's a wide variation. Closest things to watch are how much moisture is present in the Ghee (keep it as low as possible), and how much oxygen it's been exposed to (more = faster rancidity. Most ghee producers will have no idea what you're tlaking about when to start to have this conversation, fyi).
Since there are so many unknowns for me - what i'd suggest you do is start by adding tenths of a percent to your mass during conching, and evaluate it every 2 hours. If there's insufficient change, add a few tenths of a percent more, and assess after 2 hours of conching. Continue until you're satisified that it's either working or not 8-)
Since pH is a measure of the -log of H+ ions in a solution of water - which chocolate has very little of - i'd not bother with a pH reading of your chocolate mass.
Do let us know how it goes!
I like the grates/finger type personally, as it's more surface area:product contact (higher liklihood of foreign ferrous object removal). The effectiveness of them is directly related to the strength of the magents in them (rated by gauss). I almost exclusivly used these all around the world.
Why not use finger magnets?
Easiest thing to do is to use the nutritional information provided by your suppliers, and do the math for your formulation. If, however, you don't have that, you can use the generic categories contained in the USDA food composition database.
Hope that helps!
http://fnic.nal.usda.gov/food-composition/usda-nutrient-data-laboratory
I'm going to call BS. They tested 3 batches (no details on the statistical rigor or methodology), and picked a small company that's owned by Warren Buffet. I'm not sure i trust that their motives are pure as the winter snow.
And there's not that technology. What will happen, if they persist with this line of consideration, is that major manufacturers will simply not ship to the state of California. It's happened before.
Your roast step will be your micro kill step. Validate it. At the last step prior to depositing into moulds/enrobing, that will be your final opportunity to place a magnet / screen out foreign objects. After packaging, you could metal detect. Depends on how thorough you want/need to be.
Remember to pay close attention to the potential for re-contamination of micro clean areas via physically transport of microbes from dirty areas, or via air handling systems. Also if your equipment is water jacketed or gets a water wash down, you'll want to consider the potential for leaks to emerge and/or incomplete drying leading to microbial growth areas.
Talk to the good folks at Rizek SA. They are hq'd in SD.
Having built most of the infrastructure in the DR, i have some familiarity with the hispaniola beans from there 8-) I'd encourage you to verify that the beans that are being provided to you as hispaniola are indeed fermented under the protocols you'd want, and dried appropriately. You'd be amazed at how often beans are represented as something other than what they are.
First off, you may want to look at the fat of your beans. Hispaniola's are often lower fat due to the way they've been fermented (or not). Typically you'd want a fermented bean, and the more fermenated it is, the higher fat it will be - and the better your viscosity will be. Also pay attention to it's moisture content; if the beans are fully dried, you'll have viscosity issues.
Limit your lecithin usage to 0.5% or less. More is not better. Alternatives to soy lec are sunflower lecithin, but it's not as effective. PGPR drastically reduces viscosity, but is much different than lecithin (read up on the differences between yield value and plastic viscosity if you'r einteretsed). Also not very natural if that's important. Ammonium phosphatide works well, again not particularly natural.
It's intersting how often what people believe doesn't match with what's actual. One year my (then) middle school daughter did a social experiement for the science fair. She took one brand of chocolate, re-melted it, remoulded it into 'blank' molds, then broke it up. She then labelled it as 6 different brands of chocolate (remember it's all the exact same chocolate, just labelled differently) - and gave it to people and asked them to rate it from 1(hate it) to 10(love it). She then asked people to rate which brands were their favorite and least favorite.
Those people who indicated a preference of chocolate type "A", when they tasted the chocolate that was labelled "A" - rated it very highly. If they indicated they hated chocolate brand "B" - when the tasted that chocolate labelled "B" - they gave it a very low rating.
Exact. Same. Chocolate. Wildly large range of liking scores that directly correlated to their brand preference reporting.
Fascinating insight into the behavioral aspects driven by beliefs.
Afraid there's no short and easy answer to that ash - fermentation science is a huge area, with a relatively small pool of experts. There's a hundred different variations on a theme, and i'm not sure i could cover them all in a short web post. Combine the many potential fermentation variables with the fact that everyone around the world does it differently (even within the same origin, there can be an amazing lack of standardization) - and it becomes rather impossible to generalize a fix. Really the best to do is to work on a specific location with a specific person/approach and work through the specifics of a fermentation protocol for that particular problem.
Don't pay any attention to the smell phases. They're utterly worthless, as all beans are different (they may apply to certain beans in certain circumstances). Pay attention to your roast times/temps so you get a safe roast (roasting is your micro kill step), and do multiple roasts on the same batch of bean so you can better ascertain what's "right" for you.
I'd imagine you're not doing anything wrong at all, and what you're seeing is simply the nature of the beans given their origin and the way they were fermented. Most of Vietnamese farmers don't know how to ferment their beans - and while there are a number of concerted efforts to improve the quality, it's a slow process. Vietnamese beans can be very good - they'll be close to west african beans in character. It's impossible to create sourness during roasting/grinding - so it's unusual that you'd detect sour increasing over time.
Remember that fermentation is a very, very complex science - thousands of components are formed. Sourness is from the acids - and there are dozens of acids that are formed, and not all of them are volatile (ie not all of them disappear during roasting). if the beans don't smell / taste of vinegar, then my bet is that you've got beans that are low in volatile acidity, but high in organic acidity (and those don't evaporte no matter what you do) simply due to the way they were fermented. Addition of some baking soda during conching might help mitigate that.
The beautiful thing about chocolate is there's so many variables to play with. If you've still got some beans left, roast them at 20 degrees higher temp for 20% longer time and see what you get. One of the other challenges is that we may not be speaking the same sensory 'language' (ie you may say bitter but mean something completely different than what i mean). It's very, very hard to trouble shoot sensory over the internet w/o first having a shared and agreed upon lexicon of what the words actually mean.
Ahh the power of marketing.
What i would classify as the 'best' chocolate, most people will frankly never see in their lifetimes. I make it myself from beans that just aren't available to anyone. Many times when friends or family taste it, they don't like it because it's so different than what the average joe believes to be good chocolate (ie what's avaialble on the grocery store shelves). For me it's a wonderfully complex symphony of flavors and nuances and textures that have been carefully orchestrated.
"Best" is vague at best (bah-dum!) - what are the criteria for best? Hershey's sells an *awful* lot of chocolate, making more money on it than anyone else. Financially, they might consider themselves to be the best. Mars has more technical knowledge than anyone on the planet - technically they're the best. I'm guessing no one here would put either of them in the best category 8)
I suppose the old addage applies here - which wine is the best? The one you like!
I'm afraid it's nearly impossible to trouble shoot with the info you've provided. are you making chocolate from beans, or are you using cocoa powder? both? Do you have any sugar in your recipe? The more details you can provide, the better responses you'll get (exact formulation, which country your beans are from, etc).
There are a *HUGE* array of flavors that are possible from cocoa beans - it could be that you've managed to get a batch that was acidified when fermented. Does it smell like vinegar? If so, keep conching it and use higher temperatuers with the lid off the unit. If it's sour but doesn't taste/smell like vinegar, then you may be able to lower the sourness by adding a little bit of baking soda (1%) to try to neutralize the acids.
Funny you say that - my wife's a professor who researches factors that impact credibility - i wonder if it's her study you read.
Fear is a fantasticaly effective marketing tool. Opinion based advocates have used this approach effectively with their core group. It's been pretty well established that most folks already have made their minds up about a topic, and leverage opion based advocacy to reinforce those pre-existing beliefs. I've long ago stopped trying to fight that fight, precisely because the minds have already been made up, facts be damned. As someone in the news once famously said - never let the facts get in the way of a good story!
I suspect she's making a comfortable living off this approach, which is why we continue to see it. Sensationalism only calls more attention to her, which results in more money for her, which becomes a self fueling fly wheel that propogates it further.
God bless the internet, where everyone's anonymous, peer review is unnecessary, and you become an expert in everything simply by claiming so.
The legal limit in most (not all) countries is 1.75% shell. Less is better, as the more shell you have the grittier it will taste, the lower your fat will be, the faster your equipment will fail, and the higher your unwanteds (lead, mycotoxins, etc) will be.
To build on Marks post - since sugar is a bunch of large crystals, you need to 'refine' it down to smaller crystals - hence the reason all of your solids should be in your refining stage - to crush them into smaller pieces. Now, as you do that, the surface area of your chocolate will become very high, and the cocoa butter that you ahve present will have to coat all that extra surface area. As it does this, your chocolate becomes much thicker - it's called higher viscosity. In order to 'thin' it back out so you can do things like pour it into a mould, you have to reduce that viscosity. That's what lecithin does. You'll want to add it almost at the last stage because if your chocolate is too thin (low viscosity) during conching, conching isn't as effective. Now, most stone grinders are terrible conches, so it doesn't really matter all that much - but it does to some degree.
Remember, just a little bit of lecithin (0.5%) is almost always enough - adding more of it will usually result in the chocolate thickening back up again.
For just sugars, i like palm sugar or jaggery mixed with local things. I'd not likely use either of those for chocolate however because in chocolate, i'd want to emphasize the chocolate, not the sugar. Personal preference.
Having spent some time with my fair share of folks at the FDA - i can say with some degree of confidence that this is on their radar, and good things are not in store for those who habitually violate the standards and/or put consumers at risk. That said, there's lots of threats to the food system, and not all of them are #1 priority, so it's difficult to say when the hammer will fall, but it will fall. Remember that pathogens are only one of the category of 'bad things' that reside on shells. Heavy metals and mycotoxins are also very real concerns.
Almost all sugar is produced - essentially - the same way - there's a series of extraction steps to get the sugar out of the plant, then it's concentrated, then it's purified. It's at this purification step where you end up with a range of colors - every single region around the world calls their higher color sugars a different name - but they're all effectively the same thing - higher impurity sugars. That may sound bad (and in some cases, it is - i've been to most sugar refineries in the world and some of them are abyssmal. In other cases it's just more natural colors and is fine).
Since it's not effective to talk about each regions individual nomenclature (there's literally hundreds of names for the various brown sugars) - the world has standardized how they talk about it in the form of ICUMSA color standards - it's an analytical measure of how dark the sugar is. Your standard white sugar has an ICUMSA value of perhaps 40-50. A tan sugar may be ISCUMA 100. A very dark sugar may be ICUMSA 600. Not sure you're going to do anything with that, but sometimes the back story is interesting.
The easiest way to get higher color sugars is simply to run it through the washing, crystallizers, and centrifuges less often than one does for a white sugar, leaving effectively more molasses in it. This typically results in a higher color, but still low moisture sugar (< 1%). However, in some of the more modern high t hroughput refineries, it's not efficient for them to run like this, so what they do is highly refine everything at the high speed rates, then blend back the previously extracted molassess stream into the highly refined white sugar - sort of 'reconstituting' brown sugar. These can be much 'wetter' and higher moisture than their counterparts - so it's important to get a specification on your sugar to know the moisture. As you are aware, high moisture does bad things (tm) for chocolate.
Got it - thanks. I'm sure that was pointed out somewhere and i've just not been present enough to catch it - thanks.
Speaking of messages - and it's probably because i'm not drinking enough coffee - but i can't for the life of me see how to send a message to someone on the new site. I've seen reference to private messages, but it's not apparent to me how one actually sends the private message. Is the funtionality not implimented yet, am i just getting too old to find the new technology, or is there a secret decoder ring one needs to use to find it 8-)
Fat based flavors will always give you the best dispersion. Alcohol based flavors can work just fine in chocolate, but disperse less well as they're hydrophillic (it's the nature of alcohols). As time notes, due to a phenemonen called azeotroping, you're never going to get a 100% pure alcohol - it will always carry some water with it. Almost all your vanilla liquid flavors are alcohol based, for context, and the industry uses them all the time. Will you be ok with either one? Absolutely, but you may need to mix a bit more witih the alcohol based. If you use excessive amounts (ie > 1%), expect more challenges. Most of your texture is coming from the interaction of your cocoa butter and whatever liquid fat you're adding to get the meltaway texture.
In the next couple of years, there are a number of VERY large chocolate factories being built in India. It may not match your timeline, but the hiring need will be significant and you'll learn quite a bit.
It's incredibly difficult to make a tea out of something that's encapsulated with a total fat content of over 50%, as it is to reach roasting temperatures in tea, as it is to simulate process (grinding, conching).
When does it begin? immediately. it's a process who's rate depends on many things - total fat content, if you have milk fat present, and if so how much, are there nuts present, how 'good' was your temper to begin with, what are the storage conditions, etc.
Generally speaking, a good rule of thumb is that most of the changes are going to work their way out after a month. the chocolates certainly not done changing by that point, however the average person's not going to notice significant changes after that time.
Should you switch? that's a big question - that's entirely up to you. i don't know enough about what you're using, how you're using it, or what your customer want to answer that!
Undertempering a bit and sealing in air tight plastic wrappers could extend the peaks and valleys a bit, but undertempering's a very trickily proposition if you don't have a way of accurately measuring it, and many people don't have hot/cold sealers to seal their bars in airtight plastic overwrap film...
Chocolate flavor does indeed change over time in tempered chocolate - the main driver of this has to do with how tempering works. When you have a 'solid' tempered bar - there's still actually quite a bit of liquid cocoa butter present in it. Over time, much of that liquid cocoa butter will begin to crystallize and solidify (this is also why your chocolates get harder over time). The dynamics of flavor release with solid fat are quite different with the dynamics of flavor release with liquid fat. Generally what you'll see is a 'rounding out' of the flavors - where you might one have had huge peaks and valleys of flavor, you'll now have foothills. This isn't true for all flavor categories, and the ability of acids mitigation depends heavily on the type of acids you have present.
Without knowing all the details, i'd agree lack of proper temper is the likely culprit.
