Forum Activity for @ricardo villanueva

Looking to learn how to make chocolate - bean to bar process

Posted in: Chocolate Education

Enjoy your "site". Ciao.

Looking to learn how to make chocolate - bean to bar process

Posted in: Chocolate Education

Hi Adamandia:

I am a little skeptical that the Santha grinder ( or any little stone grinder ) will produce completely smooth, under 30 micronchocolate. These cute machines look like an old phonograph. Material ismilled between a spinning disk and one or two fist-sized "wheels" that revolve around it. Chocolate is odd ( a non-newtonian fluid ). That means, like cornstarch, the more you compress it, the more dense it becomes. This generates resistance and heat, lots of heat. Little machines are hard pressed to deal with this. Nothing wrong with the technology, just the scale. Also, if you grind too long, your chocolate may turn into a ropey, tar-like consistency.

Maybe Brad and Sebastian have some techniques that overcome these problems. Bottom line - I wouldn't buy any machine that did not come with a guarantee that it could grind chocolate to 30 microns or less. If you hear: " Well our machine wasn't made for chocolate per se, but it should..." don't walk, run away.

A note on micrometers: one reliable and economic way to get an objective measurement of particle size is to use a microscope. Retailers can provide a fliter with a line grid that fits into the eye tube. You make a thin smear of your chocolate onto a glass slide and the lines in your field of view will indicate the size of particles. You can preserve your slides by adding one drop of marine varnish. By preserving slides, you cansee how various chocolate brands vary not only in particle size and percentage of sizes but also particle shape.

Bottom line on a grinder-- get a guarantee that is enforceable.

Best, Ricardo

Looking to learn how to make chocolate - bean to bar process

Posted in: Chocolate Education

Hi Adamandia:

Might I first suggest the book The Science of Chocolate by S.T. Beckett who I believe teaches in York. His book can be very technical in places, butit is thorough.

The Web site 'chocolate alchemy' is fine, but they are selling gear for home bean to bar chocolate making -- and not all that cheap.

Small scale home bean to bar chocolate making is doable in all except maybe one regard. Washing, roasting, winnowing, making nibs, conching, tempering and molding can all be done small scale with reasonable inexpensive equipment. The hard part is getting the ground nibs into a liquor that has particles less than 30 microns ( a human hair is about 50 microns thick). Sites like chocolate alchemy offer various grinders that were created to grind herbs and spices for Indian (UK would say Asian) food. Theproblem is that these machines just can't get chocolate down to 30 microns, and you end up with gritty chocolate.

The small scale chocolate lab solution is to use steel rollers spaced just under 30 microns apart. Easy peasey. Unfortunately, even a re-built bench type roller mill runs about 25K U.S. last I checked. Bay Area Scharffen Berger (now owned by Hershey's)uses a stone wheel like the sort you might see in a flour mill. If you are determined to make home bean to bar chocolate, I would suggest considering a stone roller grinder ( like the ones they use for olive oil extraction ). These should be available on the continent and for considerably less than $25K. Here's another suggestion: why not buy bulkchocolate or liquor and work on tempering? This is a valuable sub skill in chocolate making that you can start on without too much fuss. And you can temper by hand using a Bain Marie (water bath), seed chocolate, and a chocolate thermometer.

Hope that helps! Ricardo