Forum Activity for @Mark Allan

cacao cucina

Posted in: Opinion

Yes, $100K is well out of my current commitment level and means. We run a little orphanage in Honduras and I am just trying to start a small business that our older boys can start a career with.

cacao cucina

Posted in: Opinion

Hi Clay,

I think the machine will show up in the next week. I live in Honduras, so I had to ship it to Miami, at a company that only ships to Honduras. There is no national postal system here. Anyway, the link is:

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-quality-DL-ZYJ02-Traditional-mini_1341961132.html

I will be sure to review this machine as soon as I see how it performs. It presses oils from other seeds also. It looks like a drill bit that crushes things inside a cylinder. So rather than spending $27K on Cacao Cucina's press that will render a liter of butter in a few minutes, I am hoping this machine will plod along along give the 1-2L per hour that the sales person stated it would. If it even gives me 5L/day, that would be far more than I could use at the moment.

cacao cucina

Posted in: Opinion

A little update on the tempering. We use the method from Chocolate Alchemy's site, to temper in the wet grinder. It's easier to control the temperature in there, and no additional investment is required.

I am waiting on a $300 machine from China, which slowly renders cocoa butter but far more capacity than we need at the moment. It will supposedly extract 1-2 kg per hour. We'll see. It's a pretty simple design so I'm hoping it's durable.

cacao cucina

Posted in: Opinion

We run an orphanage in Honduras. Incidentally, Hondurans grows cocoa. For this reason I am investigating chocolate production as a fund raiser and as an industry to employ people in a country with 50% unemployment/under-employment. Cocoa Cucina was probably the first site I found that offered everything you needed for smaller scale chocolate production. Unfortunately, buying everything required to bean2bar was quoted at just over $100K.

So for now we are just experimenting with the homemade path, which I like to call "R&D". :-) We roast in the oven. We use the local method of winnowing beans, which is to pour them out in front of a fan, into a large bowl. Then we use the Champion juicer to make the liqueur, followed by a wet grinder for about day, finally tempering in a Kitchenaid stand mixer with a lamp near by to keep it from cooling too much before molding.

Best I can tell, the Cocoa Cucina equipment is for someone who knows well more than I do, is already making good chocolate, but needs to take it to the next level, and willing to stake a good portion of their life's savings on it. I speculate that the CC equipment is about the right size for a downtown chocolate shop, selling at pretty steep price.

Tempering machine with a wheel/dispenser

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

Anybody ever try tempering with just the paddle attachment of a stand mixer. We have a Kitchenaid. Wondering why a low speed turn wouldn't temper.

I'm so new to this that I haven't even done it yet, but I live in a country where cocoa beans are readily available and already dried for $2/lb, retail.