Forum Activity for @Peter3

Hi,

The seeding method for tempering works only if the cold chocolate you add has already been tempered (which means that cocoa butter it contains is already crystalised in correct crystal form).

If you use cold "chocolate" that has been made and than just cooled it will not work.

If you are working with small quantities you will need to learn how to temper chocolate on table or use one of the machines which generate seed from cocoa butter.

If I understand correctly you want to have a solid chocolate  centre for panned product?

Are you going to use the same chocolate for both?

We have tested starting a panned product from a very small chocolate drop (like a small piece used for chocolate chip cookies), if you start building the chocolate up around this "seed" very slowly you will get a round ball and avoid doubles.

Once you have your centre you can do with it whatever you want next: sugar coat, pan with the same or different chocolate etc.

If I understand correctly the research viscosity reduction is achieved by "aggregating" solid particles to improve "packing rate".

In chocolate manufacturing in some situations* it may be beneficial to be able to produce and use chocolate with lower fat content and suitable viscosity.

* Reducing cocoa butter content can reduce the cost of raw materials used to make chocolate. This reduction will not always reduce total cost of manufacturing and for people making fine chocolates this may be a wrong idea in general.

The main issue I see with using this technology in chocolate manufacturing is that "correct viscosity" is required at use stage where we pour tempered chocolate into moulds, use it to enrobe or coat products. At this stage chocolate contains not only cocoa, sugar and milk solids but also a certain amount of cocoa butter crystals which need to be uniformly dispersed in the mass and not "aggregated" in any way.

Unlike pumping crude oil the cost of pumping chocolate is almost negligible part of the whole manufacturing process.

I would guess that this technology may be more suitable for low cost compound manufacturing where reduction of fat content can help with cost reduction and some compounds are used without tempering.  

Correct on 900g + 9g of cocoa butter as approximation of 1%.

If you find the change of viscosity too much you may need to go to 0.5%.

You need to add the cocoa butter to hot chocolate and mix for 10-15 minutes.

The whole matter of viscosity control of tempered chocolate is very complex and many pages could be written on the subject.

You could try a much simpler approach.

If you are happy with the temper of the milk chocolate keep the tempering machine settings.

You can use a disposable plastic knife (something with repeatable shape and weight) and dip it in the tempered dark chocolate (use 10 pieces to get good average), measure and record weights.

Add 1% of cocoa butter (by weight) to your milk chocolate, temper and dip the plastic knives, measure, record compare.

Keep increasing the cocoa butter by 1% until you get the same weights.

You can scrape the chocolate from plastic knives, melt and reuse.

I would guess 1-3% should do the trick.

You may need to drop your cooling temperature set point on the tempering machine if your temper is getting worse. 

I will agree with you on the fact that total plate counts, yeast and mold are not indicators of coliforms or salmonella presence. 

Guusb above asked about sterilising nibs.

I have been looking at options for sterilisation on the bean processing line we are building. Suppliers strongly suggest installing a sterilisation step in the process as this is very common practice in industrial applications, especially where the the product is sold on to other industrial customers and requires very low TPC results.

In whole bean roasting this is achieved by injection of steam into steriliser before roaster and requires quite large steam generation capacity.

I have looked at results of our micro testing over last few years, and TPC on beans range from 3x10^2 to 4-5x10^6, in cocoa liquor we have never gone over 8x10^3 and most results are below 1x10^3. Australian standards for finished chocolate require less than 1x10^4 and we have never had finished product at more than half of this level.

We are not selling any product to other industrial customers and looking at low probability of large salmonella contamination on beans and even lower chance of this contamination surviving roasting and grinding process we have decided not to install any additional sterilisation steps in our process.

I have left a space for this just in case things change.

I will add on tangent.

In the beer brewing world, roasted cocoa nibs are used as an flavour additive in several different beer recipes. Roasted to develop flavour and than soaked in neutral alcohol to sanitise. Introduction of live microorganisms present on nib into brewing systems brings very unpleasant results.  

Use nibs from your current process to make cocoa mass.

Find a local micro lab (there are plenty of them) and get the cocoa mass tested for total plate count, yeasts and moulds.

While you are waiting for results find out what is your local micro standard for total plate counts in chocolate products.

Get the results from the lab, compare to standard and you will know if you need to change anything.

If in doubt come back here with results.

Whole thing will cost you less than 100 Euro.

Most probably you will find that you don't need to do anything.

If I read and understand the results of this test correctly the cadmium content is 1.57 micro gram per gram. 

In Australia the limit for cadmium content in the chocolate is 0.5 micro gram per gram. Some other countries have similar limits some have no limits.

If the cadmium content in the nib was at the same level as in the shell you could use these beans to make a chocolate with cocoa mass content of no more than 30%.

Fortunately usually cadmium content in the nibs is lower than in the shell, but it should be tested before use.

It depends a lot on what type of tempering machines you use.

Some of them can be taken apart and cleaned which means a fair bit of work but wide range of applications. Other tempering machines can be only flushed which means that they can be used for milk and dark chocolate (no white) and while it requires less work it creates a quantity of "rework" chocolate. 

Finding the exact explanation of what is happening during conching is not very easy as we have very limited understanding of that process.

It needs to be pointed out that we only measure "average" temperature of the mass in the conche using a relatively basic temperature sensor. Mechanical action of conche tools may result in "local" temperatures much higher (I have been told as high as 2,000C at sugar crystal breaks)  than one indicated so the answer to your question of what is happening is probably: all of the above reactions and some more. 

Source of 75-78C is experience, less than this and we get very limited caramelisation, more and caramelisation is difficult to control. Changing the temperature of chocolate mass in the running conche is not a very fast process.

Hi,

Please understand that I work in an operation making tens of tons of chocolate every week and I can offer very limited advice on how to use small scale machinery.

I am not sure if you can replicate "normal" chocolate making process in a Santha wet grinder and putting chocolate in the oven will not work.

"Normal" as what what is used to make most of the chocolate worldwide, using mixers, refiners and conches.

Process where raw materials are being dosed and mixed, refined to required particle size and loaded into chocolate conche as dry flake.

This flake in the conche is processed "dry and powdery" first to remove moisture, turned into "dry and pasty" phase to allow mechanical work and flavour development and at the very end cocoa butter and lecithin are added to liquefy mass and turn it into liquid chocolate with correct viscosity.

By controlling a range of variables like temperature, time, speed and direction of rotors or level of ventilation in the "dry and pasty" stage we can create a very wide range of chocolates from the exactly same mix of raw materials.

Conching is the magical part of chocolate making as we have a good idea how to do this but very little understanding of what exactly is happening.

You can develop a very strong caramel flavour in milk chocolate if during chocolate making process.

Typically you would want to keep the mass temperature below 55C for first 2 hours to remove the moisture and then raise it to 75-78C for 2 hours while it is still dry/pasty. Drop down to 65C and continue normal way. All before liquifying the chocolate.

Trying to do the same with already made/finished chocolate will not work.

I am very confused about what are you actually asking about?

How to make chocolate with with caramel flavour/taste?

This can be achieved in the process of making chocolate with normal milk chocolate recipe. Best method is to keep the mass at dry stage at 75-78C for 1-2hours.   

Few quick points:

1. If your chocolate is correctly tempered but the surface temperature of the mould cavity is not correct (too cold) you will get the result as in your photos.

To put it in basic terms heat flows from the chocolate into the mould surface, chocolate cools too fast resulting in creation of "unwanted" type of cocoa butter crystals in this area.

Try warming your moulds up to 27-29C and see if this will improve the results.

2. The trick to making a nicer looking product is to have a bit of texture on the mould cavity which gives you texture on the product surface. Flat surface with nothing on it as in your moulds is not a good idea.

3. Keep tapping and vibrating too get rid of bubbles. Using lower viscosity chocolate will help.

As Sebastian said above lead and cadmium free chocolate products don't exist.

Both elements get into the bean from the soil where the cocoa trees grow.

Some origins have higher content levels (Ecuador, Venezuela) some lower (Pacific countries).

I'm not aware of any purification system for removing lead or cadmium from cocoa powder or cocoa mass so this may be the wrong approach.

When you are stating "free" do you mean absolutely no traces of cadmium or lead or just below certain threshold?

Beans from Pacific countries and from Africa are generally low in cadmium.

Use DME dry malt extracts (powdered), liquid extracts contain significant amount of water (over 15%) and getting that water out of chocolate is difficult.

There is a very wide range of malt extracts available for brewing industry and home brewing so you will be spoilt for choice.

One other thing to keep in mind is that DME is very hygroscopic which creates a few challenges in use.

Use of malt extract should have close to zero effect on tempering as does not contain any fat (and if used correctly will not introduce water). Tempering is all about cocoa butter crystalisation.

My last name  begins with a K and has a lot of letters in.

No passion for running though.

Vast majority of milk chocolate in the world is made using spray dried milk powder.

The difference between roller dried and spray dried milk powders (apart from taste) shows in the the mixing. If both milk powders have the same fat content more fat will be released in the mixer from roller dried milk powder than from spray dried milk powder. Fat from spray dried milk powder will be released in the conche.

This works both ways:

If you use roller dried milk powder you use less additional fat (cocoa butter) in mixer prior to refining to achieve the same consistency.

If you use spray dried milk powder you can use more fat in the in the mixer prior to refining. Fat may come from increased cocoa liquor content, more cocoa butter or different mix ratio between whole and skim milk powders.

1. What is the process you are using now? What is your product?

2. What is the production capacity you are looking for? As in pieces (what size) per hour or per shift?

3. Will you need to pass an audit of the grocery chain?

4. You can buy depositors that handle large inclusions. Answers to the above questions will help to make a decision on this.

5. You can buy volumetric depositors that will handle small batch production.

6. You can but a mould with raised dividers (which go almost to the surface), fill it in one go and easily break into smaller bars/tablets/pieces that can be individually packed.

We use the last method: Add 18kg of tempered chocolate to a kettle with temperature control on the water jacket (set to 31C), add inclusions,mix for 2 minutes, deposit (manual operation of the valve) out of the kettle into a mould sitting on a scale, vibrate and cool.

After cooling demould, break into 4 x 100g pieces, pack and box (all by hand).

Team of 5 can make over 250kg per shift. 

Two points:

1. Dosing accuracy is not great resulting in large give away (not important in our case)

2. You have to mix small batches so the chocolate does not loose the temper.

This is a very important thing to keep in mind often forgotten.

I will suggest looking from another perspective, not necessarily better but different 

I had a look at a few tempering machines like Selmi or FBM Compatta.

Pretty.

However the control systems used for control of chocolate tempering were not ideal and not very responsive to any changes. Chocolate flow interruptions caused by using the "filling moulds" function were resulting in unstable chocolate temperature and loss of temper. The temperature control range was wide.

This may be fine in many situations but it may cause serious problems in others.

Another option for people looking at tempering chocolate on a small scale are small scale industrial tempering machines or lab tempering machines. New ones are expensive (but so are the Selmis of this world) but there are second hand machines on the market. Getting a machine with capacity bigger than required is not a bad idea. Normally they use PID controls for temperature with settable parameters which helps to adjust and control temperatures much closer to required setpoint.

Possibly something like the last machine on this page:

http://www.raymondtravel.co.uk/chocolate_temperers.htm

There are a few other dealers in second hand confectionery machines worldwide

Excellent.

Hi Mark,

If I understand correctly you are just planning your process.

This is a good moment to ask questions.

I will start with what I understand of your idea.

1. You will make chocolate in 25kg batches using refiner (what kind of refiner as this word can have many meanings in chocolate world?).

2. You will need to create some sort of tempering process.

3. You are going to make a finished product using this chocolate.

You will need to look both at point 1 and point 3 before deciding on point 2.

1. What will be the temperature of chocolate out of refiner? Can you control this temperature? If chocolate will be very hot or very cold tempering will be affected.

2. How will you control viscosity? Adding cocoa butter in different quantities to each batch will affect tempering.

3. What are you planning to do with your chocolate? Mould plain bars? Add inclusions? Use it to enrobe centres? 

4. Critical question: how fast you will be producing? How much time it will take you to use the 25kg of chocolate? If you can use the whole batch within 30 minutes you can look at tempering whole batch, if you will use only a few kg per hour you will need to temper in smaller batches. Once correctly tempered chocolate needs to be used within a short time, it will not remain correctly tempered if just held in a tank.

5. How good are your hand tempering skills (on a cold table), have you tried tempering a few kg at a time? Do you have a room with suitable conditions? Do you have sufficient cooling for both tempering and for cooling/setting the finished product?

I think that all of these questions will need to be considered.

Peter

Could you please describe in detail your process. What you do, what are batch sizes, what are you trying to achieve.

Without this it is very difficult to offer any advice.

To start, there is no difference in tempering "fresh" chocolate from old chocolate that has been melted.

Second. If you can not temper whole batch in one go it may be much better idea to hand temper and mould small batches. This may avoid wasting a lot of work making untempered product in large batches (please remember that if you mould just plain chocolate and temper is not right you can always remelt it and start again).

There is a japanese company making all sorts of chocolate coated potato chips.

You wish for white, you get white.

http://www.royceaustraliapacific.com/products/potato-chip-chocolate/23-fromage-blanc-potato-chip-chocolate-white

No difference in comparison to using soy lecithin.

In my opinion lecithin is a very important ingredient in chocolate making for a few reasons: ability to achieve best conching results and ability to achieve desired viscosity without adding too much cocoa butter which can make product taste unbalanced and too greasy (common to high cocoa content milk chocolates on the market where high cocoa content percentage is reached just by adding extra cocoa butter).

If I understand correctly you are talking about what is called reworking chocolate. 

Using chocolate as an ingredient to make another batch of chocolate.

In all factories chocolate batches fail from time to time (gritty, sandy or too low viscosity) and there are various methods for reworking the product.

All of them require calculations so finished product has the same composition as intended and lecithin content must be taken into consideration.

Side note:

We use conches to make chocolate and to achieve best results we add ~0.05% lecithin at the very beginning and 0.2-0.3% at the end just before final cocoa butter additions. With final content about 0.3%. This gives us the best conching profiles.

Taking above into consideration my rework recipe uses failed batch (which already contains 0.3% lecithin)  at 10% of the mixer recipe with no additional lecithin added and other ingredients adjusted. Mix gets processed in the refiners and loaded into the conche. This means that I will start with less than 0.05% of lecithin in the conche.

To sum up.

Chocolate can be reworked but only as a small part of new batch if one seeks consistency. 

We have done trials with using sunflower lecithin instead of soy lecithin. We have used liquid products with very similar specifications and there was no difference in results (taste, viscosity).

We have considered changing to sunflower lecithin to remove soy from the ingredients list but in the end decided not to go ahead. Too much effort required to change all packaging for practically no result.

Hi Sebastian,

Thank you for your opinion.

I will need to do about about 3 on average and a maximum of 7 test per day, over 2 shifts so I may start with gravimetric and if this takes too much time buy the instruments. Based on your point about impact of metal content on results NIR looks like a better option.

Peter 

Hi Sebastian,

I understand that by NIR you mean Near Infrared Transmission Spectroscopy. 

I need to set up a lab which will be able to do reasonably accurate (no more accurate than +/- 0.5%) measurements of cocoa butter content in cocoa mass.

We use blends of in house processed beans in our recipes and I need to adjust mixer contents to variation of cocoa butter in the beans to improve chocolate consistency. I have just started to look around for solutions and uncle Google shows this:

https://www.oxford-instruments.com/OxfordInstruments/media/industrial-analysis/magnetic-resonance-pdfs/Determination-of-Total-Fat-Content-in-Chocolate-and-other-Cocoa-Derivatives.pdf

Would you have an opinion on which method would work better?

Peter

Buying a recommended cooler in this case may not be the best idea.

There is a lot of variation in how you use the refiner, in what ambient conditions and in what location. All of these will make a lot of difference to the choice of cooling system.

You may find that the cost of cooling system will be high in comparison to the cost of water used.

1. Your best option is to talk to a local refrigeration company and ask them for a quote, they will be in the best position to make all calculations.

2. If you use the 3 roll for a couple of hours a day and not all the time you may be able to get away with just water storage system without any active cooling (this depends a lot on your location and on maximum inlet water temperature for the refiner). Get a big rainwater tank, connect a pump capable of supplying correct water pressure for what the refiner requires and direct the over flow back to that tank. All depending on how you use the refiner, on how much water and at what temperature you need. 

In any recirculation system you will need some sort of chemical water treatment to avoid scaling, corrosion and growth of nasty bacteria. 

If you can give more information about what are your requirements and what are your ambient conditions I can calculate some numbers for you so you have somewhere to start.

In our case the taste is pretty good, both in milk and dark chocolates.

We have been selling the product in large quantities for years.

Peppermint oil from Sevarome.

Use 1 ml per 1 kg.

Do not add to the grinder or conche.

Add to liquid chocolate before tempering or even better just before depositing if you can mix it in well. This will reduce the clean up.

Please remember that chocolate absorbs flavours very well so you run a risk of everything smelling a bit minty if you are not careful while producing or cleaning. 

As far as I can see in tempermeters we use:

1. Aluminium cup is filled with sample chocolate, this is placed in "cup holder", covered, temperature probe is inserted in the centre of the sample and test is started.

2. Tempermeter provides consistent cooling (by controlling the temperature of "cup holder" at +8C).

3. Temperature recorded by the probe is recorded as it the sample is cooled and solidified.

4. This data is plotted and analysed.

5. If chocolate is perfectly tempered and monocrystaline structure is formend during crystalisation time temperature curve will be: down, stay at constant temperature and down again (close to how it would look for freezeing water) and temper index will be calculated as 5.

6. Undertempered and overtempered chocolates produce different time temperature curves (there is no "stay at constant temperature" part of the curve).

7. We agree on acceptable temper index range and if sample tests show that chocolate is within the range we start production, keep testing through the day and adjust tempering settings (on tempering machine) if needed.

Making one yourself could be done. As the whole test takes 8 minutes no more than 3-5 recordings per second would be needed (maybe even less). Containers are aluminium coffe capsule cups. Consistent "cup holder" temperature can be achieved by flowing constant temperature water through the coil), large tank and basic cooling control system will achieve this. Probes, hardware and software can be easily done as Kevlarcoated above stated.

For somebody with knowledge and time this is not so complex.  

Hi Sebastian,

I need to add first that this is my opinion only and applies to batch roasting process on smaller side of batch up to 300kg. Continuous roasting processes are completely different ball game.

Opinion based partly on experience (we use a Sirocco), partly on engineering knowledge and partly on conversations with people in the industry.

Geometry of roaster: spherical shape plus internal baffles result in beans being very well mixed and evenly heated this gives a uniform roast.  

External burner coupled with single pass for hot air reduce temperature inertia and allow very good temperature control, single pass also helps to remove unwanted flavours. This is not as energy efficient as nib roasters where air is recirculated.

A number of trials have proven that matching the roast results from ball roasters using drum roasters is not possible. This is one of the reasons why Food Masters are working to resurrect the ball roaster.

We are about to commit to a new cocoa bean processing plant and if the new ball roaster was available and proven in larger sizes it would have been our preference. Unfortunately only small lab size machines have been built so far so we will go with drum roasting.

I would be interested in other opinions.

Food Masters are trying to resurrect the Sirroco roaster which is one of the best technologies for whole bean roasting. They will have all the modern controls (temperature/time curves, air flow etc) from touch screen PLC.

I have seen a 25kg machine in their workshop last year (made for a Japanese manufacturer) and I was very impressed. 

This may suit the OP much better than Selmi roaster.

Emulsifier will not help in your situation.

1. Honey contains about 17% water, every 10% of honey in your recipe brings in 1.7% water content. Water content in chocolate generally should be below 0.3% total.

2. Coconut oil is not compatibile with cocoa butter and any additions will create difficulties in tempering or make it impossible.

I'm afraid that we may be talking a very different language and the same words may have very different meanings.

As Brad pointed out earlier in this thread may people would consider "raw chocolate" somewhere in the "misleading customer" category as usually the ingredients used are not raw and product produced is not what a "reasonable jury" would consider chocolate. This means that if this thread continues there may be some strong opinions on what you are trying to do. Proceed at your own risk.

Could you please describe what are you trying to achieve, how are you making your chocolate and what are you planning to do with it?

I would strongly suggest looking at recipe.

Adding honey as a sweetener introduces a lot of water into the product and coconut oil will seriously impact tempering process.

To start with I may question if there would be an easily detectable difference between beans that have been roasted at 100-110C with the only difference being 18 or 20 minutes roasting time.

I may be wrong.

If you would like a suggestion:

Start with 10 minutes at 75C, raise temperature to 100C, hold for 15 minutes, raise to 130C hold for 10 minutes, discharge and cool immediatelty by blowing cold air (use a fan?).

You may try extending time at 130C to 15 minutes or raising the temp to 135C or 140C.

As always in life Your Mileage May Vary.

Long shelf life of chocolate products (products to be stored at 18-20C) is achieved by formulating recipes in a way that would keep "water activity" low. Product with water activity below 0.6 will not spoil as there is not enough available water for microorganism to multiply (it does not kill them, just stops them reproducing) and there is no need to add any preservatives. 

We make a very wide range of centres like ganaches, fruit based, nut based, with cream (we boil the fresh cream) with shelf life between 4 and 6 months.

A bit more info on water activity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_activity

Hi Mark,

I would suggest doing a bit of reading on what "chocolate tempering" actually means.

Regarding your post.

Infrared thermometers are not suitable for accurate reading of chocolate temperature. Try to get a digital stem thermometer and check it against a calibrated mercury thermometer for accuracy (or get it calibrated).

Point 3.

Yes I am ignoring the tempering curve on the package.

You can temper chocolate by using already tempered seed as I have described above.

Or

You can temper chocolate by cooling (to create cocoa butter crystals) and reheating it (to melt undesired crystal form) following the curve recommended by supplier.

One or the other method.

Not both at the same time.