vegan milk and white chocolate
Posted in: Opinion
Clay Gordon:
Martin - Thanks for sharing!
My pleasure 
The commercial product I found was vile....my Vegan customers seem very happy with this one and so do I! Tastes pretty good actually
Forum Activity for @martin0642
Posted in: Opinion
vegan milk and white chocolate
Posted in: Opinion
Hi all - I was going to make a new thread on this but decided to revive this one instead...seems to make more sense.
I am a relatively new chocolatier in the UK - I make my own chocolate (for bars and some of the molded chocs) and I've just started doing a vegan filled chocolate line. I have to say I'm apalled at the quality (or lack thereof) of vegan chocolates....just wow. I found an acceptable vegan milk chocolate made by Plamil foods in the UK; but the white chocolate was awful. They make it with rice powder and rice syrup in place of teh dairy. It is a nightmare to work with...it forms a crust in the bowl when melting (on the bottom of the bowl and no matter how careful I am with temperature) and sets up slightly sticky. Nice...not.
So I made my own using cocoa butter, sugar (from beets) and coconut milk powder. It does have a coconut flavour but it's not overpowering at all and the chocolate tempers beautifully...had great success moulding shells with it.
The key thing i've found is that most recipes for vegan chocolate do not include a proper grinder like the santha or (in my case) premier tabletop grinder. It is absolutely essential to grind it o get the proper consistency and avoid the graininess. I grind it for about 20 hours - works like a charm.
Anyway....figured I'd share in case anyone else read this and wanted to have a go
Tempering
Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, & Techniques
Sabrina512:
Hi Gap,
I hope you don't mind some more questions? .... About buying equipment - before hitting the purchase button on Mol D'art 
Are you able to "make it" with the equipment you have now? Or do you have another job? My idea is to buy affordable small scale eqipment to use for as long as I can, maybe a year, till a bank lender will consider me "eligable" for a business loan.
In the moment I sell to two customers - One big one that sells up to 100 of my bars a month, and a tiny chocolate boutique. This is about all I am producing now, using my tequnique of warming the chocolate in a dehydrator during the day, which takes hours. I have a part time job working three days a week, so basically I work everyday
Thanks!
Hi Sabrina - your pot struck a chord so i thought i'd reply. I've been in business solely as a chocolatier for about 8 months and made a few pointless purchases so I thought i'd share!
I've now got contracts with a couple of restaurants and my market sales are starting to pick up a bit. I'm probably making around 400 chocolates a month at the moment (plus my own bars for markets).
I bought a keychoc 04 tank.... stopped using it very soon after buying it. I just don't need to have melted chocolate on hand all day with my production flow right now and it takes up very valuable space in my tiny kitchen. i'm going to sell it and at some point get a mol d'art melter (the wider space is way more useful for moulds etc). But right now the biggest help for me would be finding space for a microwave ...much faster melting chocolate (i'm using a double boiler) and useful for warming ganache etc when needed. (I hate microwaves but im going to bite the bullet on this one).
Other useless kit: chocolate moulds that i only have one of (useless for larger scale production..get several each of a few type rather than lots of different ones..and check cavity size against your packaging..I have several I can't use right now)
As for your making it question......... I would hold on to the job for now. I'm currently looking for one! Chocolate is great fun but to make it a profitable busines that will pay you enough for year round is hard. Summer time in particular is very difficult. You need money to pay bills..and then money to buy ingredients etc for your business...those two things probably won't come from the chocolate sales for quite some time.
One day...a chocolate shop......right now...same as you - working two jobs (when I get the other one that is!)