Forum Activity for @PeterK

I can assure you this can happen on polycarbonate molds, I spent a few good years trying to get rid of them! My theory-It is basically the heat in the bars last stand, If you have long flat surfaces the chocolate cools, shrinks- releasing heat and this collects in the middle of the bar. I would not recommend any physical cleaning of molds as they do in fact scratch up, wash in dishwasher with a good non filming detergent. When we did photoshoots I used to make bars with undertempered chocolate  and then freeze them came out LOOKING beautiful.

Warming cabinets work fine, buy a used one  at a restaurant supply company and under worst case scenario you have to change the thermostat.I ran with two of these for 5 years. As an aside to anyone using a refrigerator to cool your chocolate. you may want to consider changing your thermostat to one that will run a bit warmer, we got a lot of cracking with a thermostat running very cold.

Daniel,

If your Macintyre is continually grinding you have a mechanical problem, you need to get a mechanic to look at it. Any correctly functioning Universal will not continue grinding once released from tension. 

Nino,

We did exactly that, the same beans on four different roaster types, tasted them off against each other as nibs and then as liquor. One of our conclusions was that the breakage has a greater effect than recognized. As far as " brighter" I prefer to think of it as complexity.

BTW, I find semi fluidized bed roasters to be the most controllable and most precise roasters I ever worked with. You can get whatever profile you want out of these things, it really surprised me. That said bring a few checkbooks.

I pre grind nibs only for 2 hours,then add sugar some butter, then grind to spec, then add residual butter and lecithin.

Try grinding your nibs only with fan on for -two hours before addition of sugar.

adding butter at sugar addition ( I would not add more than 25% of your added butter) can reduce batch times, theoretically this should come at the expense of your fans volatile removal ability, but I think final viscosity isn't much different.

Incidentally, how thoroughly these machines grind is purely a function of time. I like refiner conches but like any piece of equipment they have their limitations.

In the same vein, you may find when grinding less viscous formulations that there are nibs that do not get processed, a trip through a screen is advised.

I think the fly in the ointment is that 6-7 % threshold. I can't ever recall getting direct shipped that showed up at that level. It is next to impossible for certain spots

as long as aw is low enough, and micro is clear it generally isn't (until maint.). Your kill step is in roasting. And do not forget your magnet.

Cleaning a MacIntyre constantly can get time consuming and costly, we ran in batches of 5 then mixed them together to even out the variances.

You could certainly argue that "raw" cocoa butter isn't raw. BTW I would hazard a guess you had a batch with some fermentation issues, I don't think anything gets conched.

I would melt out some of both, mix them in varying percentages, solidify them, then taste against your original.

Also, not questioning your taste buds, but I have never seen a lot of cocoa butter that varied in the lot.

I agree, I would not spend too much time chasing the adulteration angle, it will probably lead nowhere (and cost you a bit). The bigger question is- did you sample the lot before you bought it? Natural cocoa butter is variable from lot to lot, we would NEVER buy without a preshipment sample.

Note: As far as will they attack beans or finished product, they may prefer beans but if you give them access to finished goods they WILL get to them. Guaranteed.

This is a common situation with a VFD, the motor amplifies the carrier frequency and voila you have noise. Simplest possible solutions include changing the carrier frequency ( usually set in parameters for your drive, just raise it slightly, or sometimes it is possible to minimize the noise by increasing/decreasing the distance from VFD to motor. Best thing to do would be to talk to your electrician about this as there are many variables, you could need a combination of them to reduce the noise. First thing- self adjust the carrier frequency slightly higher to see if it helps (in your drive manual). Note: the noise never goes away it just gets adjusted beyond your hearing limits ( your dog will still complain). Or you could just get a pair of earmuffs (which was our solution, I wasn't about to spend the time to figure it out)