No worries.  You're right, deodorized ccb should be - odor free.  If it smells like vanilla, that's almost certainly a compound called vanillin (natural vanilla is almost entirely the compound vanillin) which is pretty volatile, and even the most poorly run deodorizers in the world would strip vanillin out of cocoa butter - not that it should be there in the first place!

Thanks, Sebastian.  I've decided to send the whole lot back and ask for a refund.  I'm 90% convinced it's not pure cocoa butter and malfeasance is involved.  I don't know whether it's on the part of the vendor I purchased from or (probably more likely) their supplier.  I took a chunk of it to the Big Island Chocolate Festival and showed it to some veteran chocolate makers and a fellow who's sold literal tons of cocoa butter and they all said they'd never seen any like it and they wouldn't use it.  So, I'm not going to risk using something fishy in our chocolate.

Here's a few additional details that helped me come to this decision. 

• I also ordered a bit of deodorized cocoa butter from them just to try, wondering if it might make better CB silk.  That stuff has a light, pleasant benzoin/vanilla scent.  I've never used deodorized cocoa butter before, but I would think it would have almost no scent (it's called "deodorized), and any scent it has shouldn't be vanilla.
• I thought I'd try making an experimental batch of white chocolate with some of the deodorized stuff, and after a few hours of only sucrose and CB in the melanger, it made a surprisingly tasty, fluffy icing.  Never seen cocoa butter go fluffy or taste good by itself.  I'm guessing a fragrance was added to mask a scent that would give away the fat's true constituents.
• A few weeks ago, my partner and I noticed how an earlier shipment of cocoa butter from them smelled when I melted it.  It had a faint coconut scent.  Like idiots, we found that amusing, never thinking it might actually contain coconut oil.  I think we're so accustomed to our bean flavors changing with every month's harvest that we just shrugged it off as natural product variation.

This has been a good learning experience.  I need to scrutinize every shipment of ingredients as soon as I receive them, because now I'm the fool with no cocoa butter in the middle of nowhere and only two weeks out from another festival with low inventory.  Lessons are always best learned the hard way.

At any rate, thanks so much for your help on this.

Well, it's hard to say.  Sounds like you're ordering from a small guy who's handling both food and cosmetic products (which is where many off spec food products go to die), and probably doesn't understand much about their supply chain.  I don't love these scenarios, but I do understand why they exist.  If they didn't provide you with a CoA for your product, they almost certainly should have one from their supplier - and you could ask them for it. If they can't (or won't) produce one - it's probably a good sign to start looking for an alternate vendor. 

From the photos alone, I don't think you've got a contamination issue. Assuming there's not intentional malfeasance in play (lets take them at their word) - I suspect it's either what I previously mentioned, or if it's a deodorized cocoa butter, there could be a scenario where they simultaneously ran their deodorizer REALLY hot and somehow got a small bit of water in it - which flashed into steam and a bajillion little steam bubbles incorporated into the cocoa butter while they had an agitator running all out.  You can send me 100g of it if you want and I can test that pretty easily, but there's not much you can do with the findings of that unless you've got a vacuum oven.

You can also use your senses - if it smells or tastes like something it shouldn't - then that takes us down a different road. 

Thanks, Sebastian and Clay.  I really appreciate your thoughts on this. Regarding the photos:

1. This is what happened to the thin film of CB left in the bottom of the pan after melting and allowed to sit and cool on its own for a while.  This was after being scraped pretty well with a spatula, so there wasn't much left in the pan, which is why it surprised me that it was able to fight gravity and draw itself up into little balls.
2. This is a partially melted chunk that I pulled out while I was melting a some of it.  This shows how the continuous phase melted and turned transparent faster than the spheres.  Observe the air bubbles, too.  This is something else that suggests to me that it there was a vigorous attempt to mix it and air got incorporated as a result.
3. This is a shot of the CB as I received it.

None of the above photos shows the result of melting and resolidifying, but it essentially goes right back into the same mealy state I got it in.  The only difference is that there was a bit of liquid, like cooking oil (not water), at the bottom of the container I let it set up in.  This was well stirred as I melted it, so I wouldn't think it was just an issue with different origins of cocoa butter not being mixed well.

I procured this from a small online store that sells various plant butters for body products and food additives.  They claim it's sourced from Ghana.  I'm small potatoes and can't afford to ship a pallet of cocoa butter to Hawaii let alone use it in a year, which is why I've been trying to do business with this shop where I can buy 30-lb quantities every couple months for under $20/lb.  It's always looked like any CB I've used up until this last order, but I'm thinking I might need to look for a different supplier now.

Sebastian:

Welcome back to the Forums – it’s been a while!

Skwerl – Sebastian is an industry veteran who’s been contributing to these forums since 2015. I did not have answers to your questions, so I contacted him and asked him to participate.

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@DiscoverChoc

Well shoot, I didn't realize TCL still had a forum - and here I've been absent for all these year.  Thankfully Clay reminded me by sharing this post!

Josh - can you describe your photos a bit more? Which photo shows how you received it?  And is one of them what it looks like after you melted it and resolidified it (if so which one)?  Is the one with the bubble tea like appearance a bunch of solid cocoa butter spheres, in a continuous layer of a liquid cocoa butter phase?

where do you get your butter from, and who's the original processor of it?  Do you have a specification for it?

I've definitely seen super unusual behavior from ccb before.   Cocoa butter has a whole range of fatty acids, and often the larger (especially asian) processors will create massive, massive lots that are blended in interesting ways, and may not be particularly homogeneous - so you may get butter that is one giant lot (like a million tons in a lot - crazy) - but is very non-homogenous and as a result there can be 'pockets' of very low melting ccb's and very high ones.  Most people don't have a DSC to fingerprint their butters, but if your spec has one listed, and if you have a CoA from your supplier, that's one thing to look at. 

Hey, folks.  I received a shipment of cocoa butter from a new vendor and I've never seen a texture like this.  It's a mealy aggregation of a bunch of little spheres.  I thought perhaps it had just cooled in a weird way, but upon melting and cooling, it forms the same texture.  I noticed that even the film left in a pan I melted some in had retracted into little balls overnight.

I'm thinking maybe this has been cut with another fat, but perhaps this is just a type of cocoa butter I've never seen before.  When partially melted (see photo), there appears to be clear continuous and dispersed phases, which seems to support that.  The continuous phase seeems to melt at a slightly lower temperature.  Any thoughts?

Thank you,
Josh