Forum Activity for @Sebastian

If you ever need a toffee tester... 8-) they say it's impossible for someone to just have one potato chip. I disagree. it's impossible to have just one piece of toffee - that stuff kills me, but oh how i love it!

generally speaking heat is an enemy of fat stability. Ghee is functionally not very different than anhydrous milk fat. it could be that enstrom's actually hasn't boiled off their moisture contained in the butter they're using, and the resulting toffee is higher in moisture than it should be - which, combined with heat, results in bad things (tm) happening to fats. of course, it could also be that if you don't refrigerate their product as they say you need to, it could be just fine. there's lots of urban legend and misconceptions out there as to what is necessary, or anecdotal evidence that has shaped current policy - as i tell my daughter all the time - just because someone SAYS you have to do something doesn't mean it's actually TRUE ...

Not sure i've got a technical answer for you mate... i've consumed more toffee than your average bear, and i don't think i've ever had a rancid one. I'm sure it can happen, i've just never seen it. I've seen lots and lots of toffee rolled in almonds that tasted terrible, but that was the problem of the nuts, not the toffee...

Take some of theirs and do an informal shelf life study yourself by sitting it on the counter and tasting it every week for 6 months?

Well, all toffee contains milk products, so by definition it contains dairy. The real question(s) are ones of water activity (is there sufficient free water in your formulation to support microbiological growth - typically toffee formulations are very low Aw - you'd need to answer that question for your formulation and process), and one of moisture absorption (toffee will absorb moisture from the air, changing it's texture) - It's typically not a food safety concern, more of a quality one. Mark from here is much more well versed in toffee than i and may chime in.

Possibly. Mind the tolerances so that your hammers don't end up turning your screen into screen dust.

The answer is above, i'm very, very, very familiar with it 8-)

I'd explore asking the vendor if he'd mill some powder if you'd sent it to him, ask him to return it to you milled, and then make some ice cream out of it (i'd not consume it yet) for visual inspection.

I wonder if it's as simple as having someone else make a mesh to fit their equipment?

Typical high quality cocoa powders average 8um. there's a distribution, of course - some will be larger, some will be smaller, but it gives you a feel for it. how big is 'too big' for ice cream? that's a very individual question with no clear answer, depends on who's looking at it. finer is always better. 200 um will be too large, as i suspect 74 um will be as well.

what you may be able to do is mill it, use a very fine screen to sieve it, and whatever it retains (i.e. the 'overs') have those remilled until they pass your sieve. it'll be a time consuming process, i wager, but should be effective.

Send him some of your unmilled material and ask if he'd run it for you to see what it yields?

Larry - it may be a typo, but you've got 15 NANOMETERS as your particle size target, not 15 MICROMETERS. huge, huge, huge difference...0.037mm = 37 um (not 37,000 um)

Mark - sure, it can be large, but then you have large, visible particles in your finished application. For cocoa powder, finer is almost always better. Historically the low grade asian cocoa producers were characterized by their large particle size - that's changing, but generally speaking cocoa powders users want a fine powder.

just for giggles, i did a quick ebay search for hammer mills, and a few smaller pieces of gear did show up - caveat: i've never directly used any of the pilot pieces of equipment that are presently listed, so i can't speak to them directly, but there were a few there for less than $500 - i've no idea of your budget, but it could be that it's inexpensive enough to enable a 'try it and see what happens' scenario

your cocoa powder will never dissolve in ice cream - what you need to do is get a sufficiently small particle size that you can't see the individual pieces. commercial cocoa powders are hammer milled down to a very fine particle size (< 8 um). i'm not sure what attachments are available for a kitchen aid, but i'd be surprised if there was an off the shelf solution via that route (i've been surprised before though!). perhaps look for an old sugar hammer mill - i don't think they're very expensive..

ADM has a big ol' factory right there.... Callebaut 811 is about as generic and ubiquitous as they come however, if your supplier doesn't have it, almost any other one will... Clasen's only been making chocolate for a very short time.

if it is moisture, add 0.05-0.1% fluid lecithin to help address it

Could be. Is there any chance moisture is getting into it? if not, warm it up 1-2 degrees.

those logistics aren't really all that different than most other regions, to be honest. the life cycle of the typical cocoa moth is about 25 days (mas o menos), and you hit on the main source early on - almost all of the infestation will occur in the warehouse and storage. if he's got beans that are 25% internally impacted, that's occurred over the course of many months (potentially even years) - OR someone's scalped off the 'worst of the worst' to clean up a lot of beans - assuming the beans are bagged and palletized, the majority of they impacted beans will be on the outside facing surfaces - to prepare a bulk shipment for someone else. There's a saying in the ivory coast that roughly translates to 'there's no graveyard for cocoa beans' meaning ALL beans find their way into sale-able streams - diseased, infested, moldy, or not.

well, there's really no such thing as a domesticated bean.. so...all beans will have bugs. if you are finding them on the inside at 25% level, that's a sure sign that they weren't taken care of properly post harvest, and someone's just offloading them to get rid of them.

you can try an urschel mill. note almost all mills generate heat when grinding. grind slowly to generate less heat. or add dry ice.

Many ways to do lot coding. Often times it's done julian style. an example (stolen from the net) could look like:

Sometimes, rather than a specific day of a month, the "Julian date" or day of the year is given --for example, January 1 would be "1" and February 1 would be "32." These two illustrations by the Canned Food Alliance show how this might work:

• Can code:2061(February 6, 2001); 2=month, 06=date, 1=year

• Can code: 0195(July 14, 2000); 0=year, 195=Julian date -- July 14th is the 195th day of the year

If you run multiple shifts, it's prudent to amend the julian code to include a shift designator (-1/2/3, -A/B/C, etc)

Necessary? No. Beneficial? Yes. The purpose of the cap is to prevent the filling from either leaking out and fouling your tempered chocolate, or to slow down the rate of migration of the (normally) softer/incompatible fat with that of the fat in the chocolate. Skip the capping, and you increase your risk of issues maintaining your temper or product quality (bloom, softening) on the finished product later.

no, you want to cut your unroasted ones. what your description tells me is that it's a mixture of what is likely many 'lots' of beans from various sources, or perhaps made over various times with multiple qualities blended into it. photos of course are helpful too.

yup, take a photo of them to post if you're able to, pictures are always helpful

Honduran beans can be very good - but there's more to just a 4 or 6 day fermentation - the quantity of beans in the fermentation impacts the output, if the fermentation is done in a box/sack/heap, if the fermentation is drained or not, if/how frequently the heap is turned (aerated), etc. By manipulating one or more of those variables, you can get very different flavors from the exact same beans.

I'd encourage you to cut 100 beans in half, and count how many are purple, how many are brown, how many are 'soft/squishy' inside, and how many are moldy. That'll tell you an awful lot about the fermentation and drying. What is it about the flavor of the beans you've currently got that you don't like? does it take acidic/sour? do they smell like vinegar? Depending on what it is you do'nd tlike about what you already have, going to a 6 day fermentation may actually make you like it even less!

If only it were that simple, everyone who has a PhD in an general field would know the answer 8-) not to diminish your friend's field, but i get the impression he's a generalist, and not a specialist. It's a bit like going to your family doctor for specific advice on cardiomyopathy. There may be a general familiarity with the topic, but i'd not wager my life savings on the advice.

The bitterness could be a result of the fermentation or the roasting, but it also may have absolutely nothing to do with either. Chocolate mfr requires SUCH a holistic understanding of the process it's often difficult to attribute blame or success on any one single process step. And for what it's worth, the baking soda's actually a very, very good idea. I've used it a time or two myself.

Do you have any control over your bean sourcing and processing, or are you simply working with beans that you ordered? If the latter, i'm afraid it may be be exceptionally difficult for you to affect any change, depending on what's causing the problem. 4 days of fermenting may be ideal for some beans, and 6 days ideal for others. "Ideal" is also a pretty ambiguous term - which is idea, a red car or a blue car? Much of "ideal" is personal preference, so if you have examples of finished chocolates you find "ideal" that helps to pinpoint what's required to get there.

Which origin beans are you using, do you have any firsthand knowldge of how they're processed (vs the guy who sold them to me said they were xxx), have you cut 100 of them in half to look at their color, etc?

Often times defining what attributes you want before you start is helpful, vs starting and then saying 'it's not what i want, what can i change'...

While Indonesia is the 3rd largest cocoa producing country in the world, it may not be the best in terms of getting a comprehensive cocoa understanding - one of the issues is that very, very, VERY few people in Indonesia ferment their beans. additionally, most cocoa is grown on the island of Sulawesi - although to be certain there is some grown on the other islands as well. bali's a pretty cool touristy spot to visit, but if you're looking for more ... authentic ... experiences i might point you to luwu utara in Sulawesi and visit rantepao for some very unique experiences. i'm sure i could connect you with some places that are fermenting there as well should you try to pull a trip together.

sorry guys, have been travelling a bit and unable to respond. looks like you've got most of it worked out, if you have more questions let me know. Ash your idea is ok as long as y ou run it through a heat exchanger (ie you don't want the air 'touching' the finished product as it's likely that some of the air will be drawn out of the roaster before the kill has occurred, resulting in a very efficient salmonella distribution system...) run it through an enclosed heat exchanger to prevent that.

would you be able to close off the doorway from the 'clean room' to the roasting room, put a hole in the wall for your roaster to discharge into the clean room and seal it up tight, and configure the HVAC such that in your clean room there's more air blowing into it than in the roasting room (positive pressure to keep the dust out)?

Best practice is to store raw beans separately from your finished goods, ideally under a negative pressure room (positive airflow outside the room), and have separate employees/clothes/traffic patterns/air handling systems from finished goods. Airborne dust will be an issue. i'm assuming you're going to have a very difficult time doing that in the space you have available. You might consider a scenario where your 'dirty' room is separated by a physical wall - one one side of the wall you've got your bean storage, roasting, and winnowing - with the discharge of the roaster going through the wall to your 'clean' side, where you mill and make your chocolate. an environmental monitoring program would also be considered best practice to ensure the controls you put in place are effective.

As noted earlier you can certainly let it 'rest' in a conche if you'd like, but there's no benefit to doing so. As with anything i suppose, there's an awful lot of urban legend and anecdotal stuff out there, lots of strong beliefs that aren't supported by evidence, or are simply not true. i can't count the number of times someone has passionately stated something as fact simply because, to them, it was what they believe to be truth, and that belief translated to fact for them. they wholeheartedly *believe* they are right. Sadly, no matter how strongly i believe Santa Clause is real, it has no bearing on if he was actually real or not. i don't think anyone's putting misinformation out there intentionally or maliciously - it's simply that they often don't know what they don't know.

Well, that's a different topic altogether. Aging tempered chocolate does have it's merits, as the kinetics of crystallization and flavor release are very tied together (i've done the studies to know the rate of change over a variety of temperatures and packaging conditions). If you're aging bulk chocolate that will be remelted, the changes are significantly less (they still do exist, but are driven by different mechanisms and likely aren't great enough to be worth the hassle). Chocolate is a fantastically ineffectively oxygen barrier (FAR more air penetrates chocolate than one would think). One should never make flavor decisions on chocolate fresh out of the process, as one's consumers don't consume it in that state or age.

You can let it rest in the conch if you'd like; however there's no technical benefit to doing to. Marketers could spin up a nice story about it i'm sure.

Terry Richardson used to do a series of courses that sounds like it'd fit just fine - out in california. http://www.richres.com

Look forward to you sharing your experience!

The flavanol preservation topic is a hugely complex one. There are many, many types of flavanols, and they complex with things like sugar and proteins. Some of them taste astringent, some of them don't. Most of them degrade with heat and water - but some of them less so.

How much starting flavanols you have, how long you hold them at a given temp (and what temp you start it, how you ramp the heat), when you introduce the steam and how long you have it present, what the starting moisture is of the beans themselves - well, you get the idea. Can you get 40% less flavanol degradation? certainly, but the details are important. 40% as compared to what? Setting the beans on fire? (i exaggerate, but often comparisons are baselined against absurdly worst case scenarios to make a product look as shiningly positive as possible). it's important to know what the claim was made against.

If, say, the 40% was baselined against a medium roast non alkalizing drum roaster that doesn't employ a water injection for micro kill - the types of flavanols you'd be 'saving' would result in a more astringent flavor (actually astringency is more of a mouthfeel than a flavor) - but it would be noticeable. Additionally, steam is a wonderfully effective way of stripping off some flavors (bad and good) - so if you're working with beans that have delicate floral or fruity notes - those may disappear in the presence of steam (depends on the nature of the chemistry that causes those flavors). Moreover (but wait - there's more!) - because of the additional astringency that could result from the saving of the flavanols, flavors that weren't physically lost could be covered up by the more present flavanols now (i.e. masking effect).

People have spent decades working to understand the intricacies of this seemingly simple question 8-) Would i personally look at using one for small scale production? That depends on what end i was trying to achieve, and what my starting materials were that i had to work with. Consider a roaster as you would any other tool - it's important to select the right tool for the right job, and to select the right tool, one must have a clear understanding of what it is they want that tool to do - otherwise you could inadvertently try to use a hammer to cut a piece of wood. The right first question shouldn't be should i use a given roaster - it should be what is the right roaster to use to give xxx and yyy results with zzz materials.

Well, i suppose that depends on what your definition of "better" is 8-) If you want a dark roast flavor profile, this is not the road you should take. If you want a lighter roast, it has it's merits - is it better? Well, especially when it comes to flavor - that's for you to decide!

Same for health - what do you mean by nutritional profile? Fat is part of the nutritional profile - this will do nothing to degrade fat. If you mean flavanols - well, generally speaking, water and heat are the enemy of flavanols.

The more precise you can be in your definition of what 'better' means, the more informed response we'll be able to provide.

I wouldn't say it's new - i'd used them for many years, but not on a small scale. Excellent way to achieve an effective micro kill and get a low to medium roast profile. Anytime your'e working with superheated steam and pressures on a small scale, your costs are going to be 3x higher than if you were simply due to the safety elements necessary to prevent your roaster from turning into a bomb.

Variable. More then a couple of mm but less than the width of a finger (i know someone who knows that firsthand (pun intended) from putting his fingers where they shouldn't be while equipment is running).

Interesting. I'll be up in NYC a bit next week, and more so the week after.. I'll have to look for some.

Peru in July - are you going down for the chocolate trade show? Someone offered to pay my way for a week if i came down to speak - and i'd love to - but i'm afraid it's not good timing for my family. Next time 8-)

One of the tricky things to manage - especially at larger fermentaries where the cacao isn't grown where it's fermented - is to be sure to manage the freshness of the beans. The second you split open a pod - fermentation begins. Jungles are wonderfully effective incubators, and there's yeast, mold, and bacteria everywhere, just waiting for you to open a sugary pod up and let them begin to feast. Typically the farmers open the pods, collect enough to transport, and then transport - if you're able for receive these beans w/in 8 or so hours of them first being opened, you're going to still have a high bris level (sugars), which is your primary indicator of how much fermentation has progressed. Acidity doesn't really start to play a part until the secondary and tertiary fermentations of lactic and acetic kick in - if you're observing pulp (juice) pH in the 3 range, it's a very clear indicator that either fermentation has been underway for some time (i.e. the beans were harvested before you think they were), or there's a significant disease/pest impact at play. I suspect that if you were to go to the farms and trace the supply chain, starting the clock from when the first pod is cut open to the time it arrives at the fermentation center, you'd find the time is considerably longer than 4 hours...

Edit - huh i've never seen solbeso - is it available in the US?

The Rizeks are going to be the most advanced of the non-privatized folks to work with on this topic - they've got a very nice set up there that a member of this board helped them build in fact. Marcello Corno would be your main technical contact there, and they have a small micro laboratory on site at their main production facility. As noted, yeast selection doesn't really matter as long as the strain is viable, and it only needs to be viable for a portion of the fermentation as it will be quickly outcompeted by the other two phases. I've just reviewed some of my historical pulp pH data - now - and this is critical - assuming you've got relatively fresh pods, undiseased, you're going to have a 95% probability that your T0 pH will be between 4.74 and 4.93. That pH will drop over time as the acetobacter and lactobacter kick in, to be sure, but by the time that occurs that yeast's job is done (it's main functional job is to convert sugar to alcohol - which is important for a number of reasons) - but once that's done, it doesn't matter if the yeast lives or not.

The three things you'll need are yeast, lactic acid bacteria, and acetobacter, very concentrated. remember that naturally, there are dozens/hundreds of strains out there that are all competing with one another. At the end of the day, it usually doesn't really matter a great deal which strains you have (there are a few exceptions, but not nearly as many as you'd might expect with the thousands of combinations). while the callebaut work is actually being done, it's really more for marketing than affecting actual large scale results. others have been doing this type of thing for many, many years and are significantly more progressed in their understanding and usage of these techniques than callebaut.

Any brew house can give you the yeast, i've never looked for retail available acetobacter or lactobacter, but i'm sure they're available as well. It's important to understand the fundamentals of fermentation before starting to try to tweak the components of fermentation, so i'd encourage you to be certain you've got the basics of that down first otherwise you're going to just get frustrated and not understand why.

There's nothing wrong with it. When you go to temper it, the fat will melt out and, assuming you achieve proper temper, the spots will go away.

To stop the heat streaking, once you're at temper, use a spatula to thoroughly mix up the tempered chocolate, let it sit a couple of minutes, and do it again. You're trying to get a consistent temperature in all the chocolate. If there's a lightbulb or some heat source that's coming on durign this time, turn it off.

For the sugar bloom, you're going to need to stop the condensation - end of story. W/o seeing the setup myself, it's hard to say exactly what's wrong, but it will boil down to controlling your relative humidity and temperatures. There are condensation charts out there on the web that'll help you understand - at a given RH of your room or cabinet - at which point it becomes cold enough for condensation to form.

That is fat bloom, caused by untempered, or incompletely tempered, chocolate. Not to say there' sno moisture present (it's hard to tell from the photo), but i'd bet you your next batch of chocolate that what is visable in this photo is fat bloom.

Not having looked at the post in detail, from the pictures you've got a combination of sugar bloom and something called heat streaks. Sugar bloom is the result of your chocolates getting wet at some point (likely condensation after cooling), and heat streaks are the result of your tempered chocolate not being thoroughly mixed/agitated, resulting in some areas being cooler than other areas within the chocolate mass itself.

As with almost anything, i'm afraid it's not quite as straightforward as a 0.4% max. While that can certainly be true for some instances, the max amount depends on a number of variables including PE/PC ratios (the actual amount of the functional components found in lecithin - not all lecithin is created equal!), the geometry of the particles one is trying to coat, the amount of moisture present (and if it's present in the form of waters of crystallization or mono-layers or free moisture), the starting viscosity, the starting fat % and the extent to which the fat that is already present has coated the solids, the temperature, the ambient relative humidity, the amount 'work' input into the mass (which is a function of the design of the conche and some mixture of the above elements), etc, etc, etc

For the average individual here, almost none of those elements are known or controllable, and the scale at which they're working is relatively small. The equipment with which they're working is going to require them to utilize more lecithin than is technically necessary were they to have the ability to work with other types of equipment where the work input allows for more control (ie most folks here are adding lecithin to a chocolate that's already either semi-fluid or clay-like in consistency), and as such they are not inputting anywhere near the optimal amount of energy/work to obtain a controllable, optimized conching envelop. Under those conditions, the bridging which occurs with too much lecithin usage, generally doesn't start to appear until 0.9-1.0% usage levels; i recommend starting at 0.3-0.5% and incrementally (0.1%) add more until either the max viscosity reduction is obtained, or the target viscosity is reached - which ever comes first.