Forum Activity for @David Menkes

Looking to purchase 65lb grinder/melanger

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

As an alternative, Indi is selling theirs for $4k shipped.

Erin@indichocolate.com

Gratitude

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Lynda -

Thanks for sharing. I am glad to hear that TheChocolateLife has been such a valuable resource for you.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Joe -

Yeah, I know what you mean. I've been trying to find a set of colors that can be used universally in the site using the overall color scheme from the old TheChocolateLife. Still working on it. Part of the issue is that some of the CSS classes are doubled up. So if I change something it might have to work against both a dark and a light background. That makes it tougher.

updated by @Clay Gordon: 01/29/15 11:19:21

Rev Delta baffle sensor repair

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

David -

Baffles cannot be easily repaired as the wires are epoxied into the baffle. Whatever is causing the short is probably buried somewhere between the sensor and the contact wires. Troubleshooting is hard because you have to disassemble the baffle to find the cause of the short.

As you bought a used machine, Chocovision is not obligated to honor any warranty. Did you ask for a good price? Try looking for parts on eBay, too.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Hi Clay,

Great site, excellent resources here.

The only thing I found which may use a little tweaking if that when you move the mouse over a hyperlink, the link changes to a color which is almost the same as the background color. This has caused me to hesitate from clicking on the link thinking something was wrong or the link disappeared, especially when there is a link embedded in the forum since the text is tiny.

Typically a link will remain the same color and it will become underlined when a mouse is moved over it.

It is not a big deal, it just tricked me a few times.

Best Regards,'

Joe  C.

Looking to purchase 65lb grinder/melanger

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

FBM introduced a new machine at SIGEP that I helped them design - the >> RUMBO << .

The design is a hybrid of the Indian wet grinder and a traditional Lehmann melanger. The bowl and the base are fixed and the grinding stones turn. The grinding stones are direct-drive: no belts or chains, and the motor is variable-speed.

The base and the grinding stones are also made of real granite. The people who cut the stones for the RUMBO are the same people who cut the stones to repair actual Lehmann melangers. The grinding stones weigh 45kg each as well.

Perhaps more importantly, the RUMBO incorporates a forced hot air mechanism into the design. You can heat the stones and base before you start grinding so that the fat starts to liquefy more or less immediately. Furthermore, you can keep the air blowing while refining (or not) your choice.

Also, the machine unloads itself. There is an opening in the side of the machine and the scrapers push the chocolate out of this opening. No more tipping the bowl and having to reach in to scrape the chocolate out. The bowl is in two parts and is removable so you can reach the innards for cleaning.

Finally, it's price competitive with a fully-loaded CocoaTown 65. About 10% more. Rated batch capacity is 40 liters, but the bowl is 120L. The more chocolate you put in the machine the longer the processing time. We are looking at ~24 hours to grind/refine to the desired particle size, then transfer to a Kleego50 for conching (in under three hours).

If anyone is interested, please send me a private note and I will send you the catalog page.

How to inhibit sugar crystalization?

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

I am using dulce de leche is a recipe and if I store the left overs in the refrigerator it starts to crystalize becoming gritty after a week or so.

I read that adding cream of tartar or corn syrup will help inhibit the formation of crystals.

Is there some type of rule of thumb of the ratio between the additive and the sugar base to keep it smooth and creamy?

Thanks

Joe C.

updated by @Joe Camerlin: 04/11/25 09:27:36

Looking to purchase 65lb grinder/melanger

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

i would be very interested in the larger premier grinders as i currently use 4x of the 2ltr tabletop ones, and have had no problems runnning chocolate for days at a time in them. Real work horses

Looking to purchase 65lb grinder/melanger

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

Have you heard about Bavahni's project? He's doing a 65lb and a 100lb "Premier" grinder.

New Features on the Forum Index Pages

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

There are two important indicators on the Forum Index pages.

When you see the number of posts surrounded by a dotted line it means that that item has been pinned. It will remain at the top of the page.

When you see the number of posts highlighted in yellow it means that there new topics or comments in this section that you have not read.

You can click on the checkmark icon to mark all of the posts within this section as read.

 

 

updated by @Clay Gordon: 06/29/23 16:55:17

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Done and done. Sent you a private message.

updated by @Clay Gordon: 01/28/15 19:08:25

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Confectioner please. 

Thanks a lot for your help.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Victor -

The two are related to each other. I thought I had fixed the quota select not being visible last night. While I am continuing to find a permanent solution, what quota do you want to be in? Blogger, Chocolate maker, Confectioner, Enthusiast, Other Chocolate Professional, Retailer?

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Hello,

I also have the quota not appearing problem. Also tried to send you a private note but when I enter clay in the recipient box all I get is "No results".

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Susan -

Problem solved. The issue was not that you didn't have a Twitter account, it was that there were a couple of fields where I set the minimum number of characters to 16 and you did not enter that length of an answer. To help prevent robots from signing up for accounts I set this minimum. I edited your answers - e.g, from "Belgium" to "It was during a trip to Belgium" to check that, in fact this was the problem, and it was. I was also requiring at least 2 characters for a Twitter account which meant that people without an account (or who didn't want to share) would not be allowed to sign up/update. Thanks for pointing this out to me so I could get it fixed. Done and done.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Susan -

When creating the fields I thought I did make them optional on both the create account and update account forms. I will go and check them to make sure. Thank you for letting me know.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Twitter, Facebook, etc. are listed as optional but I cannot submit other changes without an entry in those fields. I do not participate in those sites so do not have any data to enter. Please do not require info for those sites.

Streaked bars

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Just jumping in incase someone else has the issue.  I just got done dealing with this for about the past year.  Was thinking my chocolate skills after almost 8 years were in decline for some reason.  Turns out it was just my thermometer.

Sometimes I'd have streaks of lighter colored almost pale yellow on the mold side, and sometimes faint streaks on the back. Problem was it was inconsistent, even though tempering was being done consistently and it was passing the "spoon test"   After calibrating my thermometer I found that it drifted from being accurate at 32F but then was off by an inconsistent amount and wasnt accurate again until 233F.   

So, new thermometer and validating that it's properly calibrated solved the issue. Now I'm getting consistent temper anytime I try.

 

BTW: I thought it might be airflow, because I keep cieling fans on in the work area. So I turned them off with no change in temper. Some suggested humidity; but I live in a desert, where if I'm seeing 25%, it's a wet day.  But that can also affect things if you're in a humid area.  I do tend to keep my molds out at room temp, no heating or cooling of them specifically; then place them in a cold box at around 65-68F on a wire rack.

question about meltaway flavorings

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Thanks for that sebastian. I was always told to stay away from non-oil based flavorings in chocolate, so for the most part I have. Most of my experience is from flavor extractions for cooking and baking.  And what you said does make a bit of sense since a lot of extractions try to concentrate the flavors/potentcy of the extract through distillation.

I've also noticed most non alcohol based flavorings I've found in the industry use Propelene Glycol as the medium as well and some using Vegetable Glycerin(may be labled as Glycerin or Glycerol). I would think that may be safe for chocolate as well without seizing. Both of which are an alcohol, but not water based.

question about meltaway flavorings

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Fat based flavors will always give you the best dispersion.  Alcohol based flavors can work just fine in chocolate, but disperse less well as they're hydrophillic (it's the nature of alcohols).  As time notes, due to a phenemonen called azeotroping, you're never going to get a 100% pure alcohol - it will always carry some water with it.  Almost all your vanilla liquid flavors are alcohol based, for context, and the industry uses them all the time.  Will you be ok with either one?  Absolutely, but you may need to mix a bit more witih the alcohol based.  If you use excessive amounts (ie > 1%), expect more challenges.  Most of your texture is coming from the interaction of your cocoa butter and whatever liquid fat you're adding to get the meltaway texture.

Finding chocolatier to be supplier around the world

Posted in: Allow Me to Introduce Myself

 Hello

 

you need some good finest chocolates from belgium 

i making full custommade

greetings

 

 

Peter 

contact ; info@amandino.be

Corn Syrup

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

I have another question or two about corn syrup.

We've been using Karo corn syrup - the small 32 oz bottles because they don't have High Fructose Corn Syrup.

In an effort to bring my costs down, I picked up a pail of corn syrup. - Liquidose 434 (42 D.E. / 43 Baume')

This corn syrup is much more viscous (thick) than the Karo. The Karo has the consistency of maple syrup and the Liquidose has the consistency of.... very cold honey.

I'm guessing that a major difference between the two is the amount of water in the syrup. Karo has more relative to the Liquidose 434. This would also mean that if measuring by volume there are more corn syrup solids per unit in the Liquidose.

Am I right to believe this may also mean there is more anti-crystalization and AW reduction effect per unit of volume for the liquidose?

Do you think I should adjust my recipes? Will this change in corn syrup help increase my shelf life? Has anyone else encountered this?

updated by @Larry2: 09/08/15 03:52:36

question about meltaway flavorings

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Not seeing an answer here, so hopefully this will help.  Let me start by saying I've never used an alcohol based flavoring for chocolate, so I'm not speaking from experience in that regard; just knowlege of the products/ingredients.

Alcohol is mixed with water. So any alcohol based flavorings are going to contain water.  It's very difficult outside of medical grade stuff to get pure alcohol, so you're going to have a distilled mixture that at best will be about 98% pure, then diluted with distilled water down to approx 80-100 proof (40-50% alcohol) And that's the base. 

The process is used because some flavors are simply not fat soluable and some flavors are. Further some flavors are naturally oils (like citrus).

Hopefully this info helps.

BTW: Did you try it and if so how did it turn out?

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Ben -

I have added the "body" field of Group Discussions to the site-wide search field. It's going to take some time to index every discussion but give it a few hours and you will be able to search the text of all Group Discussions, not just the title.

The foil post was there, it was just the 11th of 11 posts. So you needed to click through to Browse All Results then go to the 3rd page of results. I am looking into where to change the pagination of the search results so that the first 10 posts are displayed (in each category) not four, and that 10 are displayed on each of the next pages.

And I know the title of the page is "Home" which I find confusing. I have alerted the developers.

As for doing anything to help ... you are. I have only two eyes and limited bandwidth to do all the testing that needs to get done. By pointing things out to me that you think don't make sense I can focus on getting them fixed.

updated by @Clay Gordon: 01/28/15 10:14:43

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Thanks Clay. The reordered comments are working for me, and are much better, in my opinion.

And thanks for looking into the search funtionality. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Ben -

I have noticed this, too. I believe I can add the body of the group discussions into the global search capability pretty easily. As for the number of Forum results displayed - that's an issue I have brought up with the developers in another context and so finding a solution is already underway.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Ben -

Changing the sort order is trivial to do and I have already made that change. Let me know if it's working the way you think it should.

As for changing the display of the search results that requires programming. I think it's a very good idea and when I get a few free moments I will work on it. Over the weekend I hope, but not before. Another reason I did not do this is that there have been some issues I've been experiencing with comment sort order with threading enabled - the display order goes wacky for me. I have to work with the developers to clear up those issues as they would not be in my code.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Jonas - it may be a source of confusion but there is a good functional reason that this is so. Jamroom was set up originally for bands. Bands have many members, and members can belong to more than one band - and in particular a manager could manage multiple bands. Jamroom is set up to handle this. In the coming weeks I plan to offer this up to ChocolateLife members who are companies with two or more employees who are ChocolateLife members.

One member can create two profiles for their account, a personal profile and a company profile. I can then link other member accounts to the company profile. People can post to their personal profiles AND to the company profile. It's pretty cool. There are other features, such as groups and pages attached to profiles and profile customization tweaks, so that a company could credibly host the community component of their web presence on TheChocolateLife instead of (or in addition to) Facebook (and social sharing via TheChocolateLife is arguably easier. Furthermore, by implementing something called domain mapping, the company profile on TheChocolatelife could become an actual part of the company's web presence at a url something like community.mydomain.tld.

IN THE MEANTIME ... you can take advantage of the fact that there are separate account and profile names.

Account Name: Jonas Ketterle
Profile Name: Firefly Chocolate

In this way in posts and comments the link to you would read:

Jonas Ketterle - @firefly-chocolate (with the @firefly-chocolate linking to your profile).

And, of course if you wanted to, you could reverse these and the links would say:

Firefly Chocolate - @jonas-ketterle
updated by @Clay Gordon: 06/29/23 16:55:17

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Just noticed an issue with the search function. It appears that it only searches titles for group discussions, and the first post for forum discussions.

As examples, a search for the word 'foil' does not return the following group discussion, which has 'foil' in the first post:

http://www.thechocolatelife.com/clay/group_discuss/1134/chocolate-bar-wrappers

...and a search for 'infrared' does not return the following forum discussion, which has 'infrared' in the second post:

http://www.thechocolatelife.com/clay/forum/tech-help-tips-tricks-techniques/4441/chocolate-thermometers

updated by @Potomac Chocolate: 02/16/15 08:19:18

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Thanks Clay. I think the search results look a little weird since they're inconsistent between the forum results (with detail) and the group results (without detail). My preference would definitely be to have the group results show the same detail as the forum results. It just gives you a little more info to help you decide which link to click.

For the group discussion comments, I would definitely prefer them to be oldest to newest. This is how the forum discussions work, so it would be consistent. But I also think it just makes more sense, considering that existing/older discussions on this site are used as a resource for new and existing users. Newest to oldest may work ok if you're actively tracking an ongoing discussion (although, I think oldest-to-newest makes more sense for this, too), but doesn't when referring back to it later or reading a discussion for the first time. In those cases, the user would read the original post at the top, then jump to the last page and scroll to the bottom, and then read a comment, scroll up to the top of the next comment, read down, scroll up, and so on.

Hello from a new bean to bar maker in Arizona

Posted in: Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Welcome and best wishes to you on this venture.

Gratitude

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Clay, I might not post much on this site, but I want you to know how much this site has helped me when it comes to my chocolate business.  If I ever have a question about anything chocolate -- this is the first step I take to look for an answer.  I've never been disappointed in searching for the answer here first.  I've found different used equipment to purchase (and the transactions have always worked out great); ways to "fix" my caramel cooking process for the perfect tasting caramel; suppliers to purchase needed supplies; answers to my questions about "what to do if...."; and more things than there is room to discuss.  Thanks for creating a great "GO TO" site when it comes to every thing about chocolates.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Hey Clay,

Just noticed that I need to upload both a profile and an account photo. Didn't realize these were different things until the default image kept showing up even after updating my profile. You may not need to change this ... just a point of minor confusion. Site is great!

Jonas

Hello from a new bean to bar maker in Arizona

Posted in: Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Hi everyone. As the forum says, just wanted to introduce myself. I've been making chocolate truffles for about 9 years now and ventured into making chocolate from the bean about 6 years ago.  My friends and family have convinced me that I should venture out and start a business making chocolate, so I have.

As the intro says, I'm in Arizona. Specifically the Phoenix area.  And yes it becomes difficult to work with chocolate when it's 115+ outside, which may explain the utter lack of bean to bar makers here.

New to the site, but have heard about good stuff and of course my google-fu leads me to various forum and blog posts here so I figured this would be a good place to be active. I look forward to getting to know you on the forums.

updated by @timwilde: 04/09/15 16:00:53

Rev Delta baffle sensor repair

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Greetings o chocomasters!

I recently bought a used Rev Delta and received a bunch of baffles. One of the baffles has a slight "burned" dark splotch over one of the two metallic sensors that touch the base (which tells the machine the baffle is installed correctly). So if I try to use that particular baffle, after about 5-6 minutes the drum stops and the alarm sounds with the LED warning ***PLEASE REPLACE BAFFLE*** even though it's screwed down all the way. I've tried (with more or less success) to unscrew it slightly which seems to help for a few minutes, but then it stops and gives the error message again. Using other baffles works just fine. When I emailed ChocoVision, they told me that the baffles can't be repaired and I have to buy a new baffle. Boo.

Anyone have any luck with this?

updated by @David Menkes: 04/11/25 09:27:36

I'm in the market for a smallish enrobing line

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

Speckledhen,

yes, please send me some photos. As I've asked, can you tell me the pros and cons of your machine? I've never used a smith before.

polycarbonate moulds giving probs.plz help

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Patches as in discoloration? Do you have a photo?

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Ben -

Having the name of the discussion without the detail makes a lot more sense when there are two or more search results.

The comments are being displayed in Newest to Oldest order. Do you want them in Oldest to Newest so that it's easier to follow the conversation? The page picker at the bottom makes it easy to jump to the last page.

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Yep, I see the Shared Journey discussion now, too. I think it just didn't register that it was a link to the discussion since it didn't have the date, icon, first lines, etc. I must have just thought it was another section header.

The first post I see on that discussion is yours of 12/1/14, which is the most recent comment posted to that thread.

Thanks,
Ben

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Ben:

When I click on Search in the top nav and enter " Shared Journey " as the search term I get the following page:

I see the Shared Journey discussion - as well as a forum topic that rererences the discussion. You see something different?

 

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Michael, the site is not completely set up yet - I still have a couple of days until the end of the month!. However, I can tell you that it's more than a single-step process and your ChocolateLife.com login does not carry over. All Classifieds now have to fit within a listing package. When you click on submit listing you need to select a package (if you don't already have an account you will be asked to create one).

WANTED listings (either wanted to buy or jobs) are still free. SELL listings are either $5 (30 days) or $10 (60 days) each.

One of the issues with the classifieds on the old site is that they never aged off. No-one ever deleted them and it was a huge administrative burden for me to do it because I had no way of knowing if the classified was still active or not. In thinking about the problem I decided to set up a site with software that could handle classifieds where the listings could age off (disappear) after a certain length of time. There are increased cost for running two different sites and I had to do something to cover those additional costs.
updated by @Clay Gordon: 01/27/15 15:26:46

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

What is the date on the first comment displayed for you? For me it's 12/01/2014 - posted by me. I will look into the search thing.