Forum Activity for @ChocolateCodex

Who Makes The Best Chocolate in the World?

Posted in: Opinion

We have a saying at my house..."ideology is a flavour". 

Who Makes The Best Chocolate in the World?

Posted in: Opinion

It's intersting how often what people believe doesn't match with what's actual.  One year my (then) middle school daughter did a social experiement for the science fair.  She took one brand of chocolate, re-melted it, remoulded it into 'blank' molds, then broke it up.  She then labelled it as 6 different brands of chocolate (remember it's all the exact same chocolate, just labelled differently) - and gave it to people and asked them to rate it from 1(hate it) to 10(love it).  She then asked people to rate which brands were their favorite and least favorite.

Those people who indicated a preference of chocolate type "A", when they tasted the chocolate that was labelled "A" - rated it very highly.  If they indicated they hated chocolate brand "B" - when the tasted that chocolate labelled "B" - they gave it a very low rating.

 Exact. Same. Chocolate.  Wildly large range of liking scores that directly correlated to their brand preference reporting.

Fascinating insight into the behavioral aspects driven by beliefs.

Rapadura sugar? Unrefined, evaporated cane juice?

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Every professional I asked to taste my chocolate told me they tasted raisins and dates. I tried different beans, roasts and conche times and I could never, ever get it out.

Then one day I was making a simple syrup for some cocktails and when I tasted it I could taste that raisin and date. Hopefully my misfortune here gives you a tool to help you choose the sugars you want to try making chocolate with 

Like Sebastian I want to highlight the chocolate, so I bought every sugar I could get and tasted them to find the one with the least added taste. Wholesome Sweeteners organic sugar was the best compromise until I found out about Native sugar in one of Taza's transparency reports. It's organic, available white, and has very good pricing for bulk orders.

Wholesalers should have spec sheets that indicate moisture and ICUMSA colour. Useful to make sure you're clear on what you're ordering.

If you find a darker sugar and chocolate combination you enjoy, please do post about it.

Who Makes The Best Chocolate in the World?

Posted in: Opinion

Mast Brothers makes the best Chocolate in the world.  (but still has bars available for purchase while using tiny volume cocoatown granite grinders.  If it's so good why isn't he sold out??)

Fortunato No. 4 is the rarest chocolate in the world (but is available wholesale through Chef Rubber, and wholesalers like Qzina specialty foods.)

Amadei makes a very expensive "Porcelana" chocolate bar (that is practically as black as an oreo cookie.  Hmmm.... a blend???)

Xocai makes "cold processed" anti-oxidant rich chocolate (that tastes like chocolate)

Countless Organic merchants promote "raw" cocoa powder (that magically has a rich chocolatey taste)

10's of thousands of chocolatiers who "make chocolate"  (grrrrrrr.... this is the worst one and really pisses me off!)

....and the list of misinformed marketing crap goes on...

 

Clay, can you guess how many people think Lindt 70% Excellence is "good" chocolate?  It would BLOW YOUR MIND!!!  In the past 6 years I've hosted over FIVE HUNDRED chocolate and wine tastings for well over 10,000 people who for the most part, thought Lindt was good quality.  I would rather lick a dive bar parking lot than eat the burnt crap that Lindt calls "70% Excellence".  However, they spend millions of dollars per year here in Canada buying premium shelf space in large grocery stores and department stores to flog the public with their brand.  Not to mention the millions of dollars they spend on television advertisements that show the Lindt "masters" in their impeccable chef whites, stirring their vats of chocolate!

What a farce! 

When tasted side by side with a good quality chocolate, almost 50% actually spit out the Lindt.

 

I'm not worried about some bearded hippie with a handful of dinky stone grinders and a chocolate "God" complex.  If anything, he's doing our industry a favour!  I'm sure even his worst chocolate is still better than Lindt!  I'm worried about companies like Lindt.  To most people, chocolate is still a candy - a novel, convenience item to be grabbed on the way to the cash register at the drug store, or grocery store.  As long as large companies are able to buy this premium shelf space, THEY will dictate the chocolate buying habits and taste preferences of the masses, not the bearded hippie with the big mouth.

 

I think the world needs 1,000 more bearded hippies to counter balance companies like Lindt and the chocolatiers who go around telling people they make chocolate when they don't.

updated by @Brad Churchill: 02/19/15 22:24:33

adding sugar and lecithin to chocolate

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Thanks for the response, makes sence. Looking forward to learning more about the process for sure!

Choosing a Couverture

Posted in: Tasting Notes

Hi Ruth - Thanks for replying to my post.  What an honor!  I actually just bought your Candymaking book and it just arrived a couple days ago!  It was recommended to me by my instructor, Kerry Beal, at Ecole Chocolat.  I wrote about a difficult time I had with making cherry cordials that leaked.  Kerry said your book could possibly help with that issue.  I'm looking forward to reading it!

Regarding viscosity, that is an interesting point I had not considered.  For now I am mainly looking for couvertures to be used for solid molded chocolates/bars, and am not yet thinking about ganaches, etc.  So for that purpose, I believe I would need high viscosity chocolate?  I'm not really sure how to predetermine viscosity before purchasing and tempering the chocolate.  Do you have any recommendations?  That kind of brings me to my next question: Is there any website or resource that reviews/rates chocolate couvertures?  I've searched around, but the only thing I've seen has been C-spot, which I believe is more about reviewing chocolate bars?

 

Choosing a Couverture

Posted in: Tasting Notes

Sonia - eBay is a great suggestion.  I had not thought of them for small quantities of couverture.  Thanks!

Choosing a Couverture

Posted in: Tasting Notes

Thanks for the suggestion, Michael.  I purchased couverture from Chocosphere once and was very happy with them.  One thought I had was to possibly just start emailing places like Chocosphere and asking if they ever sell smaller sample sizes of the couvertures they offer.

First bean2bar batch

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Thank you @sebastian that is helpf

adding sugar and lecithin to chocolate

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Afraid there's no short and easy answer to that ash - fermentation science is a huge area, with a relatively small pool of experts.  There's a hundred different variations on a theme, and i'm not sure i could cover them all in a short web post.  Combine the many potential fermentation variables with the fact that everyone around the world does it differently (even within the same origin, there can be an amazing lack of standardization) - and it becomes rather impossible to generalize a fix.  Really the best to do is to work on a specific location with a specific person/approach and work through the specifics of a fermentation protocol for that particular problem.  

NSF Approved 30-45 lb Chocolate Melter for under $1500?

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

I think Clay's idea will probably give you the most bang for the buck. And that's especially true for smaller amounts of chocolate. But if you are concerned about the issue of water, you might also want to think about a used proofing box. For $1500 (your upper limit) you can actually get a new one, but if you're willing to look around a bit I'm sure you can find a used one for half that price without a lot of effort. Just go to a local restaurant supply outlet and ask - they'll hook you up.

Just make sure you get one with separate temperature and humidity controls and then don't use any water. In a full-sized proof box you could load in a bunch of hotel pans full of chocolate at night and by the morning they should all be melted. So not only would this work for you now, but your needs would have to grow fairly substantially before you outgrew the box. And of course no inspector is ever going to give you grief over a proofing box since they're standard equipment in so many kitchens.

 

adding sugar and lecithin to chocolate

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

 Hi there, I had a question for you Sabastian along the lines of something you were saying earlier. If your chocolate does smell like vinegar and as you said above it was acidified during fermentaition what tips would you tell the farmers to improve there process to ferment without acidifying? A lot of diffrent factors im sure but is there a basic mistake that gets made that imparts the taste and smell of vingar into your chocolate that could be easily corrected? 

NSF Approved 30-45 lb Chocolate Melter for under $1500?

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

Thanks for helping me with the search Clay! I would be hopelessly lost without you!

I thought I hit the gold mine today when I found this warmer with a built-in thermometer (though I would still probably need several of them with 4" deep pans to melt the 30 lbs of chocolate that would be going into the Revolation 3Z)
http://www.webstaurantstore.com/12-x-20-electric-food-warmer-with-thermostat-120v-1200w/324TAH1HFSS.html

But then I spoke with someone from webstaurantstore and he said that ALL the food warmers they sell require water...

Any thoughts on this or where I might look for one that does not require water as you recommended?

Thank you!

Choosing a Couverture

Posted in: Tasting Notes

While the taste is extremely important, don't forget viscosity, and what flavors you are planning to use with it. I think most chocolatiers use several different chocolates for different purposes. Also, some chocolates are easier to source than others, depending on where you live.

Choosing a Couverture

Posted in: Tasting Notes

Hello another brand you might consider is Belcolade,  a Belgian couverture very nice. As far as buying small batches to sample, you might want to try Ebay.  

Choosing a Couverture

Posted in: Tasting Notes

You might want to think about these guys; for what you're attempting it seems like as convenient a way to begin as any:  https://www.chocosphere.com

Choosing a Couverture

Posted in: Tasting Notes

Hi All,

I am considering starting a chocolate business and am in the process of trying to decide on the couvertures I would like to use for my product lines.  I'm wondering if others can share their input on how they went about deciding on the couverture you would eventually use in your business?

So far I have tasted around 40 different couvertures and I don't feel like I am anywhere close to finding a perfect dark, milk, or white chocolate that I'd like to use for my recipes.  The brands of couvertures I have tasted so far have been Felchlin, Valrhona, El Rey, Callebaut, Guittard, and E. Guittard.  I have tasted a few from each brand, but not every variety that each of those brands sells.  Some of those have been very good, but I am still searching.  I'd really like to find a way to get a very large sampling of different couvertures so that I feel like I've made an informed decision and that my products are the best they can be.

So far I have been limited to what I can find locally in small quantities.  I'm trying to avoid buying several pounds of a couverture that I just want to taste.  Can other chocolatiers offer suggestions on how you went about buying small samples of couverture to taste so that you could make a decision for your product line? 

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer!

updated by @Pantoufle: 04/09/15 13:31:51

Is Ecole Chocolate online program for me?

Posted in: Chocolate Education

Or-m,

I recently took Ecole Chocolat's Professional Chocolatier program, and I echo what Andrea already offered.  I don't have the professional culinary background that you have, yet there is one other thing that I found very helpful that you might like, too:  you would be taking this course with other students from many different locales.  Worldwide, in fact.  While I live in Texas, my "cohort" group consisted of folks as far away as Germany, England, Kuwait, Ecuador, and southeast Asia.  Obviously, there were folks from all across the USA as well as Canada, too. Each of us was invited to submit information/results of our various exercises as we progressed through the curriculum.  The exercises are monitored and graded by professional chocolatiers who are on staff at Ecole Chocolat (and they are quite good in that capacity, too).  While each individual assignment is submitted in private for official grading, we were encouraged to share our results and questions within an open forum. This was particularly helpful to me as we could converse online and share our successes as well as our troubles and challenges.  I personally fell behind on a few things (temperature control in south Texas is a bit of challenge during much of the year!), but the EC staff are graciously allowing me to catch up this spring.  Yes, the actual work and assignments are done all on your own, but you are potentially building a network of "cohorts" who you might someday want to contact and bounce ideas back and forth with.  To me, it's worth it.

Cotton 

Sweet Innovations

Davis Chocolate deviates from the norm with sweet innovations

updated by @Davis Chocolate: 04/09/15 04:11:39

First bean2bar batch

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Don't pay any attention to the smell phases.   They're utterly worthless, as all beans are different (they may apply to certain beans in certain circumstances).  Pay attention to your roast times/temps so you get a safe roast (roasting is your micro kill step), and do multiple roasts on the same batch of bean so you can better ascertain what's "right" for you.

First bean2bar batch

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

I just finished my first bean to bar batch, and I'm afraid I under-roasted. What would be the clues that point me in that direction? I roasted to a nice brownie smell, but after winnowing and starting the refining process I found that they smelled and tasted incredibly bitter/astringent. I read (too late) that some recommend roasting beyond the first phase of brownie smell through a "vinegary" phase, and on to a second "brownie" smell. I conched in the premier grinder for 24 hrs and some of the astringent flavors dissipated but not very much. These are the"mixed bag" of test beans from chocolate alchemy - a cheap option for my first batch but unfortunately cannot compare tasting notes to John's suggestions that are offered with his other beans. In the end, it is sort of good, but very sour/bitter and tastes a bit like traditional Baker's baking chocolate. 70% cane sugar. Even if it's not exactly good as eating chocolate I'll break up this first batch and save some to compare to future batches.

updated by @eg: 04/11/25 09:27:36

Chocolate Company/ equipment sold together

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

Are you only selling all of the equipment together, or are you willing to separate?

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Hi Clay,

Yes, I'm referring to the sorting of the discussions themselves, and what info is shown about the discussions, on the group pages. You previously changed the sorting of the comments in a discussion to be much more readable.

Thanks,
Ben

adding sugar and lecithin to chocolate

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

I'd imagine you're not doing anything wrong at all, and what you're seeing is simply the nature of the beans given their origin and the way they were fermented.  Most of Vietnamese farmers don't know how to ferment their beans - and while there are a number of concerted efforts to improve the quality, it's a slow process.  Vietnamese beans can be very good - they'll be close to west african beans in character.  It's impossible to create sourness during roasting/grinding - so it's unusual that you'd detect sour increasing over time.  

Remember that fermentation is a very, very complex science - thousands of components are formed.  Sourness is from the acids - and there are dozens of acids that are formed, and not all of them are volatile (ie not all of them disappear during roasting).  if the beans don't smell / taste of vinegar, then my bet is that you've got beans that are low in volatile acidity, but high in organic acidity (and those don't evaporte no matter what you do) simply due to the way they were fermented.  Addition of some baking soda during conching might help mitigate that.

The beautiful thing about chocolate is there's so many variables to play with.  If you've still got some beans left, roast them at 20 degrees higher temp for 20% longer time and see what you get.  One of the other challenges is that we may not be speaking the same sensory 'language' (ie you may say bitter but mean something completely different than what i mean).  It's very, very hard to trouble shoot sensory over the internet w/o first having a shared and agreed upon lexicon of what the words actually mean.

Water Activity meters, testing, and benchmark recipes

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

I purchased a Decagon PawKit used for $500. It has been invaluable as I develop my formulas. If you have a State University nearby, they can test your ganaches for you. 

Hello and Thank You

Posted in: Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Good luck on this venture and we look forward to hearing how it all unfolds!

Water Activity meters, testing, and benchmark recipes

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Rotronic makes sensors that they claim offer .008% accuracy on aW for about $1500 that you can plug into a PC running their software.

There is software written that estimates aW and shelf life (and other things, including recipe cost) from confectionery recipes. I don't know the price.

There are many recipes on the internet for making your own invert sugar. The only extra ingredient you need - other than sugar and water - is either tartaric acid (cream of tartar) or citric acid. This makes for a clean ingredient label if you want to go that way. Honey is an invert sugar, too.

When it comes to aW numbers in a classic recipes database - it's an interesting idea and when you get your water meter I hope you'll share some of your insights! It's not as straightforward as it seems, just thinking about it for a few minutes.

Water Activity meters, testing, and benchmark recipes

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

We are starting a small molded and slabbed chocolates business from our home kitchen.  Our state requires water activity levels below 0.85, as tested at a certified lab.  Those tests run $75 each, and travel cost pushes it up substantially.  We can't avoid the tests, and we don't want to, but we do want to avoid wasting ingredients and time on recipes that won't pass.

I've read everything I could find on the internet about this subject.  From forums here and elsewhere, to obscure papers found on page nine of a google search.  I know Wybauw covers the subject in detail in book 3, but from what I've read, he relies heavily on sorbitol, something we don't want to include in our products.  

New meters start a bit over $2000, and for $3000 you get a lot better accuracy.  We may well buy one, but it is a considerable expense.  I've seen software that estimates water activity from recipes, but that isn't cheap either, and I have no idea if their databases are geared towards confections.  

I am really surprised that nobody has compiled a list of water activity readings for classic recipes, say a Greweling piped ganache, or a Shotts caramel.  I know technique will lead to varying results (cream heated longer, etc).  Still, it would be handy to have a set of baseline recipes and aW numbers.

I suspect we'll end up purchasing one of these units.  When we do, we'll share results.  Meanwhile, if anybody has any advice for us, we are all ears!

Thanks

M

updated by @elephant: 04/11/25 09:27:36

Hello and Thank You

Posted in: Allow Me to Introduce Myself

I want to begin this introduction by thanking everyone here for their contributions to this site over the years.  My Fiancee and I are starting a small chocolates business (molded and slabbed), and over the past few months we've turned to Chocolate Life again and again for direction and information.  It really is a wonderful resource.  Clay, you've done something important here.

We'll share more information soon, but for now, we're going to be a bit vague about location, etc.  That's for professional reasons.  We live in the north east (of the U.S) with around 20k other year 'round residents in the community.  That number swells to 125k or so during the summer months, and a million or so visitors pass through each year.  Although there are a few small competitors, nobody is offering...I won't say artisanal, because it is so overused, and I won't say craft because we aren't hipster enough...nobody is offering really good chocolates made from really good ingredients using really good recipes.  We plan to start from our home kitchen and sell primarily to wholesale accounts.

I'll be posting here most often.  My fiancee is the chef.  She's a CIA grad (top of her class), spent years in French kitchens and was executive pastry chef for a well known Michelin starred restaurant.  She's also done volume, as exec pastry chef for a very large hotel.   She's creative, realistic, and also a really nice person.  And she wants her own business.  I'm far less interesting...just a guy with some finance skills and a desire to help her shine.

So, thanks again.  I'm off to post my first question on the site.

M

updated by @elephant: 04/10/15 09:43:16

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Ben -

Now that the site is on the new server and appears to be more stable in general I will be able to devote more time to UX usability issues. I just you want to make sure that you are referring to the sorting of the group discussions themselves (on each group's "home" page), not the comments for any particular discussion.

As you might imagine, there are lots of configuration options. Lots more than on Ning - who basically gave little to no control over things like this. Plus, I have to dive into the code rather than just click a button.

adding sugar and lecithin to chocolate

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Hi sebastian,

I make chocolate from cocoa beans and cocoa butter. The recipe I'm using is 45% chocolate liquor 15% cocoa butter and 40% sugar. It tastes sugary at first then bitter and then sour ( wine-like ) after it melted.

The beans I'm using are from Vietnam which I believe Trinitario bean type. They doesn't smell like vinegar at all, just  a plain smell. But there is a little bit of the sour taste inside the raw fermentated beans when I bite it. I thought roasting can remove the remaining sourness ( the left over acidity ) inside the bean but it didn't work. Maybe the way I'm roasting it wrong that the sourness didn't completely evaporate during roasting?

Thank you

 

Bug reports

Posted in: FORUM FAQs

Hi Clay,

Just wanted to bring the group discussions back up. Currently, they show when the thread was started and the number of replies, and are sorted according to start date. On the previous site, they showed, and were sorted by, the last comment date. I think the previous way was much more useful, as it made it easy to see which threads have been updated recently. On older threads in particular, new comments could easily go unread with the current method.

-Ben

updated by @Potomac Chocolate: 09/10/15 05:56:52

Can I use a caramel cutter to cut ganache?

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Hi there,

I own both tools and if I were in your position, I would definitely choose the guitar cutter and leave the caramel cutter for another time. If you make a lot of ganache, nothing cuts like a guitar. I have a background as a savory chef and have very good knife skills. with that said, It is very difficult to cut hundreds or thousands of pieces of ganache evenly. Also, you can cut caramels with a guitar cutter. I know that there are a number of chocolatiers that say you can't, but it can be done. You must be very careful with the final temperature -- if the caramel is too firm, you will break the strings. If the caramel is too soft the caramels will stick back together after the strings go through. I find that cooking the temperature to 240-241 degrees Farenhite is a good temperature for my recipe. Recipes that a high amount of fat and a moderate amount of glucose hold their shape best when cutting in my experience.

Also, if you choose to buy a guitar I highly reccomend going with a Dedy guitar with a stainless steel base. The cheaper ones with the plastic base are not as good and they are very difficult to clean.

good luck with your decision!

Daneil

Who Makes The Best Chocolate in the World?

Posted in: Opinion

Ahh the power of marketing.

What i would classify as the 'best' chocolate, most people will frankly never see in their lifetimes.  I make it myself from beans that just aren't available to anyone.  Many times when friends or family taste it, they don't like it because it's so different than what the average joe believes to be good chocolate (ie what's avaialble on the grocery store shelves).  For me it's a wonderfully complex symphony of flavors and nuances and textures that have been carefully orchestrated.

"Best" is vague at best (bah-dum!) - what are the criteria for best?  Hershey's sells an *awful* lot of chocolate, making more money on it than anyone else.  Financially, they might consider themselves to be the best.  Mars has more technical knowledge than anyone on the planet - technically they're the best.  I'm guessing no one here would put either of them in the best category 8)

I suppose the old addage applies here - which wine is the best?  The one you like!

adding sugar and lecithin to chocolate

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

I'm afraid it's nearly impossible to trouble shoot with the info you've provided.  are you making chocolate from beans, or are you using cocoa powder?  both?  Do you have any sugar in your recipe?  The more details you can provide, the better responses you'll get (exact formulation, which country your beans are from, etc).

There are a *HUGE* array of flavors that are possible from cocoa beans - it could be that you've managed to get a batch that was acidified when fermented.  Does it smell like vinegar?  If so, keep conching it and use higher temperatuers with the lid off the unit.  If it's sour but doesn't taste/smell like vinegar, then you may be able to lower the sourness by adding a little bit of baking soda (1%) to try to neutralize the acids. 

adding sugar and lecithin to chocolate

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Thank you for all your kind answers,

I ran into some trouble with my new patch of chocolate. First of all, after roasting my cocoa beans in my coffee roaster for 40 mins at 150C, my beans didn't smell like baking brownie and it tasted a bit sour. I tried to remove the cocoa butter from my chocolate , but my cocoa powder still taste so sour and very bitter. So I tried to mix them all together to make dark chocolate and conch it for 24 hours to remove the sourness but the sour taste still remain in my chocolate after dissolving it on my tongue.

Can someone pls tell me what have I did wrong? And how to remove the sour taste in my chocolate? Could it be the problem with my beans? My roasting? Or my technique?

Thank you,

Who Makes The Best Chocolate in the World?

Posted in: Opinion

I've given them several chances and every bar has been either "meh" or "nope". I just can't get excited about it. The packaging is really the biggest selling point. It looks nice enough that you don't need to wrap it if you are giving it as a gift. That has got to account for a large percentage of business. It looks good on a shelf in a boutique so you get wholesale accounts that normally wouldn't be stocking chocolate. I'm a bit of packaging design nerd and I think that many chocolate companies miss out on opportunity because they don't invest in quality design and packaging. That being said, in this case definitely the Emperor's New Clothes...or lipstick on a pig. 

Your point about the danger of Mast Brother's coming to represent "good" chocolate reminds me of the tyranny of Starbucks. We all know the coffee quality there is crap, but it's become the benchmark of "real" coffee for the masses. 

 

Who Makes The Best Chocolate in the World?

Posted in: Opinion

If you have to say you are the greatest about yourself, can it be true?

The "impressively bearded" Mast Bros were featured in a Vanity Fair article, See All The Mast Bros Chocolate Wrappers .

BTW, I know the Mast Bros are impressively bearded because the article's author, Joel Podolsky, goes out of his way to point it out, emphasizing that the bros are "the self-described poster boys for hipster to gourmet chocolate." The key there is self -described.

Rick Mast then "... tells it as it is: ' I can affirm that we make the best chocolate in the world . It's not the sort of chocolate bar you’re going to pound back one after another.'"

The second half of that statement is confounding to me, as whether or not you can pound something back is not an indicator of its quality. I couldn't pound back even one blood sausage. Personally, I don't think I could pound back a single Mast Bros bar either because I find, to borrow a paraphrase made famous by Forrest Gump, " I never know what I'm going to get." They might just maybe do a good job with one batch but the next batch of "the same" chocolate will be awful. When I go into the factory tasting room in BillyBurg it's all I can do to finish a nibble of each of the samples they put out. Calling out defects in beans as virtuous in chocolate. In other words, I don't think they've mastered the craft part of craft chocolate.

The wrappers are nice. But you don't eat the wrappers.

And that sums the whole thing up, for me. It's the Emperor's new clothes. Say it loud enough and long enough and spend enough money marketing it - and you can get a lot of people to believe. But, the fact remaing, saying it is so doesn't make it so .

The real danger, in my mind, with this kind of self-ascribed position, is that people will look at the underwhelming chocolate the Mast Bros produce and think it represents what good chocolate should be. And then when some other chocolate doesn't taste like the Mast Bros chocolate well, then it must not be "good" chocolate. And that is not a good thing for the growing from-the-bean craft chocolate movement.

I have been tasting chocolate professionally now since 1998 and I have had the great food fortune over this time to taste many of the world's great chocolates made by many of the world's great chocolater makers. In my list of the top five from-the-bean chocolate makers in the US (let alone the world), the Mast Bros don't even crack the top twenty.

Your thoughts?

updated by @Clay Gordon: 04/09/15 04:28:08

Support an IndieGogo campaign - US$149 chocolate melter?

Posted in: Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Hello ChocolateLife Community, 

I discovered this project on Indiegogo. The goal is to create an inexpensive induction cooktop with temperature control so that it can also be used for sous vide cooking.

And maybe other applications as well - including some in the chocolate world.

I have requested ( on the product's forum ) a multi-step program that will allow you to increase, decrease and reheat the chocolate, and one of the engineers responded and said it was a great idea and said they'd like to hear more from the chocolate community. I obviously have an interest in seeing this product made - I want to keep the costs of my future chocolate business investment to a minimum as it's so expensive to get started in this industry. Beyond that, I have no relations whatsoever to the company.

We have until March 9th to tell the engineers what they should add to the product. They want to hear from the chocolate community.

Please add your feedback that will help bring us a product to market that we can use, especially for us beginners just starting out.

 

updated by @White Chocolate Lover: 04/09/15 04:09:05

How does a tempering machine work (Pomati)?

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

Luis:

From what I have heard - when you buy Pomati you don't get what you don't pay for. They are inexpensive -- and there are reasons. If you take a close look at the materials and quality of component selection you might be surprised at what you (don't) see.

That said ... in general, the rule of thumb you can use is that the maximum hourly production rate for a continuous tempering machine is roughly 3x the capacity of the working bowl. This assumes that you replace the chocolate you take out of the bowl in a way that does not interrupt the tempering cycle at any time. So, with a 5k working bowl you could expect to get up to 15kg/hr tempering capacity. This is a theoretical figure based mostly on the the rate of flow of chocolate. If you were to empty the bowl by one-third and then put unmelted chocolate pieces into the bowl it could take easily take 15-30 minutes for the machine to come back into temper.

Next, how long it takes to go from melted state to being in temper depends on the rate of flow as well as the difference between the melting point set in the bowl and the temper set point. So - it's going to take longer when the melt point is 50C and and the tempering point is 29C than when the melt point is 46C and the temper point is 32C. There are other things to take into consideration including the heating and cooling capacity of the respective systems. Looking at the wattage, the T5's heating and cooling capacity is not all that high, which leads me to believe it might take longer than with other company's models. But, rule of thumb from melted to tempered suggests that it should be 15-20 minutes.

Reviewing some of Anna's challenges with getting her T5 to work consistently there are two issues I can see without having to open the T5 up:

1) The length of the tempering pipe looks to be very short. This means that the chocolate is not in the pipe for very long. This can lead to inconsistent and incomplete crystal creation and mixing. This is, IMO, a critical design flaw when coupled with what appears to be a low-capacity cooling system.

2) The temperature probe is in the wrong place, so it's measuring the temperature of the chocolate in the wrong place. This is going to affect the feedback loop that governs the tempering cycle (and not in a good way, IMO).

All that said. The T5 is inexpensive. It might work for you, but it might not.

How does a tempering machine work (Pomati)?

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, Techniques

I'm looking at the Pomati T5, and was wondering if anyone knew the hourly production rate of the machine, and how long the machine takes to temper.

Thanks

Luis

NSF Approved 30-45 lb Chocolate Melter for under $1500?

Posted in: Classifieds ARCHIVE

I don't know where you are located (update your profile to include your country code!). Here in the US I just go online and look at restaurant supply web sites . (This is NOT an endorsement of this particular site - just an example search to show you what you are looking for.) You can get all the pieces you need at any one of them. But, price shop three or four because prices can vary widely.

When searching online search for " shop restaurant countertop food warmer " if you search for " buffet warmer " you will get a bunch of hits on things that won't do what you need.