Forum Activity for @Miguel Pujols

Hello Mariano,

You can find some directions and basic recipes on this link at the ChocolateAlchemy .

Hey Jim,

I did sell in a small fair once and it was terrible for me, I was not prepared and some of my chocolate melted. The cooler idea might work, you could use a wine cooler, make sure it has temperature and relative humidity control and of course include an estimated electricity consumption for the wine cooler to your costs.

Good luck

I have a question, I'm new to this and want to know what the standard chocolate recipe, percentage of sugar, cocoa butter, cocoa liquor?apology to put me in your conversation jim!

Hello Miquel,

Thank you for your help. There certainly is plenty of Palm oil in the area, the landscape is ugly with palm plantations for the oil.

I am very newly into this and do see farmer's markets as a possible outlet as well as a source for locating wholesale accounts. I will work on my "tempering" and experiment with shelf life. The good news is it really seldom gets over 80 degrees Fahrenheit here.

I thought if I did fairs, farmer's markets I might keep it in a cooler. At the moment, I am thinking about using a mylar packaging that I use for my freshly roasted coffee. I can seal it tight and then keep it out of ANY sunlight.

Again, thank you kindly.

Jim

Not really. Cocoa Butter will actually make it be more unstable. What big companies do is that they add a little bit (maybe no more than 5%) of palm oil to increase the melting point, but I don't see that as an option.

I live in Dominican Republic so I face the exact same problem and I have noticed that if WELL tempered the chocolate could stay hard for quite a while, make sure it doesn't have direct sunlight tho.

Are you considering to sell your products in fairs or some other outdoor activities?

I'm not sure how many stupid questions we are allowed? But here goes. Does the amount of Cocoa Butter added make a difference in the stabilization of the chocolate in warm weather? I live in Costa Rica, will be making and selling my chocolate here where it is always warm (thank God). Any other tricks for making chocolate less susceptible to heat?

Thank you all for your help, I ordered some cocoa butter on eBay and will try using that in my next batch. Lots of experimenting but all good! GO Costa Rica in today's world cup game!!

In case you want to know about getting your own cocoa butter in future. To do that you need a press that basically pushes the cocoa liquor extracting the greasy part which is cocoa butter and leaving a cocoa cake that is actually broken into pieces and pulverized to get cocoa powder.

have fun, and post your results!

Thank you Sebastian, it's a learning curve buit lots of fun.

Jim

You'll want cocoa butter that has been taken from someone else's liquor to add to your own.

So, I made my first couple batches of Chocolate a week ago and even with all my mistakes, it was GREAT. Maybe like a hot dog when you are camping...better than a rib eye at home. Anyway as I move forward and plan for my next batches, I was going to make cocoa butter to add to my chocolate. I was surprised to find that the information on making my own cocoa butter was basically extract it from the chocolate I was planning to return it to.

Am I missing something here?

Cocoa butter for chocolate, the other colorings for airbrush contain water and are usually used for decorating fondant. You can also temper your own cocoa butter and add the fat-soluble coloring of your choice

Cocoa Butter. The other stuff is for cakes mostly.

Hi Larry,

If you insist on chipping in for it I won't hold you back. If you have some friends on this site that you think would appreciate a bar let them know a free bar is headed their way for commenting

Chris

Hi Thomas,

A trade would nice, Ill message you

No problem, would love to trade bars.

Hi Larry,

The bars can be found in a few locations in Wisconsin. Im working on gaining accounts elsewhere. We offer private label and have a few clients. The bars are certainly delightful I can send you one if you would like, message me with your info. A marketing technique I am using is sending a free bar, and Im not sure if the people receiving the sample even appreciate it. I have found that over the phone a surprising amount of people are initially not interested in dark chocolate. These dark chocolate bars at 72% made with Arriba Cacao do not taste like the conventional dark chocolate. I would love to hear what another chocolate enthusiast has to say about it.

Free bar for the next 10 people who comment!

Good question Larry, thanks.

Chris

Hi Chris,

Are these bars available anywhere in the US? The marketing copy on your website, indicates your chocolate should be delightful. I'd love to sink my teeth into one. Where can I get one?

Thanks,

Larry

Hi!

My name is Chris Werner and I am the Assistant Marketing Director of Andean Chocolate Company. If anyone is interested in Arriba Cacao please contact me. Able to provide organic Arriba Cacao from various regions of Ecuador.

http://www.andeanchocolatecompany.com

Thanks a lot Andy!

I actually just got done reading your thread from a few years ago. It sounds like you really went through a lot to make toffee work for your business. I read in your thread that you were looking to simply break up slabs of chocolate covered toffee versus enrobing each piece separately. Is that what worked out for you and provides you a 6 month shelf life? I know that a fully enrobed piece will last longer, but it is more expensive from a labor perspective. I also like the look of a broken up piece with the toffee exposed better. Thanks again for sharing your experience.

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 ...

I'm boggled by this. I spent a good 4 months working on toffee--much of that trial and tribulation can be found here. In the past year I've probably made a few tons of toffee and most of that was by hand. Now we have a firekettle (which is a new learning curve & beast but that's another tale..)

I like to think of toffee like making a roux. You can't have excess butter or it won't bind to the sugar. So I'm really curious what kind of product they are making to have greater butter than average. I mean it's a butter + sugar product, plain and simple. Your ratio will dictate a few things but toffee is toffee is toffee until you start adding alternate sugars (like honey) or end of product additions.

Anyhow my toffee has about a 6 month shelf life before the elements start to seep in and the quality is not what I like. Luckily no where we stock lasts that long due to consumer habits but that's the longevity we give it before we would pull it.

Like it was mentioned toffee is hydroscopic by nature. It wants to absorb water, it LOVES to absorb moisture. In the summers here in the Carolinas where the average humidity is 90% we have to change the entire method of making it, and then speedily get it enrobed so that we can prevent the air from getting to it. If we left a sheetpan of toffee out over night it would have a liquid layer by the morning. Crazy. Even then packaging has some microlevel of porosity and that will eventually be the downfall of the product.

I like to think that at the heat level its cooked the proteins are broken down and the fats are converted to something more like ghee so you've got really no chance of rancidity then there's enough sugar that it's a shelf stable product since your available water is nill unless the environment adds it back. So I'd love to know how Enstrom's has done something so unique that it has this required refrigeration. It just doesn't make sense to me.

For us it's a fire and forget process. I wouldn't worry much about it. Run your own shelf tests and you should find it's something you can reliably not worry about.

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?

Thanks Sebastian for your reply! Your input is always very insightful. In the case of Enstrom Toffee, there is apparently so much butter in their recipe that they require their sealed boxes to be stored in refrigeration or a freezer. The issue being that the fats in the butter will go rancid if not refrigerated. I am wondering how much butter is too much and at what point does one pass the point at which toffee can be stored at room temperature when sealed.

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.

I am starting to think about adding toffee to our product line. I learned that Enstroms Toffee is actually considered a dairy product and requires refrigeration. I am wondering how others store toffee. I plan on sealing the bags of toffee, but I know that most retailers that we work with will not have available fridge or freezer space. I've certainly seen other brands of toffee displayed and sold at room temperature. How can one determine if toffee is safe to store at room temperature? if it is able to be at room temperature, does anyone know the shelf life of it? It is my plan to make slabs of chocolate covered toffee and then break it up versus fully enrobed pieces (which I imagine would have an even longer shelf life). Thanks for your input!

Daniel

Thanks. After I made that last reply I was weighing the pros and cons of putting the 400 screen in front of the 250, and vice versa. Still, even as low as $500 sounds for this craft, I am going to wait until I can produce a chocolate bar worth continuing on with. I am still hoping it's the under fermented bean. I tried being really careful about getting no shell/husk in the chocolate, and grinding for a couple days, but I still did not notice a drop in bitterness. Our neighbor is on the lookout for properly fermented beans among the other cacao farmers he knows.

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

Making a mesh, I wonder too if that's a possibility. We have machinists here, but not sure if they could do something to that level of detail. Larry showed a link above to a company that makes mesh.

As far as doing the sampling, there's a logistic problem. We live in Honduras and the vendor is in China. Getting things in and out of Honduras to/from the USA is difficult enough. I'd have no clue how to do that with China.

If we can get our microscope back from a friend, I will try and measure Hershey's, and then see if Hershey's works for the dairy.

The cocoa we crush with the grinder works well for baking recipes, we just don't know a lot of people in our area who bake very often. The dairy, on the other hand, buys 50 lbs of cocoa, imported from Spain, to make their ice cream.

I watched the video included on those eBay machines, showing how they operate. I am wondering if it would work to add some mesh behind or in front of the screens they provide. Such as, buy some 400 mesh and place it in front of the 250 mesh screen.

http://www.twpinc.com/wire-mesh/TWPCAT_12/p_400X400T0012W48T

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?

Hi Sebastian,

I did some follow up on the hammer mills you found on eBay for under $500. The finest mesh they have is 250, 57um. That is probably finer than I am making it with my stone grinder, but from what you said below, probably not fine enough to mix into ice cream?

We're going to try and figure out what size Hershey's Cocoa is with a microscope.

Thanks,

Mark C.

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?

Oh boy, what a novice mistake. Thank you for catching it!

This site has a useful chart on converting mesh size to particle size

http://delloyd.50megs.com/moreinfo/mesh.html

this site will send a 3"x3" sample of their 500 mesh screen. It may be large enough to work some magic. http://www.twpinc.com/wire-mesh/TWPCAT_SS_Fine/p_500X500T0010W40T

Several of the charts referenced that a 400 mesh screen is as fine as can be made. Perhaps it would simply be impractical due to clogging and so forth.

Could you just run the powder through again after working it down to a 400 mesh screen? In theory the cocoa powder would continue to refine as it goes through the mill. I think it would just go through faster because the particles are already small enough to fit through the mesh.

This would probably result in an inconsistent size, but it may work...???

Another question I haven't thought of sorting out, is how small does the powder need to get to not be grainy in ice cream? Mark, do you know how fine your cocoa powder is right now? Is it as fine as a very fine sand (200 microns) or as fine as Portland cement (74 microns)

If the current particle size is large enough, then getting down to 37 microns may be a large enough improvement to work with.

Has anyone requested a quote from on the Pallman mills? http://www.pallmannindustries.com/chocolate_products_-_pulverizing.htm#Cacao" rel="nofollow"> http://www.pallmannindustries.com/chocolate_products_-_pulverizing....

I haven't bothered them, but I wonder how much one of their mills would cost. I couldn't find anything reference a finished particle size on their site, but if they are selling it as a solution to the chocolate industry, it must be pretty good.

Hi Sebastian,

OK, what mesh size should be required? 500, as Larry was requesting? Or is the 400 small enough?

Thanks

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.

Man there's got to be a way short of $10K to pulverise cocoa powder. I thought I read that cocoa powder can be as large as 200 mesh.

I've been curious about grinding the cocoa flakes.

I reached out toone of thesellers of the machines on ebay running around $500. It looks like that machine will not get as fine as the commercial cocoa powders. They replied that with a 400 mesh screen, you could get down to around 0.037mm or 37000um. Here is our conversation string.

I wonder if you could make a500/600 mesh screen to fit.... ???

Subject:NEW Automatic continuous Hammer Mill Herb Grinder,hammer grinder,pulverizer #150980503835 Sent Date: Jun-24-14 09:05:05 PDT

NEW Automatic continuous Hammer Mill Herb Grinder,hammer grinder,pulverizer #150980503835 Sent Date: Jun-23-14 18:16:54 PDT

To: no.1-shops
Hammer Mill Herb Grinder,hammer grinder,pulverizer #150980503835 Sent Date: Jun-23-14 13:13:04 PDT