Level: Novice
Reading time: 4 minutes
I was just wondering, how important is a melanger is for this recipe of white chocolate? I know it’s important for grinding regular chocolate, to smooth the texture of the cocoa solids – but does separated cocoa butter need the same grinding, or is it already quite smooth? I’m sure it’s both useful and convenient, but I was curious if it is indispensable to this recipe or how much of a difference it would make to try making white chocolate without one.
If the use of the santha grinder in this recipe is grinding the powdery ingredients (sugar, milk powder, soy lecithin) into the cocoa butter, could pre-grinding those ingredients very fine (say, to maybe a powdered sugar texture) make a good white chocolate without needing the santha grinder?
A melanger is indispensable for any chocolate be it dark, milk or white as long as you are defining chocolate as modern chocolate with a smooth and silky texture.
Cocoa butter doesn’t need further grinding by a melanger, but everything else you add does.
Nothing available by the home chocolate maker can get chocolate as smooth as a melanger. I’ve tried everything I could think of and they all fail to do the job.
The reason has to do with the vague term “fine” or “very fine”. Those just fail to mean much of anything. Sure, powdered sugar is fine compared to corn meal, but both are coarse compared to the particle size of the sugar once it has been refined in the melanger.
And that is worth noting. It isn’t just, or even primarily, the cocoa solids that are getting refined down. It is the sugar and milk powder. Let’s get away from ‘fine’.
The sugar and any other solids in chocolate are in the 10-15 micron range. That is 1/100 of a millimeter. In contrast, granular sugar is somewhere around 500 um( microns). Fine castor sugar can get down to half of that. Now, if you go searching around you will find that 10x superfine sugar can reach 15 um. Home free right? Unfortunately not.
Commercial powdered sugar contains cornstarch and/or other anti-caking ingredients which can lead to a gummy chocolate. As for powdering your own, I just tried it. I was able to get down as low as 25 um, but there were still some pieces larger than 50 um. And that size will be coarse in your mouth.
I even tried filtering it through a sieve, and what came out was in the 10-15 um range. The problem though was that I could only get about 10% of the sugar through (less than 1 oz) before it started clogging and caking (hence the anti-caking in powdered sugar).
Really, it isn’t a viable method for anything more than just a couple ounces of chocolate.
Finally, that neglects the aeration and minor conching that occurs in the Melanger. Non-refined white chocolate has to my tastes this odd, harsh taste that goes away over the 12-18 hours needed to make white chocolate in your Melanger.
There you go. There is no making modern chocolate without a Melanger at the minimum.