Level: Novice
Reading Time: 8 minutes
You would make a ton of sales if you would invent a way to make a melanger for under $100. Why don’t you do that? The market could really use it or a cheaper way to refine chocolate.
Why the hell didn’t I think of making a $100 melanger...oh wait....
We are coming into the home stretch of the Iron Triangle of Anguish. Interestingly, this one might be both the easiest and the hardest.
The whole issue with the Iron triangle is that you are making the hard choices between what you want and what tradeoffs you can live with. Here though you mostly don’t have that issue. You basically have one option in reality. That makes it easy.
Read All The Articles In This Series:
The Iron Triangle Of Anguish (ATA #310)
All about cocoa beans (ATA # 311)
Cracking and Winnowing in baby steps (ATA 313)
Melangers et al
Tempering Coming Soon…
What makes it really hard for many people is the mirage of other options that don’t actually work.
On the small scale, the only option you have is using a melanger. Full stop.
Unfortunately this means that the Iron triangle does not really apply because it is only valid where you have viable choices. This is worth unpacking though. As a reminder, the Triangle relates cost, quality and speed on its most basic level and which 2 of 3 you want. Note the words I used.
Viable choices.
In theory you could hand grind your chocolate on a metate (or fully unrealistically, a mortar and pestle). It has been done this way for hundreds of years at least....except it does not produce a smooth chocolate in a workable time span. We are talking about days of continuously grinding for very little chocolate. And frankly, it also fails on cost and quality. Metates are going to cost you more than a melanger. It just isn’t viable.
I know you are probably thinking about less expensive kitchen appliances. Over the years I have probably tried every single one of them in one flavor or another and every single one of them failed. I, of course, started with blenders and food processors. I tried juicers, both horizontal and masticating. After burning out three or four whirley blade spice grinders I gave up on those too. Even the oft touted beast of a machine, the Vitamix did no better. Immersion blenders? Same. In short they just stirred around the chocolate. A bunch of research later I discovered that that kind of blending/mixing/whirling equipment are only capable of taking particles down to a certain size and that size feels coarse to our tongue. No amount of time or speed will make it smooth. Basically the particles just get to a certain size and they just get out of the way of the blades and you are done.
Imagine jumping into a balloon pit with a bat and expecting to pop them just by swinging but they just move out of the way. The only way you are going to pop them is to pin them or force them between a couple hard objects. In essence that is what real grinders do. This is why metates work. Stone is rubbing against stone.
This is why a good burr espresso grinder can get coffee super fine and that is the basis of something called a ball mill. Lots of balls trapping material between it and crushing it. More on that in a moment.
I quickly learned coffee grinders clog up. The oil in the chocolate gums up the fine grooves in the burrs and you are done. If instead you try to grind the sugar I found out very quickly that cost goes hand in hand with how fine you can grind the sugar. To get to the level chocolate requires you are in the tens of thousands of dollars. Hello Iron triangle my old companion. Too much $$.
I looked into ball mills next. Ball mills are kind of ingenious. A bunch of very hard balls are placed in a container along with what you want to grind. Then either the whole thing is rolled (rock tumblers are basically ball mills) or vanes are put in and the balls are stirred that way. And guess what. A whole bunch of very small, very hard food grade balls are quite expensive. Again, thousands of dollars. And for what it is worth, I went ahead of built more than one ball mill and although it worked (and goodness they are fast, smooth chocolate in 2-3 hours) it was very expensive it just didn’t make good chocolate. It was years and years before I figured out why and I’ll talk more about that in a little bit.
While researching ball mills I also came across roller mills. They are sort of a different version of the grain crackers turned cocoa cracker I talked about a couple articles back (LINK). Their main difference is that instead of having a gap between the rollers of 3/16” it needs to be 100 times closer and although that might sound easy (you just push them together right?) it is devilishly difficult. TANSTAAFL. To get rollers that close and not move apart when the chocolate is going through them requires a LOT of heavy and very expensive metal to hold it in place. Once again $$$$$$.
To be fair there are small roller mills but nothing inexpensive and they aren’t meant for home use....and they still have another catch..
..All this led me back to basics and thinking about a stone metate and wondering if there was a way to automate it. Hours of 2004 google rabbit holing later I found this.
That of course led me to small Indian wet grinders, hacking one and convincing Santha (now Spectra) to take a chance that melangers could be a new market and you can see where we are now.
Looks familiar doesn’t it?
As dictated by the constraints of the Iron Triangle, we have now come full circle to the only choice you have for making smooth chocolate at home. A melanger. Sure, it isn’t cheap, but it isn’t horrible either. People plunk more than that down for a really good Kitchenaid mixer.
I really wanted to tell the story of how we got here because hardly a week goes by where someone doesn’t suggest I find another (and they mean cheaper) way to make smooth chocolate. 18+ years and all that above says I and others have tried really hard.
I mentioned above that I’ve built a couple ball mills and in theory I could make one that might could, just maybe, if all the stars align, come in for less than a melanger. The problem is chocolate made in ball mills (and ditto roller mills) has never thrilled me when it came down to tasting it. More to the point I found it tasted bad.
Melangers are kind of cool in that two processes occur in them at the same time. You know one of them already. Refining. Particle reduction. Making cocoa and sugar particles smaller. The other process, conching, is one you may have wondered why I haven’t addressed yet.
Conching seems to mystify many people. It seems magical and mysterious and it has gained quite the mythos of half truths, rumor and misinformation. Mostly I wish people would just ignore it as at our scale and with the equipment we use. It just isn’t a thing to concern yourself with.
Conching is simply the aeration of heated chocolate for the express purpose of releasing chemicals and compounds in the chocolate that negatively affect the flavor. Everything else is romantic hand waving.
A melanger does this naturally. The rollers rotate and aerate the chocolate. Heat is produced due to friction. It is run for 24-72 hours and conching naturally happens in that time. You could not stop it if you wanted to....well, you could. See the Pro-Tip.
I bring conching up because the lack of conching is why chocolate refined with ball mill and roller mills don’t taste very good. So even IF we could come up with a ball mill for less than a melanger, we would then need yet another piece of equipment, a conch, to finish the job and we’ve ended up no closer to reducing the cost in the Iron Triangle.
PRO-TIP Stop releasing the tension on your melangers thinking you on now conching. Friction drops, heat drops and all you are doing is stirring, not conching and not even refining.
I just realized I’ve not directly answered the question that prompted this latest installment.
You would make a ton of sales if you would invent a way to make a melanger for under $100. Why don’t you do that? The market could really use it.
Don’t I know it. Don’t you dare think I’ve not thought of that. But I’ve also failed a lot and it has taught me what works, what might work and most importantly can’t work and to date I see no way to make a melanger or any refiner for under $100. It basically comes down to physics and energy.
There is a mostly all in one machine out there, not quite on the market yet due to covid, that will allow you to make about a pound of chocolate at mostly the press of a button. And it will temper for you too. Most likely it will come in over $1000. To my mind that is just making chocolate making even more unapproachable by choosing convenience and appearance over cost and batch size.
Just like oil will never dissolve sugar there are certain energy and scale requirements to making a product Sure, computers have become smaller and cheaper and faster but that is due to the advancement of mostly a non-mechanical technology and scale. And oh boy, I could sell a LOT of smart phones if I could make them for $200. But motors are very physics driven. They need to impart energy and mechanical stresses go way up as you reduce size. You can’t just make a melanger or roller mill or ball mill 1/10 the size and expect it to be 1/10 the price any more than you can make a jack hammer smaller, cheaper and still able to do its job. You end up chasing your tail and very possibly it will be more expensive, not less.
That is just a long way of saying I’ve looked at less expensive ways to make chocolate and the numbers just don’t add up. If anything, the smaller you go, the higher the price goes due to the Iron Triangle. You are not getting less by having something smaller. You are getting more because it is compact and so you will end up balancing that somewhere, i.e. $$$
So there. Get a melanger. Which one? Apply the Iron Triangle. If the cost is higher, there is probably a good reason for that trade off. Quality? Quantity? If one seems too good to be true, it probably is. Choose wisely my friends.....psst, I love Spectra and that is why I offer them.
Next up is Iron Triangle of Tempering. Stay tuned and talk to you soon.
Making your own chocolate? have questions about any step of the process? Why not Ask The Alchemist? He regularly answers reader questions (over 300 answers are waiting for you, maybe he answered your question already) and we've just launched the new ATA video series where he demonstrates the real world answers to your chocolate making questions!
