What an interesting set of questions I’ve been receiving this last year. Well, I am using the term interesting in sort of a gently sarcastic way. I find them interesting because

In the attached, are the temperatures mentioned air temperatures or bean surface temperatures?

Think of this as the start of a FAQ. I also want to note there are some oddly phrased questions below and I’m leaving them as written, not to make fun of anyone as it is pretty obvious they are from folks who do not speak English as their first language and being monolingual myself, I applaud them for writing in. Their English is worlds better than my Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin or Italian.

Today we have two questions related to Brewing Cocoa and I find one of them really interesting from an assumption standpoint.

After last weeks in depth conversation about roasting cocoa in a coffee roaster, I wanted to, nay, needed to take it a little easy this week. There are a bunch of pretty simple questions that don’t really merit a full long winded response but in that there are no stupid questions (that is NOT a challenge folks) I still want to answer them. It also helps clear a little of the back log.

If we can roast cacao with our Diedrich IR12 that would solve everything.

This year, #AmIRight?

This is going to be a little rambling with a little of this and a little of that. I’ll get to the Ask the Alchemist after a couple announcements.

How much vanilla extract should I add to my chocolate?

I wrote an article yesterday. It was kind of a venting rant session for me. Call it therapy. But I started having doubts that I might be just railing at the world and it wasn’t useful or delivered the message I wanted.

I have been making your milk chocolate using your suggested 25% blend of cocoa, sugar, milk power, and cocoa butter. I'm curious what the best way would be to try different percentages without messing up the end product?

“I see you have beans from a couple years ago. Are they still good? I would prefer fresher beans.”

“I spend so much time sorting my beans and lose probably 20% because they are different sizes and some are not fermented well. What really clean beans can you recommend?”

I’ve decided to support an organization that is directly helping those helping that need it, regardless of industry, country, etc. It is to help the world we all belong to.

They are Direct Relief COVID-19.

Hello! I'm wondering your thoughts on COVID-19 and chocolate tempering preparation. From what I can read, 140 degrees is the safest temperature for food prep to kill viruses, but we don't want that for melting chocolate. any thoughts on food safety?

What is the ratio about using natural vanilla and using artificial? and the natural one, does it moisture affects?

You mentioned I should keep adding cocoa butter when  my milk chocolate  batch is thick; if am making a 1kg batch and i keep adding more cocoa butter, then my final batch no longer becomes 1kg or is it that when am making a batch of 1kg, I should always make sure my cocoa butter is higher  than all the other ingredients on paper before starting

I recently had a death in the family. I’ll be traveling October 4-10 and out of email contact.

I use my Sous Vide for so many things and am planning on making silk. My question is however have you tempered chocolate using a sous vide

Instead of whole cacao nibs, can I buy cracked cacao nibs from health store and put it in Melanger
Instead of cracked cocao nibs can I buy raw cacao powder from health store and put it in Melanger