Daily musings and writings from the Alchemist
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Refining & Conching
This sugar article has technically been in the making for over a decade and I realized it was time to finally put it all together and fill in some gaps in my knowledge. To that end we made a bunch of chocolate, both dark and milk, with a wide array of sugars. Here is our cast of characters.
Imagine you have a big, thick, gooey slime. Now, if you try to push your hand through the slime, it resists and feels sticky. That’s because the slime doesn’t like to move quickly when you apply force to it. We call this “viscosity.”
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
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.
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.
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 am new to chocolate compound coatings and I have been learning a lot from your website. I am making a chocolate compound coating, though it’s mainly geared towards chocolate. The recipe is as follows:
This may seem a little irrelevant at first but hear me out:
We are starting a new bean to bar factory in the industry so I would like to know what is the best cocoa nibs there is to order for making chocolate? And what equipment do we need? Can you supply me with a recipe for making the best chocolate? 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
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
