John's Chocolate Musings
Thought I’d share my recent chocolate making adventure.
First bar on the docket, the ever-delicious figmalion chocolate bar (a fig and walnut masterpiece).
I decided this bar needed more impact from the fig and walnut. When adding ingredients to chocolate, in this case, figs and walnuts, extra cocoa butter is added. The extra cocoa butter helps with many things including giving the chocolate mass improved flowability and creamy smooth consistency while in the melanger. However, I miscalculated the cocoa butter amount and added too much, turning the chocolate mass into chocolate soup.
Big mess! The chocolate sprayed from the melanger everywhere. My shop looked like the sight of a chocolate bar murder (A melanger is a stone grinder used in to grind the chocolate mass and ingredients down giving it a smooth velvety texture. I own two melangers). I shut off the melanger and thought of best possible fix. Adding more chocolate. This solution only made the disaster worse. I realized this batch was beyond repair and had to be throw it out.
I still needed figmalion, so I began working on round two. This batch went forward without a glitch. Batch two was made and poured in a storage container. After a quick taste or three I realized the walnuts, I used were rancid. There was no fixing this batch. Figmalion round three, reformulated without nuts. Everything worked this time, the chocolate flavor profile without nuts was an improvement.
But I'm not done...
On to the next chocolate flavor, raspberry pink peppercorn.
I thought this chocolate needed more raspberries and less peppercorn. I made the batch. Time for the tasting. Raspberry wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too high, chocolate too low. This batch needed more chocolate to fix it. I had to add double the amount of chocolate to reduce the raspberry/peppercorn flavors. Batch fixed, the Raspberry pink peppercorn chocolate tasted great. New problem now. I used all my extra chocolate for the fixin and remakin. So I needed to get busy makin another batch of 70% chocolate, something I was hoping to not have to do for a week or two.
Chocolate makin means roastin, winowin and melangin. I started the chocolate makin process, and everything went swimmingly. The chocolate batch was melangein perfectly, until melanger got tired and overheated which cause it to seize up mid-melange. This fix was easy and painless. Presto- changeo. Switch one melanger base out for the other, back up and running in no time.
New chocolate batch finished, and stored, chocolate adventure completed. Next up packaging…