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Post by markstickley on Nov 24, 2012 4:27:58 GMT -5
Does anyone use cocoa butter for tempering? I have a few questions about cocoa butter! Here's the background: I'm just starting out making chocolates at home. I've had 3 attempts so far at tempering and true to form I was 3rd time lucky. It probably helped that for the 3rd time I had just bought a very accurate digital thermometer While the temper seemed pretty good, the chocolate was really viscous and virtually impossible to work with. It's good chocolate but when I bought it I hadn't heard of couverture chocolate, which I don't think it is. I read that the difference with couverture chocolate is that it contains more cocoa butter. So here are my questions... 1. Does the added cocoa butter make it runnier at lower temperatures and therefore easier to work with? (I'm thinking: probably) 2. Can I effectively make my own couverture chocolate by adding extra cocoa butter to my non-couverture chocolate? 3. Googling for cocoa butter produces various results from skin moisturiser to an oil replacement in cooking. I'm struggling to find any that is specifically for tempering. Is there any difference or is it all the same stuff? 4. I've come across MyCryo which apparently is 100% cocoa butter, shaved into a powder. I've seen some reference to using it for tempering but I also read that it's composed of type 6 crystals, not the desirable type 5 that we need for good chocolate. If I temper with MyCryo won't the chocolate end up being mostly type 6 crystals? Any advice would be gratefully received! Thanks
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Post by Brad on Nov 25, 2012 12:07:47 GMT -5
Hi Mark;
There is a wealth of information on this forum that already answers your questions. Try searching for couverture, or tempering, or mycryo.
I also know that John posted an excellent tutorial on tempering. You just need to search the forum for it.
Cheers. Brad
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Post by markstickley on Nov 26, 2012 7:53:44 GMT -5
Thanks Brad I'll have a search around...
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Post by markstickley on Nov 27, 2012 5:24:25 GMT -5
Well I spend about 2.5 hours searching the forum and googling and since I can answer in about 1 minute I'll post the reply for the benefit of anyone else that doesn't want to spend all that time hunting: 1. Yes, more cocoa butter (like in couverture chocolate) will mean a runnier, less viscous chocolate at lower temperatures making it easier to work with. 2. Could not find an answer to this one. 3. No answer for this either. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. 4. Mycryo can be used for various things and tempering chocolate is one of them. You should generally add 1% of the weight of the chocolate in mycryo. It is type 6 crystals but apparently this doesn't matter so much. People generally think mycryo is expensive and it's better to use tempered cocoa butter instead, although I've seen mycryo more readily available to buy than the other. Some say that the results of tempering with mycryo isn't as good as just using seed chocolate but if you're making chocolate from scratch and don't want to 'pollute' it with someone else's chocolate as a seed it might be a good solution if you don't have a tempering machine that can do it for you. If anyone knows the answer to 2 & 3 I'd really appreciate a reply! Thanks
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Post by Sebastian on Nov 27, 2012 6:09:31 GMT -5
2. Yes. 3. There are differences in terms of hardness. However even many chocolate manufacturers don't spend a lot of time on this. Best bet for you is just to buy natural (non-alkalized) african cocoa butter
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Post by Sebastian on Nov 27, 2012 6:10:24 GMT -5
FYI mycryo is simply a very, very, very expensive way to temper. it'll work, however, it's a bit like heating your house by burning $20 bills.
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Post by markstickley on Nov 27, 2012 8:47:46 GMT -5
Thanks Sebastian, that's really helpful! I'll buy some cocoa butter and see if I can improvise a couverture from the chocolate I've got and work from there...
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