gap
Apprentice
Posts: 390
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Post by gap on May 26, 2013 18:18:15 GMT -5
Does anyone wash beans under cold water and dry before using?
We recently got a shipment of very dusty beans. The first batch of chocolate tasted of the dust even though we tried hard to remove it all from the nibs. The second batch we washed quickly under running cold water and then oven dried the beans at 100 C and then proceeded with our normal roast.
Has anyone else tried this? We weighed before and after washing/drying and the beans were roughly the same weight, so we're hoping we didn't add any moisture content to the beans. Any other known disadvantages (or advantages) of doing this that people know about?
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Post by Sebastian on May 27, 2013 6:41:48 GMT -5
if it's just dust, your bean cleaning should be removing most of it. whatever remains would be burned off during roasting.
i'd likely stay away from adding water - while an effective cleaning agent, it would suggest you'd have to use the beans pretty much immediately (else worry about molding), and would require additional energy (cost) to remove the moisture you just added.
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Post by lyndon on May 27, 2013 16:18:04 GMT -5
Sorry, when you refer to "your bean cleaning", what do you mean if not a quick wash as described?
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Post by Sebastian on May 27, 2013 19:38:19 GMT -5
Dried beans come in with all manner of non-bean stuff in them. Dust. Rocks. Grass. Bullets. Bones. Sticks.
They should always been physically cleaned to remove the foreign material via aspiration and density sorting of some sort.
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Post by lyndon on Jun 1, 2013 13:11:33 GMT -5
Ah I see, good to know. Density sorting sounds easy enough, but aspiration; I presume something a lot stronger than a hair dryer is needed
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Post by Sebastian on Jun 2, 2013 6:29:38 GMT -5
Depends on volume. I use a hair dryer sometimes for very small batches.
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