Post by lilypa on Nov 19, 2013 0:25:23 GMT -5
Hey All,
I recently made my first 9 lb batch of dark chocolate (just beans and sugar) in my Santha Spectra 11. Prior to that I had only made 2 - 5 lbs for about a year. For my tastes, I observed that typically I would melange around 5-6 hours per pound of chocolate. That seemed to provide the smoothness that I liked while mellowing out the acids in the beans giving the chocolate great flavor. However, I melanged this 9 lb batch for 41 hours, which is about 4.5 hours per pound of chocolate. This produced a decent chocolate, but it has a solidly bitter bite at the start of tasting as well as a touch of astringency. That bitter bite is also a bit oddly flavored. Fortunately, this chocolate tastes great on the finish/back-end so it leaves me wanting to try more.
I'm wondering if melanging times when scaling-up batches of chocolate, in the same machine, should be linear or have folks experienced a non-linearity when scaling-up? I keep questioning whether I should've melanged for 45 - 54 hours, which would've amounted to 5-6 hours per lb of chocolate that I had previous success with. At 34 hours, the texture was still a bit gritty, but the flavor was atrocious. At 41 hours, the texture was pretty smooth and the flavor was considerably better. I decided to stop at 41 hours because I was concerned that the batch would be refined so much that it would taste gummy/plasticy. (I've never melanged that long with my Spectra 11.)
What have any of you been successful with regarding scaling-up in the same machine? Linear or non-linear melanging times?
Cheers,
Dave
I recently made my first 9 lb batch of dark chocolate (just beans and sugar) in my Santha Spectra 11. Prior to that I had only made 2 - 5 lbs for about a year. For my tastes, I observed that typically I would melange around 5-6 hours per pound of chocolate. That seemed to provide the smoothness that I liked while mellowing out the acids in the beans giving the chocolate great flavor. However, I melanged this 9 lb batch for 41 hours, which is about 4.5 hours per pound of chocolate. This produced a decent chocolate, but it has a solidly bitter bite at the start of tasting as well as a touch of astringency. That bitter bite is also a bit oddly flavored. Fortunately, this chocolate tastes great on the finish/back-end so it leaves me wanting to try more.
I'm wondering if melanging times when scaling-up batches of chocolate, in the same machine, should be linear or have folks experienced a non-linearity when scaling-up? I keep questioning whether I should've melanged for 45 - 54 hours, which would've amounted to 5-6 hours per lb of chocolate that I had previous success with. At 34 hours, the texture was still a bit gritty, but the flavor was atrocious. At 41 hours, the texture was pretty smooth and the flavor was considerably better. I decided to stop at 41 hours because I was concerned that the batch would be refined so much that it would taste gummy/plasticy. (I've never melanged that long with my Spectra 11.)
What have any of you been successful with regarding scaling-up in the same machine? Linear or non-linear melanging times?
Cheers,
Dave