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Post by chadmart1076 on Mar 18, 2014 11:19:29 GMT -5
Recently I was listening to the Alton Brown podcast and his guest was from PolyScience, a company that makes laboratory equipment, but has branched into the culinary world. They have introduced the anti-griddle, smoking gun, and brought sous vide cooking to the US. Sous Vide is what caught my attention. For those unfamiliar, sous vide is a slow cooking process that cooks food in a very precisely temperature controlled water bath. You vacuum seal the food into a bag and drop it in the water. After a while the entire bag is one constant temperature. They described holding a roast at exactly medium rare for hours. www.cuisinetechnology.com/sousvide-discovery.phpSo, the question I have is can the device hold water temperature at chocolate tempering levels? If so, then I can dump my chocolate directly out of the melanger and into a piping bag. Then I seal the top and place it in the water... let it sit for a while and eventually the whole bag will be at 92 degrees, with the chocolate in perfect temper. The dangers of course deal with the fact that we are immersing a bag of chocolate into a big container of water... and if the water gets in then of course the chocolate would seize. Obviously, once I cut the tip off the piping bag I could no longer immerse that bag... well, maybe I could clip the tip or something, I don't know. Anyway... I am on the verge of buying something... and while I would love a table-top tempering machine, this is in the same price range and could handle this task as well as being usable for other things. As Alton Brown would say, a chocolate tempering machine is a uni-tasker. If and when I get to the point where I want to start producing chocolate in mass quantities, then a tempering machine is definitely the way to go... but the Sous Vide seems like a viable alternative for the hobbyist. I've emailed the company to ask for the minimum temperature as none of their literature indicates anything but the maximum temperature. Anyway, just thought I would share my idea and see if there were any thoughts on it. Thanks!
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gap
Apprentice
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Post by gap on Mar 20, 2014 20:00:24 GMT -5
I'll be up front and say I haven't tried this, so I don't know.
My thought is that tempering is all about time, temperature and movement. You can tick the box on time. Potentially, by following the temperature curve for crystallising your chocolate, you can tick the box on temperature. I'm not sure you'll tick the box on movement though if the chocolate is sealed in a bag and just left lying in the water bath.
Just my thought - love to hear differently from anyone
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Post by Ben on Mar 21, 2014 9:54:30 GMT -5
I agree with gap. It would be hard to make sure that the chocolate is consistent temp throughout without some sort of agitation, or just by leaving it in the bath for a very long time. But, if you left it at a temp for a very long time, it may be that the outermost chocolate would be over-crystalized when the inner chocolate reaches the right temp. Another thing is that (I think) the sous vide device doesn't have any way to cool the water, just heat. So, to cool the chocolate, you'd need to either (again) wait a very long time, or add cold water to the bath. If you're just trying to temper without having to buy a tempering machine, there are some more well-established ways to do so, including turbo-tempering, table tempering, or what I used to do: tempering in the melanger. All are discussed in these forums, I believe. If you're looking to experiment with a new process and want a sous vide device anyway, go for it and let us know how it works!
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Post by chadmart1076 on Dec 29, 2014 18:38:56 GMT -5
I've been working on a home-made tempering machine. I'm using a temperature controller that I found brewers use. It measures temp. and then if the temp is above a certain threshold it activates one circuit, and if it is below that threshold it activates another circuit. I am using a light bulb and PC fan to circulate air inside the box as the heat source, and then another PC fan to pull outside air to use as the cooling source. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get the controller to function properly. Regardless, I don't have any way of mixing the chocolate other than by hand, and I can't figure out how to attach the temp. probe in a way that it won't be in the way all the time. So this has put me off the project for a while. All told I might be down $100 thus far.
Then my wife finds one of those beaters for a Kitchenaid Mixer that has the spatula edge on it and my mind started working... and it went back to the Sous Vide device that I mentioned in the OG post! If I have the chocolate in the mixer bowl, constantly mixing, and the bowl is partially submerged in a Sous Vide bath... I think I have my tempering machine! (I still have to get the Sous Vide though). I have confirmation from the company that makes the Sous Vide that it can maintain any temp ranging from room temp up to well above what I would ever need for chocolate.
I started trying to figure out how to make a box that would go under the bowl of my mixer, yet still have room and the a bility for the water to flow to the Sous Vide, but then I had another epiphany, just put the whole base of the mixer in the water. I can surround the base in a bag or something, or just dry it off well after every use. It shouldn't hurt the mixer at all.
The water around the mixing bowl would be perfectly temperature controlled at all times, and the mixer would be constantly stirring. It might take a lot of time to reach the intended temperature targets, but other than that I don't see any downsides to this plan.
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gap
Apprentice
Posts: 390
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Post by gap on Dec 30, 2014 0:07:33 GMT -5
I understand the theory, I guess I'm just thinking that's a lot of open water around a lot of open chocolate
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jano
Neophyte
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Post by jano on Jun 2, 2016 23:05:07 GMT -5
Bumping old thread, sorry.
What if: 1. instead of a bag, you put the chocolate inside a vac-sealed mason jar 2. inside the jar, you drop a little plastic coated metal pill 3. Set the jar inside the water bath atop a magnetic stirrer
I've made a few automatic stirring machines, they are fun and easy, using PC fans and old hard drive magnets. Imagine a whole array of these...
You can potentially leave it now at the final tempered temp for whatever time you like, and whenever you are ready, just grap, dry, and mold. ??
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Post by BobWilson on Jun 28, 2016 9:56:54 GMT -5
So I might be able to help be a bit of a guinea pig. I recently bought an Anova Sous Vide cooker and have been trying to use it for tempering. Temperature control works great and I just work the bag by hand to agitate it. I have not yet been able to perfectly temper yet. Although I've just started making chocolate a few months ago and don't have the tempering down using any method yet. Until I get some more beans, the only chocolate I have has coffee beans mixed in, so from a scientific standpoint, I've got other uncontrolled variables that could be coming into play. Last night I tried retempering a batch of chocolate and here's what I did and you can see the results in the attached picture. The chocolate is 65% dark with 3% coffee beans refined in (as measured by total weight not relative to the cocoa bean weight, by that measure it's 10%). This ended up being too high for my taste and I will probably go with around 3% relative to cocoa bean weight). Melted chocolate up to 115. Chilled down to 81 and held for 5-10 minutes with frequent agitation Warmed up to 90 and held for 10 minutes with frequent agitation Poured into molds and let cool on the counter overnight. I'm open to suggestions about changing my temperature ranges and times and may need to get a batch of pure, just cocoa and sugar to test with. Thanks, Bob
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Post by chadmart1076 on Nov 15, 2016 14:44:23 GMT -5
It has been a while... I have had chocolate on the back-burner for some time, but I have finally gotten the bug again. I was given a Sous Vide for my birthday and the first thing I tried was tempering chocolate. My first issue was that my vac-sealer is horrible, and water got into the first bag. I grabbed a Zip-lok and tried again. I took the chocolate to full-melt in the water bath (around 120°). Then I reduced down to like 84° and let the water temp come down. Sadly I needed the stock pot I was using so I had to cancel the experiment. The temp of the water was something like 92 or 93°. I put the chocolate into a tupperware and it set up perfectly. Even a few days later there were no streaks. I think the chocolate was in the water for something like 2-3 hours total. BobWilson, I feel like you didn't allow enough time for your chocolate to come to temp in the water. The point of Sous Vide is that it takes a long time, so while the water is at 81°, the chocolate probably never got down to that temp if you only had it at that temp for 5-10 minutes, even with agitation. Additionally, agitating with your hands imparts heat into the chocolate as well. I found this in the past when using a pastry bag to mold my chocolate. The last few always bloomed, and I finally realized that my hands are body temp... 98.6°, so the heat in my hands impacted the chocolate on the outer edges of the bag. If I were to temper purely in-bag with a Sous Vide again, I would follow the same steps as you, but I would do so for 1-2 hours for each step instead of 5-10 minutes. I am actually going to build a container which I can fill with water, then it will have two holes in the top, one for the Sous Vide and one for a metal bowl. In this way I will adjust the temp of the water to the various steps and monitor the temps of the chocolate directly. The bowl and the Sous Vide will both seal to the box such that splash will never be an issue, and the water never gets anywhere near boiling, so condensation will never be an issue.
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Post by BobWilson on Nov 15, 2016 14:55:29 GMT -5
Chad, I appreciate the note. I actually changed my tempering process to using a seed method with the sous vide and have been fairly quickly and consistently tempering for the past several months.
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