Post by timwilde on Oct 3, 2014 13:28:25 GMT -5
I've been reading throughout the forums and even the Alchemist's suggestions on using vanilla.
Primarily I've been slicing the beans, scraping them into warmed and melted cocoa butter and letting the beans soak in the cocoa butter for at least an hour. This has been working for me but it seems like there's a lot of waste and not quite the carryover that I would have expected.
The vanilla supplier I use sells extremely fresh beans. These are oily pliable and rather plump, rather than most of the vanilla beans on the market where they are brittle and dry.
Some of the folks on the forum seem to advocate just throwing in whole beans. But when I did that on a test batch, I got lots of fibers from the vanilla bean dispersed throughout the chocolate after about 48 hours in the santha. Is this practice something only possible with the dried out beans? Or should I be chopping/mincing the beans first?
Secondly should I be heating the cocoabutter to higher temps if this is the way I should be doing things? As a test, I've actually omitted vanilla beans and didnt notice a difference in the finished chocolate - and I generally put in about 1 bean per pound (5 beans in a 5lb batch). At that ratio, the cocoa butter seems very aromatic before I put it into the santha, but seems to loose the aroma and flavor during refining/conching.
Is this lack of aroma/flavor just too subtle for me to pick up or is this just a result of the cocoa beans I'm using? White chocolate comes out extremely rich and vanilla-y when I use the soaking method, but tends to have dark streaks and fibers if I just toss the whole beans in.
Ultimately, I'm going to continue experimenting, but wanted to get some guidance from others and make sure I'm not doing something wrong.
Primarily I've been slicing the beans, scraping them into warmed and melted cocoa butter and letting the beans soak in the cocoa butter for at least an hour. This has been working for me but it seems like there's a lot of waste and not quite the carryover that I would have expected.
The vanilla supplier I use sells extremely fresh beans. These are oily pliable and rather plump, rather than most of the vanilla beans on the market where they are brittle and dry.
Some of the folks on the forum seem to advocate just throwing in whole beans. But when I did that on a test batch, I got lots of fibers from the vanilla bean dispersed throughout the chocolate after about 48 hours in the santha. Is this practice something only possible with the dried out beans? Or should I be chopping/mincing the beans first?
Secondly should I be heating the cocoabutter to higher temps if this is the way I should be doing things? As a test, I've actually omitted vanilla beans and didnt notice a difference in the finished chocolate - and I generally put in about 1 bean per pound (5 beans in a 5lb batch). At that ratio, the cocoa butter seems very aromatic before I put it into the santha, but seems to loose the aroma and flavor during refining/conching.
Is this lack of aroma/flavor just too subtle for me to pick up or is this just a result of the cocoa beans I'm using? White chocolate comes out extremely rich and vanilla-y when I use the soaking method, but tends to have dark streaks and fibers if I just toss the whole beans in.
Ultimately, I'm going to continue experimenting, but wanted to get some guidance from others and make sure I'm not doing something wrong.