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Post by sdcecil on Aug 15, 2015 18:55:32 GMT -5
I'm curious if anyone has background or insight into making drinking chocolate tablets at home. In my experience generally such tablets are made with a grain mill as opposed to the wet grinders used for bar chocolate. I'm curious, if anyone has been making such tablets at home, what kind of grinder they use, and if there's a small scale grain mill on the market that's good for such work.
I'm also curious about tempering. common chocolat company often boycotted for it's other products and marketing's Abuelita tablets have the shiny hardened look of tempered chocolate. Yet they also have a texture that suggests they don't come out of a wet grinding process. When I've mead tablets at home, and when I've seen them made in small shops in Latin America, the chocolate being molded is closer to a wet dough than a liquid. I usually see it pressed into molds as opposed to placed in with a syringe. So I'm a bit flummoxed as to how one can temper such a mass. Any insight would be much appreciated.
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Post by Brad on Sept 9, 2015 16:25:55 GMT -5
Sdcecil;
I've experimented with a home-based drinking chocolate method for a few years now, and I can tell you definitively you DON'T want to temper the chocolate. The reason is this: The amount of cocoa mass you need to melt in order to make a decent drinking chocolate is going to cool the hot liquid long before it's fully melted, and tempered chocolate is much harder to melt. At least with untempered chocolate it will break up, the surface area touching heat will increase, and the cocoa mass will melt sooner.
IMHO the drinking chocolate pucks are a cute idea (I've also seen them with stir sticks molded right into them), but are an epic fail when it comes to practicality. If you want to sell them I'm sure you want to sell them repeatedly to your customers, and I don't believe that many people buy these a second time.
I would suggest a shaved liquor coated lightly with corn starch (also a traditional ingredient in drinking chocolate, or xocolatl).
Cheers Brad
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Post by lyndon on Sept 10, 2015 14:03:56 GMT -5
I make hot chocolate sticks if that's any help, it's just 20g of 100% cocoa on a stick I temper it though, for aesthetic reasons. But as Brad says, I'm not sure on the resale value, they are more of a low price novelty I sell along side the more expensive items, especially around xmas etc.
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Post by sdcecil on Sept 25, 2015 18:34:04 GMT -5
Brad,
I appreciate your reply. I think it raises some additional questions for me. La Abuelita, and Tabla two companies that make drinking tablet chocolate are definitely tempering their chocolate. I'm curious if you have any idea how they accomplish it at all. Given how much sugar is in a typical tablet I'm not clear on how they keep it liquid to temper.
Secondly I'm not clear on what you mean by 'a shaved liquor' how does one shave cocoa liquor and what process does one follow to make that into a tablet?
Lyndon,
Thanks for your thoughts as well. I'm really trying to recreate the chocolate tablets that I encountered in Latin America. Those are typically something like 20% cacao and 80% chocolate. This formulation is quite different then what we generally make in small bean to bar operations and I'm trying to figure out how I can approximate it here.
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Post by basilyok on Dec 10, 2015 21:00:11 GMT -5
Do you mean 20% cacao and 80% sugar? Mexican drinking chocolate is typically quite sweet. I'm not sure about the rest of Latin America. Even the most "bitter" that I've ever tried, in the highlands of Michoacan, doesn't taste like anything higher than 60 or 70% cacao at the most, but generally they are much sweeter.
I am about to start playing around with bean to bar, using my newly acquired Santha Wet Grinder, but I've been making 100% (I like it bitter, and it's easy enough to add as much sugar as anyone likes to their own cup) drinking chocolate blocks and bars for years now using just my champion juicer with roasted criollo almendra blanca beans from Tabasco. I used to try to winnow, not very successfully, but later realized that the champion makes that process unnecessary.
Anyway, I don't temper, partly because there's no point, and partly because I really don't have a handle on the process yet. However, it really shouldn't matter if you use tempered chocolate or untempered. And, on many occasions when I was out of my chocolate, in a pinch, I have just used store bought eating chocolate bars to make pretty decent hot chocolate. I make a fairly strong chocolate drink using 2 litres of boiling water and 100g of 100% cacao bars/blocks. Even if the chocolate was tempered, making it harder to melt, as Brad mentioned, it wouldn't make a difference because there's much more hot water. Also, although I personally don't do this, most Mexicans will just keep the hot chocolate on a low flame, so melting the chocolate isn't an issue. Seeing as I don't drink 2 litres+ of hot chocolate in a day (tempting, but not advisable) I reheat it over a low flame the next day, in my rustic clay jug, and it's fine.
In Mexico, most drinking chocolate bars and tablets are fairly unprocessed. There's no need to grind it down to a smooth liqueur, but there's also no reason not to, except for cost and time. You may have noticed that there will usually be some gritty chocolate "sludge" at the bottom of your cup - that's because the cacao is not finely ground. Another reason that eating chocolate is processed is to break down the sugar particles. In drinking chocolate, these will just dissolve, so, again, not point, but also no reason not to do it.
The "wet dough" you may have seen in small chocolate shops is likely because the mixture is not highly processed, and so doesn't get warm enough to fully melt. It is also because of other additives, including anything like almonds, pecans, even cookies or flour to add bulk and lower cost. In some chocolate shops, specifically ones I've seen in Oaxaca, the chocolate does come out as a liquid, so it really depends on the region and exact mill or setting on the mill that a particular individual uses.
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