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Post by Fat Rabbit Coffee on Jul 13, 2023 20:04:22 GMT -5
This batch is delicious but I've never had it look this bad. The only thing I did differently was leave it out at room temp to cool rather than put it in the fridge. Is that why? Never mind the sprinkles. That was an experiment with inclusions but that's definitely not why because I only added them to a few pieces.
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Post by Ben on Jul 14, 2023 8:41:34 GMT -5
Yep, leaving it at room temp is probably the culprit. At a certain point while chocolate is crystallizing, the process turns exothermic which can definitely knock your chocolate out of temper. To avoid it, it's best to use some active cooling, but it can sometimes work to let it crystallize at room temp if you have some added airflow.
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Post by Fat Rabbit Coffee on Jul 14, 2023 14:08:11 GMT -5
Ah, ok. By exothermic you mean the chocolate heats up during the crystallization process and, as you said, takes it out of temper by heating it beyond the threshold to keep it in temper? I did the seed method (for only the second time ever) and following Nanci's video, I decided to try leaving it out on the counter because he basically said [paraphrasing], "...you can put it in the fridge if you want to but you don't have to." I also used 1-ish% seed this time vs 2% seed last time because I think he said to use between 1-2% but I don't remember for sure.
Interestingly if you look at the bars underneath the psychedelic Fat Rabbit bars, they came out near perfect. And the really bad rectangles came from a higher quality Tomric polycarbonate mold. Go figure.
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Post by Ben on Jul 18, 2023 10:01:44 GMT -5
I guess it *can* work that way, but cooling removes a bunch of possible problems. For example, that higher quality mold is probably thicker, so it's insulating the chocolate more and not allowing it to cool as quickly. Cooling solves that issue. And yeah, at a certain point in the crystallization process, the process starts to generate heat. Without active cooling to remove that heat, it can cause the chocolate to go out of temper. Generally this is more of problem with thicker pieces of chocolate, but from your photos it looks like the fat rabbit bars are thinner than the ones below, so it could be that your problem is something else entirely. How long did it take to mold the full batch? How are you maintaining temperature throughout the molding process? Are you constantly monitoring the temperature and stirring?
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