jyee
Neophyte
Posts: 1
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Post by jyee on Nov 13, 2020 18:15:34 GMT -5
TL;DR: can you turn a chocolate fountain into a tempering machine?
Commercially available continuous tempering machines are quite expensive for us home hobbyists, but the more I look at them, they appear to be fairly basic in design:
1. PID controlled heated reservoir. This is set to a temperature where beta V crystals are stable, but too hot for undesirable forms. 2. Some sort of mixer to keep chocolate in the reservoir moving. 3. An auger controlled spout that lifts the chocolate and allows it to flow and fall back into the heated reservoir. This falling through the air seems to be where the chocolate cools briefly and new beta V crystals are encouraged to form. It's also how the chocolate is moved from the reservoir to molds.
For those who have experience with continuous tempering machines, is there anything missing? Is there active cooling involved? (I havent seen any in the small benchtop models, but I could be wrong)
All that said, the auger lift & pour functionality seems basically like a chocolate fountain (of which there are many cheaply available). So I'm wondering, has anyone tried modifying a chocolate fountain to add PID control to the heated reservoir and possibly add mixing in order to turn it into a DIY continuous tempering machine?
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Post by Ben on Nov 14, 2020 23:32:01 GMT -5
I think this has been unsuccessfully tried before, but I don't remember by who. If I remember correctly the problems included the temperature control not being precise enough and the auger motor not being powerful enough to pump real chocolate (I believe chocolate fountains use compound chocolate with added oil to make it more liquidy).
If those two things are worked around, it may possibly work. I don't think it would be a continuous tempering machine, though, but could be a batch tempering machine. Continuous tempering machines do have active cooling. That's a key part of the continuous tempering process. The chocolate is pumped through different temperature zones to rapidly temper it before being pumped out of the spout and back into the bowl. The chocolate in the bowl is un-tempered.
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