help building my own cocoa butter press

[Sebastian]

egads, putting hexane in the microwave? i'm going to have to have a chat with the folks at WCF - that's not something i'd recommend...

re: tempering, lets start with the easiest way - once you've pressed and ground your cocoa powder, before it cools (ie while still hot), blow cold air though the mass. you'll need to come up with a way to keep the air circulating around your solids so that it's somewhat homogeneous (you don't want hot spots), and you'll need to play with air flow rates and temperatures and times, but that's where i'd start if i were you.

re: alkalization - that's a pretty IP intensive topic, not one i feel good about teaching openly on as there's quite a lot of proprietary information here. alkalization is a chemical reaction - as with any chemical reaction, reaction kinetics depend on:
1) type of alkali used
2) concentration of the alkali
3) size of your nibs
4) temperature
5) length of exposure

Sorry I can be more explicit...

[jtoddm]

Thanks sebastian -- I totally understand about not wanting to share any proprietary information.

So for tempering the cocoa powder, I guess I understand the general concept of how to heat and cool it, but at a simpler level, how do you tell if the cocoa powder is tempered? We have some cocoa powder we made a month ago that's just been sitting in a bag and it hasn't developed any clumps. Besides waiting a long time and checking for clumps, is there another easy test? And besides heat, is there someway to see the formation of crystals as you would with normal chocolate?

Also, since cocoa powder is generally an ingredient seems like it may not be super important to temper it -- is the clumping the only reason to do so?

As always, thanks for your insightful answers.

-Todd

[Sebastian]

If it's not turned into a brick by this time, you're probably good to go the big reason you'd temper it is for packaging stability - if that's unimportant to you, skip it. You can do some microscopy on it to tell if it's tempered or not, and the more you work with it, you'll be able to get a feel for it by the visual color of it - you'll see a difference int he appearance between powders that 'work' (tempered), and those that don't...

[jtoddm]

Perfect -- that all makes sense, thanks for the advice. It sounds like I will just need to make a lot more cocoa powder then and see what happens

[cocoaffee]

Hi every one has any one used the piteba oil press?

[jtoddm]

We tried it out -- it's very very small, and we never got it to work quite right for us (I think we needed to apply more heat). It's sort of interesting, but probably not worthwhile if you want to make more than a few grams at a time.

[reelchemist]

Ah, this is quite topical as I have just ordered one based on a friends result. After quite a bit of fine tuning he is able to get about 4-5 oz from 1lb of roasted cocoa nibs. Which is pretty reasonable for the hobby chocolate maker I think.

I will be asking him more questions once I get it in and start playing around with it. I will report here too. Actually I think Bob has an account on here so I'll see if he has time to hop on and impart his Piteba use wisdom.

I am very much looking forward to using my own cocoa butter in my chocolate.

[cocoaffee]

Thanks for the replies , I just received one last week ,4-5 oz seems reasonable to me too although I have not made any of the chocolates yet am just slowly trying to peace the equipments together .
I will keep an eye on this discussions, please if you manage to get hold of Bob it will save me .

[bob]

I'm relatively new to making chocolate from local beans getting a rough grind through an industrial coffee grinder, putting the ground up beans in a Spectra 20 for about 5 hours with powdered sugar cocoa butter and lecethin and tempering with the chocolait electronique. I get my cocoa butter by putting the roasted ground beans through a piteba getting 4-5 oz from a pound of beans, The Petiba puts the ground beans under tremendous pressure and powders them and I add a very small amount of baking soda to the powder and run it through the Santha for about half an hour and pour the resultant liquor into a 4in x 2 in x 1 in mould to make blocks from which you scrape really delicious drinking cocoa.
I've found the piteba to be a very robust, ingenious and remarkably cheap machine for what it does but it does take some getting used to and everything has to be just right for it to work properly, otherwise the compressed powder forms a hard cake and blocks the machine. When this happens yoy have to undo the nuts at the end and scrape the blockage out and start again.
Make sure you have the piteba bolted to a strong heavy stand because you have to exert quite some force to turn ithe handle at times and you don't want the stand capsizing. I find it works best when the two holes in the larger nut at the end are facing upwards and the compressed powder is forced out in a steady thread. According to some of the videos showing the use of the machine it is best to keep turning the handle at a steady 26 times a minute. It takes a few minutes turning before any oil comes out and it takes quite a bit of energy to get it going. There is a bonus in that in addition to getting some cheap good quality oil you'll get your exercise for the day!
I found the Petiba people very efficient to deal with and quick to respond to any query with very helpful replies.= Bob Rankin in Samoa

[ChocolateFish]

Never heard of the Piteba, so did some research...

My question(s) are

1: Does it really work?, have read mixed comments.

2: According to the website it says GRATED cocoa will obtain over a litre of cocoa butter- is this a unrealistic sales claim, and has anyone tried using grated cacao.

2: If so (it does work), how do you get the final product (cocoa cake + buttter) is it directly extracted or does it require further processing

Appreciate answers....

[cocoaffee]

Thanks Bob. just acouple more questions; did you do any modifications to the marchine?
- Why do you add baking soda? and you said you run the staff through the spectra20 for 5 hours and temper, is the quality as good as that smooth quality chocolate bar?becouse I read from here people running it for hrs and hours so yours seems to be so easy and short.
THANKYOU

[cocoaffee]

Thanks Bob. just acouple more questions; did you do any modifications to the marchine?
- Why do you add baking soda? and you said you run the staff through the spectra20 for 5 hours and temper, is the quality as good as that smooth quality chocolate bar?becouse I read from here people running it for hrs and hours so yours seems to be so easy and short.
lastly how long to you roast your beans for oil extraction?
THANKYOU

[bob]

In answer to the various questions I didn't make any modifications to the machine. It's very simple to operate and has nothing complicated about it - you just have to experiment with it a bit to get it working properly. Using the residue from the machine to make drinking cocoa I add one level teaspoon of baking soda per pound of powder because I understand this makes it completely dissolve when the hot or boiling water is added to it when mixing as a drink. I only run the powder through the Spectra for about 20 minutes before pouring into the mou;ds. When I'm making chocolate I run the roastd crushed beans with powdered suger etc through the Spectra for about 5 hours. I fnd this is enough to give a good smooth feel to the chocolate - maybe I don't need to run ir as much as others seem to do because we have a warm cliamte around 30 degrees most of the time. I roast the beans for half an hour at 250 degrees before removing the shell by hand.
You can take it from me that the Piteba really works and gives good quality oil that requires no further processing. I just keep it in a bottle in the fridge until I need it and bring it out and melt it befoire using. Not sure what is meant by grated cocoa. I just use the roasted beans after they've gone through the industrial coffee grinder I have and they're not ground particularly fine.

[cocoaffee]

ahh Finally i get my 4.5 oz of oil out of 1 pound of beans but it was after about 4 attempts with total disappoitments.
Imust say it needs a bit of patience and energy .
What did i do right or wrong? too dry beans got little oil and marchine blocked used anail and hammer to get the hard cake out .
Finally i soacked the beans with little water, put back little oil i hard got earlier back to the beans and left it over night . End result very easy flexiable turning with very mim. energy and actually ejoyable.

[reelchemist]

Have had my first attempt: Failed

Problems:

1. End cap too cold and blocked almost instantly, some oil did come out, so I can see the potential.
2. Used kerosine as fuel for burner, coulnd't get a clean burn no matter what I did to the wick length etc. Covered everything in black soot and took forever to clean up.
3. Used ground nibs to feed into the machine (nibs that had been put through a blender for a bit. They are too fine and don't feed at all well into the expeller.

Solutions to try next time:

1. Going to put the end cap in the oven to get it to temp as it seems like the problem area. There is plenty of room around the auger and more margin for temp error there.
2. Using methylated spirits as fuel, tested it and nice clean burn and much smaller flame.
3. Use straight nibs, should feed much easier.

I'll let you know how it goes