Sebastian

inulin's amorphous. there is no crystalline structure. spring, if you want to email me a formula, or at least a listing of ingredients, privately, that might be an option that you might be comfortable with. unfortunately, the less information you provide, the less helpful we can be.

Sorry mate, can't help you if you can't provide more details i'm afraid. The devil's in the details, as they say....

Post the specifics of the formula if you can. What ingredients were used, how much, and how did you process them?

well, depends on how damp 'damp' is. if it's just thickened a tad, add 0.1% fluid lecithin to it and make ganache out of it.

it is made up.

Nut oils are notoriously susceptible to oxidation - they are very unsaturated. Many times, because they have not been properly stored or packaged, by the time you get them, they're already gone bad - which doesn't mean good things for the shelf life of your product. While i love the flavor of fresh nut oils, they can be quite difficult to work with if you need any semblance of shelf life. Sunflower oils will have largely the same issue - if you're able to source what's called a high oleic sunflower oil, do that, as it'll be more stable oxidatively. Is the palm oil you have in your supermarket a liquid, solid, or a combination of both when at room temperature? If you're just making this for personal consumption, in small quantities, it doesn't much matter, i suppose, which oil you use as long as it's a fresh oil, and you minimize it's exposure to heat and oxygen. If you're making something for other purposes - ie retail - i'd urge you to pay great attention to which oil types you use. Remember, from a shelf life perspective (shelf life here meaning flavor), the more fluid your oil is, the more rapidly it will oxidize and have bad flavors develop. Finding the right balance will depend on how you intent to use it!

Remember that unsaturated oils will oxidize more quickly than saturated ones. However, they are have the lowest melting point, which is what you're after in making a spread. I'd suggest looking for something that has a balance between saturated fat and melting point. You have a few options that I'd consider: 1) a modified, or partially hydrogenated palm oil, coconut oil, or soy oil. obviously hydrogenation has a certain tone to it, and some folks might equate that with trans fat. Keep moisture as low as possible to avoid hydrolytic rancidity problems. 2) a fractionated palm kernel oil. might be your best bet from a functional and label standpoint. Personally i'd start here. 3) anhydrous milk fat would do the trick. you get a cholesterol component with this approach. it can be difficult to find, although land o lakes offers it. your most expensive approach, but arguably your most label friendly. Obviously there are others you can use. Which one you choose depends really on what you're after. I'd consider starting with option 2 to begin with.

may not be exactly what you're after, but.. http://www.allchocolate.com/enjoying/chocolate-covered-february/follow-up.aspx

It's a close approximation. Remember also that cooking continues after you remove it from the stove - time from stove to depositing may also be playing a factor.

It all has to do with how much moisture remains. You cook to a certain temperature for a certain time for two reasons, one of which is because it's the easiest method you have at your disposal to remove approximately the same amount of moisture. However, if you have inconsistent ingredient additions (of which water is one...), your heating is inconsistent (such as resistance based kitchen stove-tops which go on/off to maintain temperature), your raw material composition varies from batch to batch, your stirring is different between batches, and your environment is different - you'll likely end up with a coupla percentage points difference in your solids content (and, thus, your moisture content). A difference of 1% moisture in your finished product will cause a sensory textural difference that's discernible to most...

300 count is pretty large - like hershey kiss large (actually biger..)...300ct refers to the number of pieces per pound - most don't want pieces quite that large...

It's actually called a de-tailer, or de-tailing rod. I'm not familiar with the model you're using, but it should have one.

Deb - you did just fine 8-) also, remember that the santha's are not precision machines. The stones used in each will vary in their porosity and clearances between the rollers and stators (the bottom). I.E. - not two machines are alike, and as such, it's quite difficult to compare times and particle sizes between two of them. They also appear to vary in rotational speed from unit to unit. Industrial machines are machined to very, very tight tolerances, allowing for specific comparisons to be made.

found the AMF retail link: http://www.foodservicedirect.com/product.cfm/p/186536/Land-O-Lakes-Clarified-Butter-30-Pound.htm it's actually bigger than i thought it was, i've not spent the time to find out if there's smaller quantities or not. If you opt to use this, let me know and i'll give some additional pointers if you'd like. Edit: added a link to some interesting milk powders, resulting from just a quick search with my good friend Google. I don't have the time now to do anything more detailed, and it'd be shipping from a long way away, but if there's one place retailing it, there are more... http://www.rogersfoods.com.au/?c_id=5

If you're looking to add caramel flavor to your milk chocolate, i'm saying that there are cooked milk powders commercially available that you may wish to consider vs trying to decipher how to make crumb chocolate at home. it's certainly not the same as a full fledged crumb chocolate, but it'll be more caramalized than what you've already made with your WMP, and will have a much lower barrier to entry 8-)

Lots of trade secret information here, i'm probably not going to offer up anything other than you need to wrap your arms around using water in your chocolate production. Fluid milk has lots of moisture in it. Lots of technical hurdles to overcome, the most immediate of which you'll wrestle with is, of course, the fact that chocolate doesn't much care to have water added to it... I'm not sure how available this is on a very small level, but there are milk manufacturers that do make pre-caramalized milk powders. If you're able to identify retail quantities of that, it'd be much, much, much easier way of delivering caramlized milk flavor in your chocolate.

Kerry - i've not looked in the Canadian grocery stores for many years, but you used to be able to buy boxed NFDM (in the same aisle as condensed milk). I'd start there..I've got a link to the LoL milk fat somewhere at home - i'm currently travelling so you'll have to wait until i get home to dig it out. If my memory fails, don't hesitate to remind me 8-) Deb - Ghee will work just fine. In fact, i prefer the flavor. Regarding how much to use, that's a little bit up to personal preference. I think and work in formulation %'s. I'd recommend starting with a formulation that has about 4% milk fat, and adjust from there. If you'd like, you can calculate how much milk fat would be required to be paired with NFDM to achieve what's essentially a reconstituted WMP, by targeting a 'milk blend' fat of 26-28%. But that just sounds like more work to me 8-) Last year i worked on a project to teach my daughter how to make chocolate, including building a small scale factory - which she then sold the chocolate to benefit the homeless. She raised thousands and thousands of dollars - so it was very effective, and she learned alot. We focused on dark chocolate. If we do it again, I'm going to help her build a crumb oven and teach her how to make crumb based milk chocolate. Some of the basics that I'd teach her are the same as those above 8-)

No worries - glad it worked out! Upload pics of what you're making if you think of it, i always like seeing what others make!

Should you try milk chocolate again, i suggest scrapping the whole milk powder, and using skim (or NFDM) + anhydrous milk fat (AMF - you can buy it from land o lakes) instead. WMP, being 26-28.5% milk fat that is spread out all over the very large surface area of the milk solids particle - will be much, much more susceptible to oxidation (read - rancidity). Combine that with the fact that many packaged WMP bags are not nitrogen flushed (ie, exposed to oxygen), and are likely quite old by the time you buy them - that's not the best combination. NFDM (or skim, depending on where you live) - since it has no fat in it (well, about 0.7%, mas o menos...), is not susceptible to oxaditive rancidity. Because your milk fat will be stored (and added) separately, you have much better control over the storage conditions of the milk fat. Additionally, because you're adding the milk fat separately, it will actually reduce the viscosity more (even though there's the same over all quantity of fat present), because it's not 'bound' to the surfaces of the milk powder, like much of it is with WMP. Net/Net - better flavor, longer shelf life, lower viscosity. Interestingly, you'll also find that the flavor of your milk will change depending on which country you get it from (much like cocoa..). Your Polish milk will taste different than the milk that comes, from say, Parmalot in Canada.

I'd be willing to bet you a biscuit that's the problem. Key will be to get the right rate of cooling, you'll want it at about 45 F, with air flow both on above and below it. When you take it out of cooling, remember that condensation will form if your room temp is too high and RH is too high. It looks like they're using a fractionated palm oil for the structuring fat (they likely went to it to get hydrogenated off the label), but frankly those don't work the greatest - you'll have to ask them for specifics if it's still not owrking well, as fracto palm oils are frankly, a pain. Good luck!

What's the oil used in the coating? If it's fractionated palm kernel oil, the problem you're experiencing is that you're not cooling them - FPKO, on it's own, has erratic crystallization behavior. It's almost always paired with another setting, structuring fat (ie a small amount of hydrogenated pko, for example), but still requires rapid cooling. If FPKO is the oil base, melt it to 100, dip your biscotti, and get it into the fridge for 20 minutes. A general rule, however, should be that if a company's coating isn't working for you, call them and ask to speak to their technical group to help walk you through it's usage. It could also be that it's contaminated with some other type of oil - they'd need the lot number to track that however.

It can. Crucial things are: 1) mould design - some moulds and materials are far worse than others w/ regards to heat transfer (or trapping...) 2) cooling - both temperature and airflow are critical. the 'big boys' as you put it have a very good understanding of how to optimize their process conditions to be just right. 3) time - heat transfer is about materials, temperature, and time. just as colder temperatures aren't necessarily better (ie finding the right temp), there's a right time factor to identify as well 4) chocolate thickness is also quite important, especially for 3D moulds. solid moulding large objects is by far the most difficult. usually done in layers.

Sure, they've had them for years. very high margin.

Alex - what makes you say that? -Seb

1) are you using the same chocolate as you've always used, and is it in spec for fat? 2) are you using the same cream as you've always used, and is it in spec for fat and age (edited to add the shelf life component...) 3) you indicate you're crystallizing ambiently - is the temperature of the room at work similiar to the temperature of your kitchen at home? 4) are you getting a good emulsion when you mix the chocolate/cream together, or is there a possibility you're getting a 'mono-layer' of cream rising to the top as the ganache sits over time?