cc.canuck
-
Posts
49 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by cc.canuck
-
-
Hi there! Thought there weren't enough threads about melters here so I should add one!
I've recently bought a melter and am playing about with it to see how I can best use it to help me keep my chocolate in a workable state for longer. I know you can use a melter to temper with the seeding method BUT would it be possible to simply melt tempered chocolate up to 31° while stirring like you would using the microwave method? Hope that makes sense!
-
On 11/20/2021 at 12:28 PM, Kerry Beal said:
Just push the fondant in there
This is the answer I was hoping for! Looking forward to giving it a go. Thanks for the help.
-
I'd like to make Greweling's mint fondant recipe as a moulded chocolate. Has anyone had any experience doing something like this? His and similar recipes for fondant w/invertase have you form the fondants and then dip them in chocolate but I want them to go into a a particular bonbon mould that I have. Thanks for any advice!
-
I am a big fan of Greweling's soft caramel recipe using condensed milk but don't get on with the evaporated milk recipe. I'd like to make coffee caramels using the condensed milk recipe but am wondering if infusing condensed milk with ground coffee and then staining the coffee out will work? I'm imagining it would be a very sticky and difficult process! Anyone done this before?
-
Hi there. I am considering buying a Mini Meltinchoc to help with some issues I'm having with my process but wanted to get some opinions on it first. I've heard the temperature is inaccurate but that's pretty much it.
What I would be using it for is dipping biscuits and caramels. I'm finding that my chocolate is becoming over tempered during the dipping process (quicker with caramels than biscuits because the former have been cooled before dipping) and my attempts to keep it at the correct temperature using a microwave have not been particularly successful. Would the mini meltinchoc help with this issue and make my workflow easier? I'd ideally like to be able to dip at least 40 biscuits or caramels in a session.
Thanks for any advice!
-
I have just done a trial run of posting some of the chocolate biscuits I am planning on selling to myself. Each biscuit was in its own tight-fitting sealed bag and the postal box they were in was padded out with shredded paper.
Overall the trial was a success as the biscuits do not seem to have moved around too much. However, I spray (as in flick from a toothbrush not with a spray gun) the biscuits with coloured cocoa butter and there was a transfer of this onto the inside of the bags. Not so much that the look of the biscuits themselves was diminished but enough that the end product wasn't particularly professional looking.
I am wondering if at least part of the issue is that I am using biodegradable bags rather than plastic. I am going to do another trial with foil wrapping the biscuits but am interested to hear if anyone else has had any similar experiences with cocoa butter coming off on their packaging. Sorry this post was so long 😂
-
Nothing helpful to contribute here. I just wanted to congratulate you on your incredibly compelling topic title.
-
1
-
-
I've treated myself to one of these after admitting my caramel cutting is not quite as perfect as I'd imagined! Kerry, is it easy to add a layer of chocolate on top of your caramel to help with dipping with this contraption would you say?
-
I haven't been heating my bar moulds and they have been releasing relatively fine. I tend to always have release marks but think I need to just accept that they will always happen for me
-
14 hours ago, pastrygirl said:
Yes, lots of different skills to gain. Have you sorted out your packaging, labeling, pricing ... ?
Now that the actual products are sorted those are my summer jobs! The bars will probably go into tight fitting bags, dipped items like toffee and caramels in loose bags (though a bit concerned about marking during transport with that), and then biscuits will have to be a box though I'm not yet sure what's going to go in with them to keep them from moving around and marking each other. Even though I'll be using biodegradable bags I don't particularly want to individually wrap all of the biscuits (planning on selling boxes of 6 and 12).
-
1
-
-
On 6/21/2021 at 7:06 AM, pastrygirl said:
Yes. Toffee and nuts can last up to a year especially if fully encased in the chocolate bar (not just sprinkled on the back & exposed to air) depending on freshness of the ingredients and how they are stored. But nuts and butter fat can go rancid so of course you don't want to get too far ahead and you still want a few months left on them when you sell them. Obviously you're not going to make each bar to order, you need to figure out a good batch size or par number, which will of course grow with the business. Maybe when you're just starting out you need to keep 20 of everything in stock but after a few years as you do holiday events and pick up wholesale accounts you'll want to keep 100 or 200 per item. And it'll take time to see what the best sellers are, they are not always what you think they will be.
Are you hoping to turn this into a full-time business and make a living or keep it as a (more fun than profit-focused) hobby? Do you have experience in sales or marketing? To me, that's the hardest part - chocolatiering and marketing skills do not necessarily overlap 😆
I'm a stay at home mum to a toddler (and part-time CrossFit trainer - odd combo with chocolate making I know but it's a good balance health-wise!) at the moment so my grand plan is part-time for now to build up my skills and experience and then hopefully increase to something more substantial. I want to offer chocolate bars (in trios), dipped caramels, and dipped biscuits and my thinking to start is to have rotating stock each month to help make production more manageable.
I feel like I'll be fine with the marketing side of things and am more worried about the logistics of production. Certainly a lot of different skills to gain through this! Very grateful to have this forum as a resource.
-
1
-
-
Picking this thread back up as I've finally been organised (and restrained) enough to make, dip, store, and test some caramels to see how they fare over time. The idea was to test at 4 weeks, 6 weeks, etc but by 4 weeks the caramels had already crystallised. Any idea what could have gone wrong there? I made the caramels, cut them the next day, and then dipped them the day after that, which I'm sure wasn't ideal.
-
On 6/18/2021 at 4:45 PM, pastrygirl said:
I keep inventory so I can fulfill orders as quickly as possible. Sharing a hometown with Amazon.com, I've come to expect my purchases to be shipped within a day and I try to do the same for my customers.
Most bars will keep for a year, so might as well have a few months' supply. Bonbons are more of a conundrum that I'm solving by freezing, which is fine for shipping, just move the box to the fridge and ship the next day or keep it frozen with an insulated bag and ice pack if shipping to warmer areas.
That makes sense! I'm looking to do bars with inclusions (fruit and nuts, biscuits, toffee) so their shelf-life won't be quite that long but I guess the longer a shelf-life you can achieve the more wiggle room you have.
-
On 6/18/2021 at 3:46 PM, Jim D. said:
I do it both ways, mostly the first. I send out an email to those on my list to announce the ready date of the next batch. I state a deadline about two weeks before that date (which is how long the process takes) and provide an online order form. I mostly adhere to the cutoff date and so know how many pieces I MUST make. But experience has taught that people will forget deadlines, encounter last-minute needs for boxes of chocolates, etc., so I now make lots of extras. If those are not claimed soon after the pickup date, I freeze them for "between-batch" emergencies. So far no boxes have gone unclaimed, eventually. I also have two wholesale accounts and can always use extras for those.
For the batch I am currently working on, I have not sent out a notice because I am committed to two events that must take precedence, and customers have somewhat lower expectations because of the very warm weather. But I am making enough extras so that I will be able to provide some boxes. When everything is done, I will send out a notice and then take orders until everything is gone. But the first method is what I normally do. It works well for me since I make the chocolates in my home kitchen and cannot turn it over constantly to bonbon production--batches must be finite and cannot be gigantic. I have reluctantly turned down two newspaper interviews simply because I know I cannot fulfill many more orders. I would love to have a shop in the flourishing downtown where I would have a gorgeous glass case with a constant display of many different bonbons, but that would require more employees and much money, and is, alas, for another life.
Thank you that's very useful!
-
I'm in the very early days of selling chocolate products online and am trying to figure out what should come first - the orders or the products? Do you wait for orders to come in and then make enough bars, bonbons, dipped caramels, etc to fulfill them or do you make a set number of all of your products and then accept orders until you run out and then restock?
Apologies if that's an incredibly silly question. Like I said - early days!
-
I live in the UK at the moment so this is more of a general interest query than a pressing concern but how hot would it have to be in your kitchen for you to throw your hands up and say chocolate work is not going to work? I've noticed a few posters from hot countries here.
-
22 hours ago, Kerry Beal said:
Find me here - it's a free 4 day pass where you can watch all the demos. I demo tempering dark and milk on a slab, by seeding and of course with the EZtemper. I also do a demo on tempering Ruby by the same 3 methods. You'll be able to see the bowl I use.
I prefer plastic these days - glass really hangs on to the heat.
I tend not to use cold water or ice under the bowl anymore.
Brilliant, thank you for that 😁
-
On 6/7/2021 at 1:59 AM, Kerry Beal said:
I'd say 20 minutes or so.
It takes me so much longer than this - I'm wondering if that's a part of my results being so hit and miss. What kind of bowl are you using and are you placing it on top of a bowl filled with ice to cool it down? I'm using glass and just sitting it onto a cloth.
-
I keep making new threads for my troubleshooting but will just pop my many many problems on here even though I'm doing bars not bonbons.
I've had a couple inclusion bars give me this result where there are beads of liquid on the surface after unmoulding. This bar is filled with biscuit pieces and was left to cool at room temperature for 15 minutes, put in the fridge for another 15, and then left overnight to finish up. A previous bar had apricot in it and was put back in the fridge after it had already started releasing, both of which I had assumed were the reason for the liquid, but none of that is applicable to this bar.
As a side not for reasons I absolutely do not understand the temper didn't work here so they didn't release particularly well and are a bit swirly (chocolate failures are going to be the death of me).
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. I feel my results are just so darn inconsistent at the moment...
-
On 5/27/2021 at 4:26 PM, Anthony C said:
I think we can see just from this small thread that everyone has a different method of cleaning or not cleaning their molds 😆 I guess the thing is to find something that works for you, gives good results and doesn't give you too much stress 👍
Yes absolutely! I'm washing my moulds less frequently and simply giving them a good old polish in between uses, which has definitely helped. It's such a joyful thing checking in on bars and seeing that they have completely released. Very satisfying.
-
5
-
-
Just posting to say that a wire rack had made all the difference to my bars releasing! Thank you for the tips.
-
3
-
-
On 10/30/2017 at 4:38 PM, Daniel D said:
How thick are your bars? They look pretty thick in these pictures. The thicker the bar the more difficult it is to get a perfect temper.
Does your new fridge have wire shelving or solid shelving (eg glass shelves)? If your shelves are solid, the heat may not have a place to escape.
Also, do you have any air circulation in your refrigerator? I’d attempt to add a fan to see if increased air circulation helps.
Reviving this thread as I'm also trying to refine my process with moulded bars. I am going to start putting my moulds on a wire rack when I put them in the fridge but, if this doesn't completely solve the issue of release marks that I have, would it be worth popping a tiny handheld fan in there with them?
Gosh, my husband is definitely going to be driven crazy by my adventures in chocolate making!
-
25 minutes ago, Anthony C said:
Hi there,
From my experience I don't think not heating the molds would be a big issue. I don't heat any of my molds, they are at 21/22 degrees C (the temperature of my workshop) before filling and I normally don't have any issues. My workshop is also humidity controlled (less than 60%)
The cleaning/polishing of molds is something that drives me crazy. I clean after each use as you do. Finally settled on a process of washing the molds in hot water then dry straight away to avoid any salts from the water getting left on the mold. I then polish before use. I used to have loads of issues with coloured cocoa butters getting left on the molds, and still get the occasional one or two bonbons that stick a bit and lose a bit of colour, but never had the sticking chocolate issue that you have there either with bonbons or tablets. Clean molds and well tempered chocolate should result in a clean release I'd have thought.
Good luck!
Do you dry using a hair dryer or similar? I'm going to start doing that as I had previously been leaving them to air dry
-
New release issues now but thought I'd open this back up rather than starting a new thread.
A couple of my white chocolate bars have sections like this where bits of chocolate got stuck and I'm really at a loss as to why. I've stopped heating up my moulds because I now have the strip of cocoa butter. I also wonder if I need to refine my cleaning process, or maybe stop cleaning so often (normally after every use).
Microwave tempering method using a melter
in Pastry & Baking
Posted
Just had a disastrous attempt at tempering with it using the seeding method. My initial hope was that I could temper chocolate, dump it in the melter, and it would stay at a useable state long enough for me to get done all the things I need to get done. Really unsure how to incorporate it now...