Using the confectionery coating pan

[pastrygirl]

Does anyone have experience using a confectionery coating pan? I got one from D&R over the summer, and have only had a few chances to play with it.

When coating nuts with chocolate, how much chocolate is typically left on the pan? Last week I coated some hazelnuts, and about 1/3 of the chocolate that I used was left on the inside of the pan. Seems like a lot of waste.

How much chocolate do you add at a time? Are more smaller additions better than fewer larger ones?

Do you aim for a particular chocolate:nut ratio?

Any tips for less spherical items like cashews?

What do you use to cool the nuts as they are tumbling? I tried some cold spray, which seemed to help. Unfortunately I followed the cold spray with a hit of the propane torch to the outside to try to melt some of the chocolate on the pan, and managed to create a small fire ball, so I won't be doing that again! :0 Do you use a hair dryer to heat as needed, or something else?

[Alleguede]

Unfortunately I have little experience on this subject and plan on improving my knowledge very soon. The way I saw the selmi machine works, is that it sends little chocolate in on a very frequent stages as well as cold air. There was a lot of left over chocolate on the tumbler, That had originaly surprised me. But the smart man that showed me this would have someone scrap off that chocolate for further use.

Of memory, the chocolate was untempered and the ratio was 2 for nuts and 1 chocolate, if I recall.

[Kerry Beal]

There's a demo on here somewhere that I did with my coating pan - let me see if I can find it.

Here you go. I used dry ice to cool. You really do need a source of cool air or everything sticks together.

I have purchased a little freestanding AC unit that one day I'll get around to getting hubby to hook up to blow cold air for panning and warm for polishing.

I laughed out loud over the fire ball - thought I was the only one who did things like that!

Edited November 18, 2013 by Kerry Beal (log)

[Alleguede]

New panning machine available from chocolate world won't say the price but it looks very cool...

[Kerry Beal]

New panning machine available from chocolate world won't say the price but it looks very cool...

This one?

[Alleguede]

http://chocolateworld.be/pdfs/CWequipment.pdf

Page 10

[pastrygirl]

New panning machine available from chocolate world won't say the price but it looks very cool...

Oooh, looks very cool! One more thing for the wish list, once I get the technique down.

Do you take the extra step of candying nuts before coating? I like the effect but not the labor. When I start selling these, they will either be really expensive or not very profitable, or both

Edited November 18, 2013 by pastrygirl (log)

[pastrygirl]

There's a demo on here somewhere that I did with my coating pan - let me see if I can find it.

Here you go. I used dry ice to cool. You really do need a source of cool air or everything sticks together.

I have purchased a little freestanding AC unit that one day I'll get around to getting hubby to hook up to blow cold air for panning and warm for polishing.

I laughed out loud over the fire ball - thought I was the only one who did things like that!

Thanks for the link. I was looking for a panning thread, don't know why I didn't find it. Maybe the mods will want to merge.

Some good info in your demo. I was using tempered chocolate on room temp nuts and adding a fair amount of chocolate at a time - doing it all wrong! Will keep practicing.

[Edward J]

I use the D+R panning ball about twice a month, chocolate coated hazelnuts is the name of the game.

At first, I used a gum arabic sealer, but I stopped that about two years ago. If you use dark chocolate, it will bloom very quickly (even under ideal storage conditions) on account of the nut oil. Sealer will help, but the best things to use is milk chocolate, which won't bloom. So I stopped using dark chocolate and only use milk chocolate.

"About 1/3" chocolate sticking to the walls of the pan sounds a bit extreme. Usually I have a "crust" of about 1/2" thick that I remove with a heat gun and scraper when I finish a batch, which is a maximum of 1200 gr of whole roasted hazels.

This is what I do:

-I have a cheap portable airconditioner that I fitted with a "mask", and onto this mask I have attatched a length of 4" dryer hose, with this contraption I can direct airflow into the pan.

-I have a $10.00 electric heating pad underneath my bowl of milk chocolate. Don't know how warm it is, somewhere around 35-ish, never took a temp.

-Start it up, ladle in some choc, and immediately throw in a handfull of cocoa powder. This helps build the first crust around the nut and helps subsequent layers of chocolate to stick.

-Ladle and blow untill you get the size you want.(no cocoa pwdr anymore) If you add too much choc. in the pan, you will get a "pebbly" effect and a lot more choc will stick to the sides of the pan. Frequent thin coats are best

-I dump out the nuts when they get to the size I want, take a heat gun and plastic scraper to the pan, toss the crust back into my melting bowl, and do two or three more batches.

-I fill the cleaned pan with coated nuts, ladle in a half ladle of choc and throw in as much cocoa powder as the pan will take, when done, dump out into a deep full size hotel pan and repeat with the unpowdered nuts.

-Then I sift the nuts* into another deep hotel pan, where they can be bagged, and I reclaim all the excess cocoa powder from the first pan.

*I use a very coarse riddle or sieve used by gardeners to sieve dirt. The sieve is all s/s as are the mesh plates, I bought this at Lee Valley, and use the seive to sift off the roasted papery hazlenut skins as well.

[lebowits]

I've seen people use a "gun style" blow dryer to move unheated air into the pan while it's tumbling. If you need heat, you can turn on the heating elements in the gun. There are a number of flexible stands for these types of appliances which can be used to position the it as a free standing object.

[Kerry Beal]

Art and Wilma at Chocolate FX have some PVC tubing built into little stands that hang on nicely to the hair dryer for that stage of the process.

[pastrygirl]

I'm happy to report my last batches of coated nuts turned out much rounder and smoother than the last. I'm not entirely sure what I did differently, maybe just let them tumble longer. The nuts were cold, the chocolate was mid 90s. One of the batches used warmer chocolate and a few pieces of dry ice.

Fascinating how chocolate doesn't stick to dry ice. Can anyone explain how/why the dry ice bits repel chocolate and don't get coated?

[Kerry Beal]

I think it has something to do with the sublimation of the solid carbon dioxide back to gas on the surface of the dry ice which prevents the chocolate from sticking.  But then again - I might be totally wrong!