Just before Christmas I finally purchased a Tricor temper meter so I could get some more evidence about the quality of temper that the silk is able to produce.
I'm learning about temper curves - apparently a negative slope means over tempered, a positive slope is under tempered. The big question yet to be answered is what sort of distance away from zero means what. I'm dipping an offset in each sample at the same time I add the sample to the temper meter to determine the quality of temper the old fashioned way.
I wrote a nice long post about it last night - then my screen shut down and all was lost!
What I hope to test is the quality of temper with silk of different textures; comparing adding 0.5% silk to 1% silk; where the temper is at after 1 minute, after around 7 minutes (each temper test takes 5 minutes so can't test too quickly); the differences if I heat the chocolate to 40C or so and cool before seeding,vs just heating above 33.5 and seeding; adding silk to chocolate that is at 33.5 vs 34.5 C - and at lower temperatures as well.
I have some organic, fair trade (keep wanting to call it free trade) chocolate that I purchased a few years back. Anna and I were helping the 'organic girls' to make some evil herb filled chocolates to help with 'female troubles'. I don't think that the product ever came to market - but I ended up with a case of milk, dark and cocoa mass of some rather nice swiss chocolate. The milk went the way of all flesh but the dark and the cocoa mass are still fine.
I was approached by one of the docs in Dunnville where I work in the ER - he runs a cafe called The Minga which sells politically correct plant based, locally sourced, organic food - asking if I wanted to sell chocolate there. Great opportunity to get this chocolate used up.
So my first experiments have involved this chocolate - it does not contain lecithin - just organic cane sugar and some extra cocoa butter for flow. It's not difficult to work with.
So 1% silk applied to chocolate that was only heated to 37C and seeded at 33.5C gave me a slope of +0.35 at 1 minute and +1.06 at about 7 minutes. The same chocolate heated to 40C and seeded at 33.4C gave slopes of +0.67 and +1.06. Both manual tests showed good temper.
0.5% silk, chocolate heated to 39C and seeded at 33.4C - slope was +1.28 and +1.71 - manual temper was only fair.
Milk chocolate heated to 38, seeded at 33.6 - slope +2.15 and +2.08 - manual tests both looked great.
