Ok - experiments done - my whole chocolate room is now covered in little electrostatically charged cocoa butter shavings! I found a bunch on my elbows when I got back upstairs.
Melted 1 kg of chocolate - had it at 33.5 C. Dipped the first offset for untempered - it finally dried in about 45 minutes. Earlier in the day I had melted some cocoa butter, put a sample in the fridge, some at room temperature. I also took some EZtemper silk - molded it. Each of these 3 solid cocoa butters were then microplaned (hence the cocoa butter covered room) and 2.5 grams of each were put aside.
To 250 grams of 33.5 degree chocolate I added one of the shaved cocoa butters or the soft EZtemper silk. The shaved cocoa butter certainly mixed in better than mycryo - not sure if that would be true if it weren't freshly shaved.
From the left - untempered, cocoa butter placed in fridge from melted, cocoa butter room temperature until solid, grated silk, soft silk and finally all the samples mixed back together and another few grams of soft silk added.
Untempered - clearly not good, fridge cocoa butter - not good, room temperature cocoa butter - better but marked with finger and somewhat streaky and gritty to the touch - indicating poor temper, grated silk - certainly better than the previous 3 but not quite as good as the soft silk as indicated by a slight graininess felt when I ran my finger along it. The two on the right were smooth and velvety to the touch.
So in a pinch - if you have made silk that has returned to room temperature and have it available to grate - you can probably get reasonable results. Hell of a lot easier to incorporate than Mycyro for sure. But beware the flying cocoa butter flakes!
