1 hour ago, Kerry Beal said:By grinding they will be come smaller and smaller crystals - I'm going to paste something from Beckett - The Science of Chocolate here which discusses amorphous sugar. Electron microphotographs show sugar is amorphous in chocolate (properly made chocolate I'd argue). So I wonder what would happen if we dissolved these sugar alcohols, then freeze dried them before adding to the cocoa mass. Although if a melanger is too dear and takes up too much counter space then a freeze dryer might not be much better!
This is all fascinating stuff, but it doesn't explain how sugar becomes amorphous in chocolate. A smaller and smaller crystal is still just a crystal. What's causing the sugar to glass? The heat? The trace amount of water in the chocolate? The electron microscope doesn't lie, so if it's saying the sugar is amorphous, it's amorphous. This may be one of those 'not fully understood' areas, but it would be really nice to know, since whatever it is that causes sugar to glass, might be helpful in getting erythritol to glass as well, although keeping erythritol amorphous, as I said, is exponentially more difficult.
Freeze drying definitely sounds intriguing. But, yes, the equipment may not be practical here.
Come to think of it, I have made inulin caramels where I added the cream too quickly to the caramelized inulin, and I ended up with a thin hard layer of inulin on the base of the pan that took a very long time to dissolve. If you took this and poured it on a silpat like brittle, Inulin is most likely too hygroscopic to be ground, but perhaps this 'brittle' might be pulverized and then melanged. I'm not sure I'd put this in a blender or a melanger I'd value, though, since inulin in this cohesed, concentrated form is going to be far harder than sugar. I've had old chunks of conglomerated polydrextrose (a close cousin to inulin) that were very stressful to the hammer that I was using to break them down into smaller pieces.
