Hey all. I've been gone from this community for a few years now. We went thru a name change and now I'm back! So we make a lot of hot chocolate &

reply toIt depends on the format of the chocolate that is going to be processed. I would experiment to determine what works best for you. I often recommend to people that they pour their chocolate (tempered or untempered) onto sheet pans in thin sheets and then break these up for various applications. In this case, I think the regular cutting blades (s-shaped) may be a better choice over the shredder. I don’t find it necessary to chop the chocolate – stack a bunch of trays then put an empty one on top and drop on a counter a couple of times until the pieces are small enough to work with.

Curious if folks generally use the S blade or the shredder when it comes to drinking chocolate? and is there a better way to load the machines? I have been pouring the chocolate onto trays into thinner sheets and then chopping that into pieces that will fit in the processor.

reply toIn a fun bit of history, Robot Coupe built the first generations of Cuisinart food processors. It soon became apparent they lasted too long and so Cuisinart took manufacturing elsewhere and made something more suited to the home chef rather than a commercial machine for the home kitchen. You may have one of those early machines. Nonethless, you are wise to not to try to wreck it.

Robot Coupe machines are the workhorse of many kitchens and they can be used for this purpose. You will probably want to use a shredding blade and a feed tube and get a variable-speed device so that you can select the speed that works best for your situation and the shredding blade will determine the size of the pieces. This is going to be the least expensive way to get into production, and maybe the fastest as some machines will be shipped from overseas and others may not be in stock. Robot Coupe machines are also available from online retailers such as Web Restaurant Store – often at significant discounts.

Can anyone recommend the Robot coupe brand? I would of course prefer to purchase a machine that will last and I can’t trust anything made in the last while when it comes to appliances. Are there certain brands to look for? I have a Cuisinart processor from the 80’s that still works amazing but I don’t want to wreck it chopping chocolate. But I imagine there recent motors would never last that long.

reply toFreezing chocolate is a good option. Also – look into seeing if you can change the speed of the grating drum using a variable frequency drive. The slower the drum the less heat is generated.

Great information from both of you. I think I’ll keep working with the cheese grater I have and my commercial food processor with the shredder blade. not perfect but maybe good enough. Would be great to find a used Robot Coupe vertical cutter mixer or chocolate shaver 🙂 Thanks for taking the time to answer!

We have used tempered and also untempered chocolate. Both have pro’s and cons that we’ve found. And thanks I will check out Robot Coupe. I bought a commercial cheese grater. It did a great job at first. We stopped when it started melting and came back the next day. It melted right away the next day probably due to the thin layer of melted chocolate on the grating drum. There is no way to take drum off and completely wash it. We will try again…another chocolate maker said they freeze their chocolate first so we will try that next.

Do you temper your chocolate? If so – why? Untempered chocolate is a lot easier to work with (grind/grate) than tempered chocolate for this application. Companies like Robot Coupe make vegetable graters that can be used at very low speed (don’t want the chocolate to melt), or commercial cheese graters.

This question has come up many times on the various chocolate forums over the past several years. Generally, people just chop the chocolate in a food processor or vertical cutter mixer. This produces a granular chocolate that melts pretty easily.

Another option is a chocolate shaving machine. This is what I’d like to upgrade to at some point. I’ve seen them from Prefemac (over $4k) as well as some knock offs available on Ebay and Alibaba that ($800-$1500).