Tempering solutions for 20 lbs a day

I use a Sous Vide to make silk all the time. Works like a dream.

@Choklat This is the process I am using right now. “holding temperature at 93 degrees for the night. Come in the next morning and you have a whole machine full of silk.”

Thanks all. My beef with “silk” is that you have to make the silk ahead of time, and that’s usually an overnight process. What happens if you don’t know how to temper chocolate and you don’t have any????

Further to that, it only takes a few minutes more to run the chocolate through the tempering curve, than it does to melt the silk into your working chocolate and propagate crystals.

Take 20lbs of chocolate for example:
Heat the chocolate to 120 to decrystalize it (same as using silk)
Cool the chocolate to 88-90 degrees (same as using silk)
Take 5 lbs of the mass and cool it in a water bath to the point where it becomes thick and sludgy. (5 min)
Mix that chocolate back in to your working mass and stir it until fully melted.

Essentially what you’ve done here is create your own “instant silk” (oldschool term called seeding) with your own chocolate and at the same time saved $900 for a machine.

Another option is to buy a tempering machine and fill it with decrystalized cocoa butter, turn the motor off, and set the holding temperature at 93 degrees for the night. Come in the next morning and you have a whole machine full of silk.

Send me $100 and some chocolate. You’ll be $800 richer and we’ll call it even!

Haha!

@cacaonewbie – Here’s a link to one: http://www.eztemper.com/

@DiscoverChoc Could you provide link to some machine you describe here? “There is no reason tempering with silk should take a long time. There are machines designed specifically to do this that cost under $1000.”

@Choklat Thanks for sharing the video – will take a look right away.

@cacaonewbie –

There is no reason tempering with silk should take a long time. There are machines designed specifically to do this that cost under $1000. You do need to mix this in by hand but that should not take more than a minute or two.

Brad @Choklat is right that you should learn to temper by hand. Knowing what temper looks and feels like is necessary to know if your machine is tempering properly! The technique Brad shows works and is easy to master.

Just to be clear, if you are looking for a machine that costs no more than US$2000 you are looking for a batch tempering machine. Something in the ~5kg range should work for you. Much smaller and you will waste a lot of time waiting for the machine to temper. Much larger and you will blow past your budget. Look forward to an announcement soon in the under US$2000 batch tempering machine.

FBM makes a 10kg batch tempering machine, the Quadro 10, that costs between €5000-6000. One reason it is this expensive is that it uses a refrigeration compressor for cooling instead of relying on the ambient air temperature. The compressor means that it works faster and more consistently than one using ambient air for cooling. But they are more expensive and require 220V to work.

I have said this many times and I’ll say it again: Learn to temper chocolate properly. Spend 29 minutes of your life watching this video, then throw the silk in the garbage. Tempering 20lbs of chocolate in a commercial kitchen is about an hour’s worth of work. https://www.facebook.com/SoChoklat/videos/1132903850118884/