Hacker News Reader

Comment by hwayne | Hacker News Reader

I've done this! You can also cut a small square of diffraction grating and put it on top of a hardening chocolate candy (like an enrobed square of ganache) to make decorate a completed chocolate: http://whoisgood.dog/img/chocolate-diffraction-picture.jpg

Also tip: easiest way to temper a pot of chocolate is with an electric hand-mixer. Wait until it's 32C, mix for fifteen seconds, bam tempered.

View on HN

I found the easiest way was vacuum sealing some chocolate and sticking it in a souvee at 92f overnight. Agitate a bit after it's melted and a while before removing it from the warm water. I use the method for making tempered cocoa butter to use as seed in my tempering machine. The exact temperature varies by type of chocolate. The trick is getting it just below the point that type 5 crystals form. It's perfect to make seed chocolate for when I use the tempering machine, saves a lot of time and there's the convenience of having a big pool of chocolate for molding, it's better to have a bigger pool than you need so that when you pour out molds you can do it directly into the working pool.

It's pretty easy to put the chocolate into a tempering machine, push a button, then walk away, too.

It's pretty easy to just order the chocolate and just doing nothing yourself...

You do understand that a trick is something different than buying a machine for the job right?

You can't buy tempered, melted chocolate easily. If you want to cast it into a mold, you must melt and temper it or melt it very carefully.

... Using a hand blender is using a machine for a job too, isn't it?

GP's point is that responding to an aside about how to do something with a snarky "or you could just buy a dedicated machine" will come across as obnoxious. This should be obvious to you or anyone.

What's obnoxious is someone claiming they have found the easiest way but then refusing to accept an easier way.

It's using machine for the job, which is different than buying a machine for the job.

A hand mixer is cheap and has endless uses. A chocolate tempering machine has a single purpose. Makes sense to get one if you're making chocolate in large quantities.

A tempering machine costs hundreds of dollars and wouldn't fit in my apartment kitchen. The hand mixer was ten dollars and fits in my drawer.

Also, this is advice to anyone who wants to try it for themselves. Isn't "buy a hand mixer and some diffraction film" an easier onramp than "buy a whole tempering machine?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com