at Wed, 15 Dec 2004 21:07:38 GMT in <heimdall-7B3DE7.16073815122004
@individual.net>, lid (Scott) wrote :

>I saw this "chocolate melter" in Chef's Catalog. Worthless?
....
>I'm guessing this doesn't actually temper chocolate.

Worthless? Definitely. But the main reason why isn't a lack of tempering
capability. Regardless of whether it can temper or not, the capacity is
minuscule, far, far too small to do anything useful with. Consider that
when you're tempering chocolate, you're usually using it to coat something
- generally something big or a lot of little somethings. For that you need
reasonable capacity. I consider the small Revolation machines the minimum
for any real work. This machine is far, far smaller than either of these.
Keep in mind also with tempered chocolate that the more chocolate in the
machine, the more even the temper, and the slower it loses temper.

If you're dipping things, e.g. for fondue, you want at least enough volume
to be able to dip a couple of items in there at once without swamping the
machine. Even filled, this machine would have trouble with a large
strawberry - so again, it pretty much rules out any actual usage.

Finally, be realistic about tempering in the first place. Unless you do a
large amount of work with chocolates (especially coating), a temperer is a
machine that's going to sit in a corner gathering dust. You're not going to
go to the effort and time to drag it out and use it, except, perhaps, for
special occasions. Thus even a better model would be, for all practical
purposes, a useless purchase. For the few occasions when you do want to
temper chocolate, the marble-slab-and-palette-knife method will be more
than good enough.


--
Alex Rast

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