I had a number of thoughts today about various options in regards to getting the final chocolate smooth enough. The industrial method is to run the chocolate through a refiner that wears down the particle sizes, usually to around 20 microns. So far I have tried refining my own granulated sugar with both the Champion (which did not work appreciably) and a Vita-Mix which gave me a somewhat, but no where near fine enough, sugar and chocolate. Likewise, my test with confection sugar (ultra fine) also resulted in less than a super smooth chocolate (besides, it has cornstarch in it, and I really don't want that in my chocolate). An online search about the physical properties of various sugars lead me back to my brewing days. It was a comment that superfine sugar has cornstarch added to keep it from clumping and that my priming corn and cane sugar from homebrewing was notorious for clumping. I wonder if that grade of sugar just might be the ingredient needed for homemade chocolate, when no refiner is readily available.
I will have to try it out on some on my new Criollo and see how it goes. If anyone has some priming sugar on hand, please give it a try and let me know how it goes.
Also, I really have my doubts about it, but I did find out that fructose melts at just over 102 C. I wonder about melting the sugar and adding it to the ground cocoa straight from the Champion. Sucrose melts just too hot to try. I would not want to burn the chocolate but getting the whole mixture too hot, but I have noted that heat from the ?inside? is taken better by the chocolate than external heat. Again, worth trying.