Hilliard 6" Coater is in the house

The Beast!

Well, normally what we do is hand dip our caramels and other products. But using a 10 lb Chocovision machine while cool, just isn't big enough for our growing chocolate business and it is very slow dipping caramels. I wont even mention tempering.

Chocovision and hand dipping. Ouch.

The Hilliard not only has a 35 lb bowl but one can push about 240 lbs through the Hilliard especially if you have liquid untempered chocolate. Even without additional untempered chocolate, I find that I can coat my caramels, not to mention ganaches, all day long without having to retemper.

The Chocovision Rev X, the most I ever pushed through was about 60 lbs. I can load about 10 lbs into the Rev X, I can get about 20 lbs into my melter, at most 25. And, when dipping, I can do so for about 1 hour before I have to retemper. When I am filling molds, I can fill about 7 lbs worth of chocolate into the Rev X before I have to replenish from my melter, a messy job, and add a little seed. Usually I have to reset and retemper 2 to 3 times a day which is a pain.

With the Hilliard, I can recharge it with either solid chocolate or a combination of solid chocolate and my 20 lbs from the melter. So, I can easily push 150-200 lbs, maybe 240 before I have to call it quits and reset and retemper. But even when I do that, it is fast. I found that with a little skill and understanding of the Hilliard, I can get 2-4 hours of enrobing before I either have to add untempered chocolate to the mix or retemper it because it's gotten too thick and I've gotten dangerously hot. 

The manual says that as long as I am increasing the temp, I am fine. I have my doubts. When I'm not enrobing, I turn the pump off. This helps extend the life of the chocolate. Now, all I need is a 50 lb Savage Brothers Melter/Cooker and I will easily be able to push 240 lbs or maybe more through this system. Now you have to do your part and order chocolate so I can see how many lbs a day I can do. ;-)

By the way, enrobing is 3-5 times faster than hand dipping and they come out better. I find that for my caramels, I do need a foot. It makes it so much easier.

Nancy waiting for machine to temper before doing more Santas. Sure this is posed because no one just sits around in my kitchen.

So, after a little trial and error, about 1/2 hours worth and about 15 messed up caramels, we got the hang of it. Since I have only one arm that I can use right now, I fed the caramels into the enrober and Nancy took them off. We had several tricks to making sure that everything got covered, including enrobing by hand and using a ladle.

Are we jammed in or what? Not that bad. Snug rather than tight.