When dealing with chocolate, you should use a double pot. bottom pot
has water to heat up the top pot which has the chocolate. if you only
use one pot to melt, you have to use a very, very low heat. it's not
the fault of the temp probe. chocolate burns very easy, and the pot
catches the heat from a very hot flame, and conducts it too fast.

if you used an IR type sensor, you have to worry about getting false
readings off the pan and the heat waves from the side of the pan
eminating from the flame itself.

LarryLarry


On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 07:11:09 GMT, Adam Preble
wrote:


I've done this, both with a pyrometer and with thermocouples, and the
response time is negligible when you're talking about the temp. of food.
Like, seconds. I wouldn't worry about it. If you're really OC, you
could use a bare thermocouple.

Good Luck!
Rich



I might be that OC in this case. I tried to use a digital thermometer
for making fudge, and the long, metal probe couldn't get warm enough to
accurately report the temperature. I ended up burning the chocolate.
Yes, it's my fault for trying that with a digital thermometer, but when
it advertises it's good for candy, and can handle the temperatures
involved, I don't think I was so naive. This seems to be a common
problem with all the electronic thermometers. They have metal probes
that rely on conduction, which doesn't work when the metal probe cannot
heat consistently.