Saltychoc

@Jim D. Not to get political but considering some photos from yesterday - I'm not sure how committed any of them are to actual "healthy" food. Very worried about the already rising price of chocolate though. The blue cholula from chef rubber's natural line is very very pretty. Unfortunately, it's so light and looks much better backed with titanium white. I would also be interested to know what natural lines people have used and liked. I do a farmers market and get a number of people asking for no artificial colors. I do think New York and CA banned or has an upcoming ban for a few colorants so we may see an increase in natural colors. I have read/heard good things about Bold Cocoa butter out of the Netherlands. They are titanium free but I think use regular "fake" color formulations beyond that. Unfortunately, they still do not ship to the states, though I have asked a few time and the answer is always "we're working on it".

Prices are way up and this is great reminder to order. Pike global foods has Cacao Barry for $99/6.6lbs which comes out to $15/lb. With shipping to my area it comes to 112.50 so 17.12/lb. It was $72 at the beginning of the year. Too bad. You must have a commercial account with them to get these prices, the form is on their website and they respond quickly on weekdays. https://www.pikeglobalfoods.com/cacao-products/

So here's an quandary. I input a blackberry ganache recipe into the calculator and it gives me a significantly different water percentage than my own calculations/spreadsheet. Additionally - as there is not an option for reduced fruit purees I used the boiron blackberry puree option even though I reduce it by half. Spreadsheet: 20.28% water, 31.66% fat, 32.92% sugar. Web page: 17.73% water, 30.52% fat, 35.19% sugar. The fat is not surprising as I use 83% fat butter and 40% fat cream and there is not an option for fat %. My spreadsheet does account for the sugar content of the blackberry puree which is higher in the reduced puree. I'm mainly perplexed by the lower water % in the calculator when my spreadsheet is accounting for 20% of the water being removed from the puree. Recipe is basically (and yes - it splits easily): 240g various sugars 200g butter 1340g various chocolates 540g blackberry reduced from 1kg When I put those numbers in (using callebaut 811 as the chocolate and glucose 45 as the sugar) then I get an aw of 0 and close to the predicted water % at 21.13%. Another note - the white miso option has an aw of .71 with 12.1% salt while the miso I use is .88 with 5.3% salt. The calculator does work for many of my more basic recipes but an option to change certain product aspects to match with local products and reduced purees would be helpful.

https://www.100x100chef.com/en/product-chef/725-3307/liquid-silicone-for-professional-mold-making This may be the product.

So - I've been on all of the regular sites and can't seem to find what I'm looking for. This box from papermart is pretty close but it's still too small. It would only hold around 30pc. I'm looking for a one layer box that would hold 48 or more pieces. If that box was at least 8x8" I could make do. I am going to order custom boxes in this larger size...eventually but now is not that time. Has anyone seen anything around? I don't mind if it doesn't have a matching candy tray, I'm happy to use cups inside the box, in fact I probably will either way. - Fits at least 40-50 bonbons, think 2295 size so probably minimum 8"x8"/20cmx20cm - Ideally black, silver, navy blue. Kraft, light blue, gold, brown if need be. - two piece rigid or magnet open/close if they are a reasonable price - One layer - I have the two layer 32pc mod-pac boxes to fulfill wholesale orders but the inside "isn't nice enough" for this customer Seriously thank you to anyone that has seen something around! I'll also take recs for websites to look at beyond the usual culprits!

I didn't even think of that. I haven't heard it called that around here but this area doesn't have a big home brewing culture. You can't do it with cider or wine but you can with beer at least in the US. But you can't keep freezing and freezing forever, it's only supposed to remove a certain amount of water. My freezer is only set to -10f/-23c anyway. That said the ipa is ridiculously bitter with more of the water removed so I'm trying a couple of other methods. I tried a water ganache with the ipa and didn't love the end result but I'm going to switch to honey as the sweetener and add some more malt and I think that might solve some issues.. or just boil down and do caramel.

@Kerry Beal Jacking?

I'm working on a beer ganache for local brewery events. I'm using two beers - a 7% ipa with citrus and malt notes and a ~5% lemon/blueberry sour. Currently I'm experimenting with decanting and freezing the beer and then thawing it in a funnel over a deli container - much like you would citrus juice. I've been able to remove some of the water content. Planning to boil and reduce the ipa and use either as part of a caramel or with jivara for a malted flavor profile. Reduce the blueberry/lemon a bit further via boiling and then do a white chocolate cream. Probably just a 2 week shelf life.

I would consider reaching out to your local SBDC or university extension program. They're likely to have the information you are looking for on hand and will help you for free. It depends how and where you are planning to sell it, number of bottles produced, local regulations, and then you have to consider testing for the nutrition label, aw, etc. For the possible HACCP plan - your local health inspector or department of health might have access to this program "Food decision software" which has templates for all sorts of different documents, recall plans, etc. This might help re labeling requirements. https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/Food-Labeling-Guide-(PDF).pdf

I've used it. It's very good though I wouldn't shell with it. To me it has a strong cocoa flavor with quite a bit of citrus and tastes plant like with an almost powdery finish. That said I used it for a hot cocoa bonbon that was delicious and it definitely pairs well with cinnamon.

@Rajala Yikes! Any idea how steep?

@Jim D. Sure thing! The mold is chocolate world 1252 but I imagine any mold with a good amount of surface area would work. I laid tape on sticker backing paper and cut out the shapes, then stuck the shapes inside the molds to form the resulting "cracks"/lines. I only pressed it down along the line portion. Speckled some white, placed some dots of gold leaf mixed with cocoa butter, very lightly sprayed some brown so it covered about 1/2-1/3 of the blank space, sprayed white + pearl white over the rest of the area, then drew a line with a skewer and sprayed the back with gold, then removed the tape, polished the unpainted areas and sprayed the blue. Blue is a mix of chef rubber med blue artisan, jewel white, plus a light blue and light green that I made. It is time consuming to place the tape shapes in the mold but once you do that the spraying is very quick. Like anything you get better with practice so taping the last few molds didn't take nearly as much time. I'd like to figure out some other molds to use for this sort of thing, I don't think cw2295 would work. I have seen people on social media do something similar and achieve a sort of geode look by using a mold with a shorter cavity and simply breaking the tape and pressing it down. The eggs are quite tall so that wouldn't have worked here.

This one has 12g fat per 28g mascarpone. It's a local(ish) creamery so was significantly more expensive than most other brands. They also make a 5lb food service tub which they claim is 50% butterfat. My supplier could only get the smaller containers though.

Valentine's, St. Patricks, big eggs for Easter, Spring bonbons. Valentines - blackberry/lychee, caramel/caramel ganache, passion fruit, black forest (kirsh buttercream, morello cherry pate, dark choc). St. P's - Honey mead milk choc, whiskey caramel. Big eggs - berry tart (triple berry pate, strawberry buttercream, raspberry dark choc, lemon almond shortbread), caramel hazelnut (caramel, hazelnuts, hazelnut gianduja). Spring - cherry/pistachio, caramel/malt milk choc, matcha/raspberry, carrot cake (spiced caramel, mascarpone ganache, almond carrot shortbread). Thanks to @Rajala for the oven dried carrot idea, I blitzed them and added to the shortbread layer). No aw for the mascarpone ganache - I used VT creamery mascarpone (43% fat), iviore, glucose, honey, salt, vanilla and the water content was only 14% so I felt pretty good about it, 39% sugar, 33% fat. In retrospect I could have added some cocoa butter.

Thanks! I'll have to ask my local supplier then. I pay 80-90/3kg bag for most Valrhona and they carry most of the boiron line. So maybe I'm getting the best deal around. Chef's warehouse recently bought another local supplier and prices were and continue to be absolutely ridiculous and they charge a broken case fee. No international gourmet foods up here. A lot going on with new owners and mergers these days.