Sebastian

Actually, domestic sugar prices aren't 2-4x higher, but they are higher than world sugar prices. This is essentially due to protectionistic policies meant to protect domestic farmers from cheap sources elsewhere. The gap varies based on a number of factors, and currently the gap is only marginally higher (somewhere in the area of 0.10 cents i believe..). Even so, the US gov't has both relaxed the tarriffs as well as the amounts of sugar allowed to come in, as it's widely recognized that for a country addicted to sugar, there's a bit of a crisis looming. Two factories were damaged in the hurricane - one was back on line w/in 3 days (albiet not at full capacity), and while I'm not positive, i tihnk the second one is still offline...

Prior to the hurricanes, there was a projected deficit of US sugar (we will c onsume more than we will produce). This is exacerbated by the hurricanes. An estimated $300 million of the coutnry's sugar crop has been destroyed. Now, normally when sugar is imported, a duty is levied against it to bring world sugar prices in line with domestic pricing, to protect domestic growers. It's on a quota system, and gets very complicated very quickly (not sure I fully understand it - i'm fact i'm sure i don't), but this week the USDA increased that quota, meaning that the US will be allowed to bring in additional foreign sugar (nontarriffed) to help compensate for the destruction of this years crop. Longer term, they've also approved $29 million in funding of the Emergency Conservation Fund Program, to help farmers get their lands back into produceable shape quickly. 1/2 of that is allocated to Louisiana, which produced 35% of the nations sugar. Net net, expect taht sugar prices will go up even in spite of these things, but it could be much, much worse.

Thanks choux - i gave it the ol' college try today, and while I learned lots (i didn't really believe the cocoa butter would look good if not tempered - you were right, it works!), i'm a far, far cry from what i was after. After seeing how mine turned out, my technique must be way off. I'd be interested in hearing how others are getting the nice swirls that are present on Norman Loves products. Multiple folks indicated they'd put on a glove and swirled it in with their finger, which didn't yield near the same definition as i see in his photos (i essentially put on a 'medium amount' of the colored ccb, and in a single movement, made a nike swoosh type design, with a little more rotation). Airbrushing them in gave a nice effect, but again, not what i was hoping for. Can anyone share in further detail than what's already been shared your techniques?

I'd like to try my hand at making some of the 'norman love' type shells - i've ordered a number of the chef rubber tinted butters - the packaging suggests not to heat the product over 86F, which suggests it's coming to me in temper and that it should be used in temper. Is this the case - before i rub it into the molds or spray it in, does it need to go in tempered? Or can i simply melt it and run with it...

Until recently, there was nothing that could legally be called white chocolate. About 2 years ago, the FDA agreed upon and issued a CFR definition for white chocolate, and whallah, we've got a product that is now legally white chocolate. So what is it? Basically it's a blend of sugars, milk, milk fat, and cocoa butter - that's it in it's simplest form. You can have flavors added to it, as long as they're not milk or chocolate flavors. Manufacturers can play with a few variables to get different flavors out of their white chocolate: they can add salt or other flavors (vanillin or vanilla is a biggie). They can use natural or deodorized cocoa butters (natural butters retain some flavors, but they can be wildly unpredicable. deodorized butters are blander, but very uniform). You can play with the level of milk used and the type of milk used (ie butter milk vs whole milk, or even whole milk from field fed cows in new zealand vs whole milk from field fed cows in chile - yes, there's a difference). The same for the anhydrous mlk fat used. Of couse the product can be refined to various particle sizes as well, which impacts mouthfeel and flavor. In short - white chocolate isn't white chocolate the world around 8-) Hope that helps.

Actually, salmonella can also pass through the shell and get inside as well - it's not always only on the outside. However, that doesn't happen just all that often, but it's not entirely accurate to say salmonella is only found on the outside of the shell... http://www.aeb.org/safety/egg_handling_and_care_guide.html

I assume trying to form a gel. the calcium will complex with the alginate. The alginate can be difficult to get into soluntion, you're likely to have better luck heating the water, but it's not an absolute requirement.

further mixing, unfortunately, is about the only way to increase the odds the the invertase will come in contact with more sugar, and that's probably not the direction you want to go unless you're doing it under vacuum..

Escry - out of curiosity, how in the world do you know *which* sucrose ethe invertase is acting on? Enzymes aren't that specific, if they are meant to act on sucrose, it doesn't care where the sucrose comes from, only that it can get to it... A potential explanation for what I think y ou're trying to say may be that the sucrose in pure chocolate is essentially going to be sequestered by the fat, and if the enzyme can't get through the fat to the sugar, it's not going to do anything to the sugar..

The group will consist of 13 sales people, all of which are trained chocolatiers. They've asked for a technical presentation, will have no kitchen facilities available, so it'll have to be all powerpoint and discussion. The chocolates are all Belgian and origin, perfectly good high end chocolates, but to be honest I'm a bit confused as to why, out of all the possibilities they could choose to carry, they selected three that are fairly low solids and fairly close to one another. I do not claim to be an expert in all things pastry related, hence my cry for help here, thinking perhaps those of you who are experts in all things pastry would be able to help me better understand where they might be coming from in so selecting those types of chocolates (again to me, it doesn't make sense). Price is not likely to be a motivating factor here...in my (limited) pastry experience, as well in my industrial experience (i have much more of that), I simply haven't run across customer demand for products that are so narrowly differientiated from one another...

There is no regulatory definition of cocoa solids, which is part of the problem. The US has historically not paid much attention to this idea of cocoa solids, and whey they did, only the liquor/powder portions were counted. European convention is to include those, plus any cocoa butter. By and large, US folks have migrated to accepting of the European conventions. There are some places in Europe that do label %'s of ingredients on their labels (ie, chocolate liquor, 35%, cocoa butter, 8%, etc). Perhaps looking at it the way the ice cream industry does - such as 'cocoa solids, non fat' would be more meaningful. That way you're excluding the cocoa butter contribution from the liquor, which can vary from liquor to liquor (not much, mind you, but it can be a few %).

Thanks Steve. I've been asked by a fairly large pastry supplier to give a presentation on chocolates they're using, which they've picked specifically for their cocoa solids content, but they're really not all that different from one another. Of course I have my preferences and I know how I use them, but it's always interesting to me to see how others use them as well. I don't have the sense that a 54% is earnestly sought out for a particular use over a 50%, but I've been surprised before and i'll be surprised again 8-)

There's no shortage of fine chocolates today to be found from many suppliers. Many of them offer their products classified by cocoa solids content, and many of them do so in incriments that are fairly small, such as 50%, 54%, 58%, etc. I'm interested to see how those of you who are selecting your chocolates using cocoa solids as one of your criteria are using them. Especially those of you who are using multiple products that are slightly differientated from one another such as the above example. Do you find, for example, the 50% more desireable for baking, while the 54%'s more appropriate for mousses and ganaches? Do you like to make shelled materials with the very dark products that have very sweet centers, or would you rather bake with the very dark products? Inquiring minds want to know 8-) So how about it - what products do you use, and why?

Wow - lots of differing opinions. We freeze chocolate all the time, and we manufacture the stuff. It's a great way to preserve the flavor and extend the shelf life. Dark chocolates are less of a concern in this area than milks are ( in fact, dark chocolates, as with many wines, improve with age ). The only concerns to be noted when freezing chocolate are 1) ensure you've got them tightly sealed and 2) when you bring them out of the freezer, watch the relative humidity to avoid condensation as they come out of a cold, dry environment into a relatively warm, moist environment.

Being the delicate worker that I am, I usually use a hammer. It works quite well 8-)

Ferraro is building a plant in N. America as we speak. It will be interesting to see if that affects their marketing tactics for N. American Nutella usage...

There are actually some 99-100% liquor bars out there that are quite palatible. Most of what you're going to find on the store shelves, however, is going to be quite strong, african forestero liquor that isn't, by most people's standards anyway, appropriate for direct consumption. Note - chocolate liquor doesn't have any alcohol in it. it's the term given to chocolate in it's purest form, and is solid at room temp.

What kind of percentage of E are we talking about here? To achieve a sugary mouthfeel from just E and no other bulking agents, that must jack up the quantity, does it not? 1:1 replacement for sugar, texturally? No recrystallization issues? If I can up my E without it going sand/grainy in the final product, my scoopability issues would be gone forever and it would be less chewy as well. Tell me it's true! ;) ← Lemme talk to one of my collegues who's got more experience here than i - i can eat it with the best of them, but haven't formulated a single etoh ice cream yet 8-)

I've had some very good erythritol ice creams. use of pdx or inulin wasn't necessarily required in that application, as the cooling effect of erythritol, well... it's ice cream 8-) plus, too much pdx or inulin in a high water application tends to get gummy. you'll never get a hard ice cream with erythritol, as molecularly it's very small, which means it'll depress the FP quite a bit. when working with HIS, i tend to prefer sucralose, but it can be difficult (and expensive) to get nowdays. there's also a fair amount of synergy that can be realized by using sucralose in conjunction with ace-k, but personally i don't care for ace-k straight. Neotame is extraordaarily sweet, and seems to have good flavor, but because it's so sweet, it can be hard to formulate with - however there are companies out there that are diluting it just for that reason. There's also a company out there (the name escapes me at the moment) who's extracting neohesperadin dihydrochalcone from orange peels (NHDC - forget trying to say that 5x real fast, i'd give you a dollar if you could do it 1 time real slow!), and labelling it as a natural flavor (very label friendly) - it's got a decent flavor, but use is restricted by law (in the us at least), to 10 ppm, and is really meant to be used as a flavor enhancer, not an sweetener, although it does have tremendous sweetening capabilities. In europe, you can use as much as you want of it for sweetening. The company, however, is saying it's not NHDC and that you can use as much of it as you want, which concerns me a bit as I've analyzed it already and know that it is, and frankly have issues with a company behaving like that.

Domori has one from a certain valley in madascgar, which is wonderful - the name of it escapes me, it starts with an 's' (sambirano, i think)..i also like pralus's madascgar bar (see a trend forming here?). However, they're both very different from one another. Amedi's got a pretty good porcelana, and i like pralus's sao tome as well, but as much for the melting characteristics of the butter as for the taste.

how much? 8-) i know alkalized defatted powders exist, or at least they did in the very recent past...

You can try a defatted cocoa powder - they're pretty hard to find, but i believe there's a spanish company making it ... natra perhaps? defatted powders are literally fat free (well, almost - there may be up to 0.5% residual fat stuck away in there...)

I'd never h eard of ghee before - quick web search seems to suggest it's the same thing as clarified butter, so yeah, i'd think you'd be fine with that. main concern is just don't be doing anything to add water to your chocolate..

JSkiilling - nut oils are notoriously short in fatty acid length (it's partially the reason they also go rancid easily, they're not saturated). Because they're so short in chain length and are unsaturated, they have very low melting points. It's the same thing with AMF - I can't techinaclly give you a very good explaination of what's going on (believe me, i've looked for years). The best I've been able to surmise is that due to the chain length distribution of the fatty acids in AMF, the interference on the crystallization properties of cocoa butter is sufficient to slow it down, but not stop it, unless AMF's used excessively. Because AMF has such a low melting profile, when the cocoa butter does crystallize, most of the AMF remains liquid trapped between the spaces of the cocoa b utter crystals, or dispersed within the liquid cocoa butter (at room temperature, about 20% of your tempered, solid cocoa butter is still liquid, believe it or not). Add'n of AMF to chocoalte won't affect it's classification in the least. Most of the dark chocolates I formulate have AMF in them, actually. Makes them less brittle, and more resistant to blooming. If you're adding coconut oil to the chocolate, i've always used the natural, liquid at room temperature oil. since both the chocolate and the oil are fat based, you can just mix them directly together. the more coconut oil you add, the softer your end product will be. elaine - i'm certainly not shooting your idea down, in fact that's exactly what i was endorsing. I make veg oil center material all the time at work, specifically taking advantage of the incompatibility issue. usually it's seen as a bad thing - for center material we're taking advantage of that specifically for it's softening

If the coconut oil you found was hard at room temperature, you've got yourself a hydrogenated coconut oil, most likely with a melting point around 92F. Natural coconut oil will be almost entirely liquid at room temperature. Neither one of them, however, is going to be a good option for you if you're looking to slightly soften your chocolate, for, as someone already pointed out, they're incompatible oils. You may be able to get by adding 1-2% of a lauric oil to cocoa butter (chocolate), but it's a tricky proposition at best. There's an effect called 'eutetics' which is basically a hard way of saying that when you mix the oils together, you're going to get very unexpected and unpredictible results. Nonlauric oils such as cottonseed and soybean are going to be alittle more tolerated in chocolate, but i'd be hesitant to take it to more than 5% of the total fat. Keep in mind that the instant you've added coconut, soybean, or cotton seed oil to your chocolate, you can no longer call it chocolate (peksy standards of identity). Nutoils have a great softening affect on chocolates as well. You can add hazelnuts (or hznut paste) to chocolate and still maintain the SOI for chocolate. If you're looking to just slightly soften your chocolate, anhydrous milk fat is probably your best bet. If you're not able to find that, you may be able to get by with just goood ol' store bought butter, but i've never tried that. If it's a milk chocoalte your working with, it's already got at least 3.39% butter in it already. you've got to be a little careful here, for as you add more butterfat to a chocolate, it becomes increasingly difficult to temper - however once you've achieved your temper, it makes it more resiliant to bloom. I'd be pretty hesitant to take the total milk fat contribution much over 6%. At 5-6%, youre going to have a noticeably softer chocolate. Now, if you're looking to create a ganache type filling with longer shelf life (forgive me, I didn't have time to read the full thread, just scanned it), I've made fillings by using roughly 90% chocolate with 10% of a natural soybean or natural coconut oil. Here we're capitalizing on the eutetic effect to obtain a center material that never going to harden, even tho the vast majority of the fat is cocoabutter. It's shelf life will be near indefinate, as you've not got any water present (as with the cream). White chocolate's going to have, at minimum, 3.5% milk fat, and in most cases it won't have much more than 4%. I'd think it'd take quite a bit of white chocolate to add sufficient milk fat to make a noticeably softer end product..