Sebastian

Yes, I've gotten it for years. My perspective is probably a little different than yours, and if i had to pay for it i'm not sure i'd continue recieving it. I think you'd noted you were going to be stateside, if that's the case and you'd like to see a copy, toss me an address of where you'll be and i'll see if i can't find an old copy to send to you (i don't keep them, but if i've got one tucked away somewhere, you're welcome to have it).

i put the ccp in a tea ball, and shake it over whatever i want to dust

i'd dust in cocoa powder prior to coating.

http://www.normanloveconfections.com/chocolates/black/ Thoughts on how the black stripe is achieved, with an apparent higher density of color on either side of the stripe, done in such a fashion as to allow some level of throughput? It's done very, very uniformly on each piece..

I'd focus on how they look (packaging and individual pieces), and how they taste primarily, with a secondary focus on the individual size. there is no standard (j schmidt pieces were HUGE, while other very popular pieces are small). If very concerned, offer a range, and let your customers tell you what they prefer.

Call peters and ask to speak to scott johnson, he'll be able to take care it for you.

great idea - i've actually got a number of sizes, from coarse grind down to very, very fine.. perhaps i'll try that 8-)

Great ideas - thanks all - i'll have to try all of them 8-) last night we honey caramelized a bunch of them, and used that as the bottom layer for a chocolate torte topped with freshly roasted dominican nibs for a party today. we'll see how it goes!

making chocolate boxes is fun and easy, requires a little bit of prework on your part to premould/precut the slabs, and have some tempered chocolate on hand and piping bags to join the seams. couple that with some fancy plaquettes to paste along the walls of your box, some decorative flower petals or cigarettes, and you've got a favorite. Here's a photo of something similiar http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_i-5sviyAtss/R_VpEJe1I6I/AAAAAAAAArE/Fw1UkCvuZhs/s320/IMG_2508.jpg I like to use a hollow truffle shell similiar to what they've got in the picture, rolled in gold leaf, and then make flower petals of alternating white and dark to paste around the gold truffle shell. Plaque along the sides of the box, and the end result is something that's stunning and really quite easy to do, and if you come with the parts pre cast, all they have to do is assemble them, so no real special techniques need to be taught. i think what yo've got above is great too - just wanted to toss another idea into the ring 8-)

I've got a few kilos of finely chopped almonds and hazelnuts - looking for suggestions for great desserts that we can apply them against to wow our guests and make my wife happy once more that we've got room in the freezer (they occupy a lot of space...). I've been teaching my daughter to make chocolate as well, so we've got lots of custom made chocolate around the house (tanzania, brazil, dominican, ecuador, venezuela, etc). Of course, access to chocolate's never really been an issue for me 8-) Anyway, what are some nut based desserts that include chocolate that you've been particularly found of? Help me use up these nuts!

Actually, it will continue to harden for many months. If you're moulding solid chocolate (no fillings, no inclusions), what you're going to be concerned about is degree of temper and if it'll bloom or not. After 24 hours, you should have a pretty fair idea of if it's going to bloom or not (ie did it demould properly, did it stick to the mould, does it have proper gloss, what's the snap like, etc). If the answer to any of those makes you uncomfortable, give it a good 24 hours, and if after that time it hasn't bloomed, chances are unlikely that it'll do so w/in the next couple of weeks (assuming proper storage conditions).

Lecithin *may* help - it depends on what caused the thickening in the first place - if it age/moisture absorption related, it can help a great deal. Unfortunately i'm not familiar with what the potency is in health store lecithin capsules - my guess is that it's simply off the shelf lecithin that is used industrially, and put into capsules - if that's the case, breaking the capsule and adding a tad of lecithin should work just fine. Make sure you leave the gelatin capsule out..only one way to find out 8-)

I've found gold leaf amongst my least favorite things to work with - i love how it looks though! what i'll do is take some tempered cocoa butter and a very small brush or cotton ball, apply a very thin layer of ccb to the entire cavity, then use the brush to 'pick up' the leaf by touching the brush to the foil, and then apply it to the cavity wall just by touching it to the cocoa butter lined wall. Seems to work reasonably well for me. Good luck - post a pic if you get it to work well!

Lana - also consider, that if you're not buying direct from your supplier, but rather through a distributor - the liklihood of improper storage or out of date product increases quite a bit. Some distributors are better than others, but i've worked with distributors who had storage conditions for chocolate that were simply *abysmal* and, and as you might suspect, they exhibited much more customer complaints than other distributors...if your product isn't 'right', it may not be the manufacturer's fault - depending on what your supply chain looks like!

Good question - emulisfiers (of which lecithin is one), are usually allowed at a max level of 1.0 or 1.5% - however, just becauase you can, doesn't alway mean you should. Lecithin is essentially added as a way to reduce cocoa butter - you can achieve what is called a similiar 'apparent viscosity' by adding lots more cocoa butter (which is expensive), or you can add a little bit of lecithin (which isn't). There will be some differences in other types of viscosity (i'll avoid the technobabble, but it's called plastic viscosity and yield value) by using more cocoa butter instead of replacing it with lecithin, but it certainly can be done. At the end of the day, the main reasons a mfr uses lecithin is to reduce their costly cocoa butter, or to make the product easier for them to handle. Depending on the specifics of the product the lecithin is being added to, and the processes under which the product undergoes - there's a 'cap' on how much lecithin you can realistically add before it starts doing the opposite of what it's supposed to do. That practical limit is *about* 0.5% (disclaimer above, that will vary a little bit by specific product type and process type). Lecithin is one of those things where a little bit is a good thing, but too much of a good thing will be problematic. What happens is a phenemonon called 'bridging' - one end of lecithin like to 'stick' to water, the other end likes to 'stick' to fat. If you put too much lecithin in, it starts to 'stick' to itself and form bridge like structures. Ball mills, or attrition mills, can be used, but are much more common in grinding the liquor vs the finished chocolate. Ball mills require a certain 'fluidity' in what you charge the system with, and because liquor is about 50% fat, there's plenty of fluidity built in to it. Because chocolates are normally much lower in fat, ball mills are typically not popular particle size reduction approaches to finished chocolate. Of course there are exceptions, i've seen it done and i've done it myself, but it's not the norm. They can generate a lot of heat if you're not careful, and if you've not selected the appropriate media, you can easily end up with a very high metal content in your chocolate due to bearing abrasion.

Quite right, large differences exist in bean quality - and globally, to be quite frank, bean quality is on the decline - it's already advanced to an alarming point, and the rate of decline is faster now than it was 5 years ago. It will be quite problematic for our industry in the future unless we're able to identify ways to halt the decline. Not sure what portion of what i said you're saying is only partially right - my point was that there are hundreds of folks who sell chocolate with their own brand, but only a handful who are making most of the chocolate. Those hundreds who are thus buying it wholesale from the manufacturer, and selling it under their own name, adding another step in the value chain, which only adds costs. Unless you can tie the brand of the chocolate to a company that has physical assets that manufactures chocolate, you're quite likely paying too much! Cluizel makes a quality product, but particle size is not where they are significantly differentiated. They utilize 5 roll refiners, as most of the industry does (although there are about a half dozen other grinding systems that the industry also employs to one degree or another). Cluizel, for the past 3 years (and depending on the product), averages between 16-20 um, with a bi-modal particle size distribution. Fluidity (viscosity) is affected by a number of things, one of which is indeed cocoa butter. The more total fat you have, the lower your viscosity will be (including milk fat, not just cocoa butter - however there are some things that complicate using milk fat, such as if it's bound in whole milk powder (not available for viscosity reduction), or if it's added in anhydrous milk fat form so that 100% of it is available for viscosity reduction). Particle size shape, size, and distribution also hugely affect your viscosity. For a fixed total fat content of say, 33%, if you have two chocolates, one of which has an average particle size of 15 um and one of which has an average particle size of 25 um, the 25 um product will be considerably 'thinner' (less viscous" even though everything else is exactly the same. The type of equipment that was used to grind those particles down to that size also can have a dramatic impact on the finished rheology as well (see ACM vs Roll Refiner, for example). Conching has a significant role in viscosity as well, and it's perhaps the most complicated of all the factors that affect viscosity, as it's effectiveness is tied to it's ability to affect total moisture content, distribution of emulsifer, and it can affect particle size shape (post particle size reduction). Emulsifiers drive fluidity lower by acting as the 'bridge' between the lipohillic portion of your chocolate (the fat) and the hydrophillic portions of it (moisture, milk, sugar). Normally, oil and water don't mix, as the addage goes - lecithin helps to make them mix better. You have approximately 1% moisture in your chocolate when it arrives to you. Lecithin simply helps the moisture to become very 'slippery' when it comes in contact with the cocoa butter. Quite happy to go into more detail on any of these areas - the above is a very, very high level touch-n-go on the topics. -Seb

Remember that there's only so many places in the world that make chocolate. Most of the chocolate in the world is made by 5 or 6 companies. If the place you're buying your chocolate from does not make chocolate, and it has a brand that isn't linked to a place that makes chocolate, chances are very, very, very, very good that they're buying from one of the previously aforementioned folks, repackaging it, adding a few dollars a lb to the price, and selling it to you. Trying to save you a few bucks here...

White chocolate is hugely affected by age - any white chocolate, regardless of who mfr'd it, will thicken over time, even if it was originally manufactured to be a very low viscosity product. Talk to your manufacturers, find out what type of viscosity measurement they use - if brookfield NCA, look for something < 30 if you want a very 'thin' product. If older macmichael, look for something < 100. If they use centipoise, look for something < 20,000 (but have a deep discussion around how they got this number, there's a number of ways to get to it, and it can mean very different things). Best case? Get as new production as you can, and have a few drops of fluid lecithin at the ready to add to it to thin it out.

http://www.amazon.com/Water-Activity-Foods-Fundamentals-Technologists/dp/0813824087 http://www.amazon.com/Shelf-Life-Food-Industry-Briefing/dp/0632056746 http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781420078442;jsessionid=Ex8BQZ9jFzPcRmDxokN8Rw** many others - these are just a few

Just because it's not on the labell, doesn't mean it's not produced on equipment that deposits it. I'll bet you a dollar (or better yet, a plate of cookies) that they're made by ADM, Blommer, Cargill, or Callebaut, in which case, they'll hve lecithin in them regardless of what's on the label statement. Depositors are very expensive....

Shelf life is a very, very complex topic. Aw is only one measure of how long something may last - it's a measure of how much water is available to support microbiological growth - typically anything about 0.6 will be sufficient to grow things. I'd be very, very skeptical if your average, cream based ganache would last at room temperatures for more then 3 weeks. You can lower your Aw by putting increasing the amount of solids - typically a corn syrup is used for this, or something with a very low molecular weight (because they're small, you can fit more of them in a given space). That said, if you have a high Aw product, you can still get good shelf life if you modulate other things - such as temperature (keep the temperature low), or include anti-microbials (chemicals that prevent or slow the reproductive process of organisms - such as potassium sorbate). Conversely, just because your Aw is below 0.6 doesn't mean you can get infinite microbiological shelf life either. Microbes are EVERYWHERE. Literally. If you have a high concentration of them where you work, or just happen to make your ganache on a day when they're high, you may have a fairly low Aw and still get growth. And we've not even touched on pH.... Best reco? If you're going to make a water (cream) based ganache, and want to get more then 2 weeks ambient shelf life out of it, make the recipe 5 different times and measure the Aw (pay someone 30 bucks to do it). If it's above 0.55 or so, adjust your humectants (corn syrup, sorbitol, invert sugar, etc), reduce your cream/water, or add an antimicrobial. Again, generalizations - it's a huge topic, with loads of books devoted to it. Can't cover it all here.

you're going to have a hard time with this one - almost every company in the world uses lecithin & shared equipment. If you find chips that don't have lec labelled, i'd determine who the original mfr was and have a talk with them to see if it was made on shared equipment or not. the good news is that lecithin is so processed that it doesn't really contain any soy protein - sort of like refined, bleached, deodorized soy oil. however, if you're concerned about it, i'd just steer clear....

I do enjoy teaching, in fact i just taught a chocolate school last week. It's the favorite part of my job 8-)

Thanks Schneich - i wrote my reply at 6 am in the morning as i was rushing to work - sorry if i came across harsh - i should have waited to write the note until I'd taken more time to wordsmith the messages better. I've nothing but the utmost respect for you and what you do. I used to be Callebaut's technical director, so I'm pretty familiar with what they have and how they arrived at it. Suffice it to say that it certainly warrants further scrutiny. Remember, 1/2 of callebaut's business is chef driven, and as my wife the statistician says, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. The data can be made such that if fits the message that the chef's want to deliver...there's many reasons i'd chosen to leave that organization, this trend being one of them. Valrhona, while producing great product, isn't a particularly technical organization. I'm a great fan of their products, and have some at home right now actually. As i said, i was likely stepping into something with a lot of passion around it - if you believe it's beneficial, by all means continue to do it. I can say, with a great deal of confidence, however, that there's no scientific basis nor evidence to support it (I'm currently sr technical management of the worlds largest chocolate company - I'll see if i can't extract some internal data to share. no promises, as internal data is meant for precisely that - internal purposes - but let me poke around...). It's a topic that's been very well studied and documented by us.

Nothing public as far as i know. At risk of stepping into a big steaming pile here (there's going to be a lot of passion around this) - it's very common of french and belgian instructors to teach that one should always temper their chocolate, and a variety of reasons is given, depending on the instructor. At the end of the day, however, those reasons are simply not founded in scientific principle, and do not pan out when put to the test. The physical structure of cocoa butter at time of combination with cream has no impact on water activity. Once blended with water and milk fat (cream), the water causes a phase transition of solids into syrups (milk and sugar), and the short chain fatty acids of the milk fat sort of worm their way in between the long chains of the cocoa butter (this, by the way, is what provides bloom resistance). Schneich had mentioned that he'd tested Aw in his kitchen - not knowing the details of what he did, were the same lot of materials used, were the both mixed homogeneously, was the reading within the standard deviation of the equipment used, etc, it's hard to say the results were conclusive. I think it's great that he's testing it! Remember that it's pretty rare for a chef to have a physical sciences background as well, and it's not uncommon for them to try to explain a phenomenon they observe in scientific terms, but w/o having the proper background to determine why it's occurring, or properly testing their hypothesis. It's also part of the culture to not question what the chef says, and as such w/o challenge, the hypothesis carries on, true or not. At the end of the day, if you like using tempered chocolate in your ganache, by all means continue to do so - it'll harm nothing. But it's not going to help either. -Seb Sebastian - having followed your various posts for a few years, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't say that without some scientific backing. Is there anything available publically on the topic? ←