schneich

we use the deco system (printer, ink and sheets) and we are totally happy with it. at the beginning we had the same issues with the non transferring transfers :-) i called deco and they told me they have issues with certain batches. she send me new ones for free, since then no prob. we use it pretty much only with white choc. i color our white chocolate even whiter with a little bit of titaniumdioxide. i use a wheelmachine for the white that is always at around 33.5 celsius, i hope that helps... cheesr t.

i wont get tired to sing the praises of this valrhona recipe collection, it might answer all your questions ;-) http://espace-pro.valrhona.com/recettes/liste klick on "essential recipes" in the lower right corner... cheers t.

last thing we did was a whole car (toyota IQ) check out the making of...

who told you coconut oil is healthier than butter or cream ???????????????????

if you have a superbag i will make it easier to separate the foie fat...

hi, doing this kind of mousse cake (in france they are called petit gateau) is our main business, we produce about 2000 per week. luckily its not as complicated as richard wrote. you certainly need moulds, which you can get from demarle. first you prepare your mousse, if you got a lot of pieces to do at once you´ll want to keep your mousse slightly more fluid to keep it from setting on you while filling. next you fill some mousse into the molds, and add your core, which is usually a jellied coulis, a brulee, a bavaroise, or simply a compote forzen in small cylinders. you add the core by pressing it into your mousse, now you add more mousse and finish with a piece of biscuit, dacquoise, brownie or whatever you like, scrape it clean and put it in the freezer for 24h. its true that you gain a bit of quality if you use a blast chiller (we have one) but you can do fine without. here is a nice recipe for a nappage neutre, once cooked you can store it in the fridge and flavour it with any fruit puree (20%). you glaze by pulling your petit gateau from the freezer, put them on a grate and laddle the 50C nappage on. the nappage will set pretty much instantly, now you pull em from the grate with an offset spatula and put em back in the freezer until you need them....

@ejw50 i can send you some tried and true recipes all with an aW value below .080 which makes them shelf stable for up to 3 month...

dudez, i had some really serious pistacchio gelato at sigep. the guy used pistacchios from bronte, half roasted, tha other half STEAMED ;-)

you should change the formule of your ganache to make it "shorter" so it doesnt form peaks, that is btw one of the biggest problems when you work with a one-shot machine. other than that you should change your ganache recipe to make the texture fluid enough to fill a LOT of moulds, if you got it right slightly banging the mold on the counter flattens out the peaks ;-)

andiesenji thats interesting, i think i try that....

i would make a lemon cremeux..

been to sigep last week, hotel in bologna. we have been to: "taverna dei Lords" - garganelli ragu was great, maybe it could have a bit more essence, tortellini in brodo (from "la sfoglina") just great, broth was lukewarm and tasteless. main was a meat platter with veggies and potatoes, meat was really good and tender, portions could have been a bit bigger. "dessert apocalypse" unbelievable 6 different dessets on a cart, take as much as you like, tiramisu with fresh panettone and the chocolate flan were just GREAT. overall i would go again! 75.00 euro includin 1 bottle of wine and 3 bottles of water "trattoria meloncello" - nowadays VERY crowded, owner sent us back into the cold (-10C) to wait for 1/2 hour. tagliatelle ragu were very very good, table wine sucks, osso buco was very mediocre, tough and cooked very long, peas were MUSHY, potato puree tastes like KFC :-( zuppa inglese also SUCKED, gummy interior, weird colored biscuit yuck! 105 euro including 4 glass of wine and two bottles of water. sometimes the kitchendoor opened, and one could see ONLY immigrant cooks... "caminetto d oro" - great pasta ragu, great tortellini, and a MARVELOUS bistecca fiorentina, about 1 kg of dry aged chianina beef cooked to perfection YUM! with a bottle of wine and 2 bottles of water we payed 80.00 euros - fair deal, i would go again anytime !!

p.s. a "pistacchio essence" simply doesnt exsist ! its just flavouring and that makes it evil ;-)

DONT use it !!! most of the time its some bad pistacchios with a lot of bitteralmond flavouring and some green color !!! if you need it in a recipe do the following: take a prefered amount of californian peeled pistacchios, split in two equal parts, roast one part in the oven until SLIGHTLY colored, put both parts in thermomix or robot coupe and mix while hot until you got a semiliquid pistacchio paste, use as indicated ;-) that usually takes only 20 mins. or so. if you put the paste in an airtight container it will last easily 12 months in the freezer.. cheers t.

au contraire shalamanese !! to me pistacchio gelato is one KEY flavor in all gelato to get the flavour right you must use half toasted and half untoasted pistachios because the untoasted have a flavour that gets lost while toasting. i dont think any honorable italian artisan gelato producer will use something else than pistachios ;-)

usually a creamy center is done with essential oils and invertase, which softens the center without making it grainy (recristallization)...

the added water conten doesnt matter, because you boil it out anyway, but you should replace the "lost" lecithin. i also use liquid sorbitol. next week iam going to do a foie gras caramel, a 750g lobe of finest foi gras is waiting in the fridge to be melted. the foie fat will then be used instead of the butter :-) cheers t.

just wanted to give you guys an update from the caramel front. i finetuned my recipe cause i had still issues with fat oozing. after some very unsuccessful trials with sucrose ester (sucro, sole graells & sucrosilk) instead of lecithin i wen back to the original recipe changing the bicarbonate, the butter and the lecithin weights. 1000 Sugar 150 Glucose 140 Liquid Sorbitol 600 Beurre demi sel 60 Lecithin 1000 Cream 35% 8 Bicarbonate 30 vanilla extract this baby is very stable shows virtually no signs of fat oozing and what seems really weird it tastes a lot creamier :-/ i also tried a genin type mango/passion recipe, but it was lightyears away from the real thing.. gotta put some effort in this i guess... i also find that cooking the caramels slower over a long period of time intensifies the caramel flavours.. anyway, these are my results so far, they sell very well :-)

you got to have the right wire !! very important, you can save money if you order it from chocolate world.. cheers t.

if you dont cook your caramel beyond 130c you shouldnt have recrystallization issues. i HATE to put a lot of glucose in caramels, makes them sticky, i only use about 5% ors so...

if you seeded to much callets and they wont go away, you can always delete them with your bamix ;-)

last trials with nicks recipe yesterday, i think we NAILED IT. i think iam safe to say now that we DID a genin clone (or at least very close) ;-) i cooked a double recipe, pretty slow on a induction cooktop at about 1500-2200 watts, hence no scorching during the whole cooking process. compared to nick original recipe i tripled the lecithin which i bamixed into a small portion of melted butter. since i didnt have sorbitol powder i used liquid, and doubled the amount to cope with the excess water, the 30 vanilla was added at 115c. the whole thing was cooked to 120c. i have no idea what emulsions do at high temperatures (maybe someone has a few cent on that) but i guess i found that if you work the hot caramel too much after cooking (we tried to put it in some flexipan molds) or even work it after it cooled a few minutes it has a very bad habit to break on you :-( if you let the sucker cool COMPLETELY (and by completely i mean over night covered with a layer of baking paper in a cold pastry kitchen) its nice and smooth. the whole thing is still quite hard to handle on a guitar cutter but workable. the lecithin seems to do its job quite well, but if someone else knows a more powerful emusifier for the job i would like to know :-/ from today these thingies are going into production... double of the recipe below makes 4 guitar size slabs and about 300 euros ;-) cheers t. 1000 Sugar 150 Glucose 140 Liquid Sorbitol 700 Beurre demi sel 12 Lecithin 1000 Cream 35% 4 Bicarbonate 30 vanilla extract

i didnt read all the postings on this one, but the little dotted line gives you an idea how high you can turn the temp. on a wheel machine WITHOUT loosing temper. while using a wheel machine a lot of crystal are beeing dispersed, bearing more and more crystals over time. if you keep the machine at 31c, the chocolate will solidify pretty soon. by keeping it at up to 34c you melt away enough crystals to keep it workable without loosing temper during the whole day. cheers t.

bees wax !

poured it on a silpat with aluminum rulers... i cut it with the guitar cutter... no sticking at all... cheers t.