schneich

why would anyone want to spray thick chocolates ?? i you want to make your life easy your buying one of those babies: Wagner w 180 p the ratios for perfect spraying chocolate are: dark chocolate 70% = 70% Chocolate 30% Cocoa Butter semi dark chocolate 55% = 60% Chocolate 40% Cocoa Butter Milk chocolate around 38% = 50% Chocolate 5o% Cocoa Butter white chocolate around 32% = 40% Chocolate 60% Cocoa Butter you spray just a thin layer and then you normally mold with tempered chocolate. if your cocoa butter designs are somewhat thick you want to go a little warmer for the first mold, and a bit colder for the second to get nice thick walls, if you want to have yellow or orange or any shiny bright color you want to spray a white layer before molding a dark chocolate... cheers and merry xmas... t.

the a la mode method is "cold candying" - make a syrup 2 parts sugar one part water, boil, let cool to 30c put along with your fruit into vacuum bag, vacuum, open 3-4 weeks later.. voila!! it preserves the freshness perfectly.... cheers t.

you can make your life a lot easier and use a bain marie set at 30C throw you chocolate in and the next day you have semi melted tempered chocolate, immersion blender and your good to go..

I dont want to be negative here but do you think its a good idea to open a new venture these days? currently we are at -30% turnover compared to a normal year people are keeping their purse in the pocket... :-(

if you write a mail to manufacturer they should be able to send you a fact file for each couverture (fat, sugar and cocoa percentages, bacteria count yada yada yada)

the thing with these infrared thermometers is that i get a different reading every time i only change the distance to the bowl a tiny little bit. maybe i just bought the wrong one... ?? cheers t.

we recently tried the leaf crocant recipe of greweling and of siefert, and the greweling recipe was easier to make and far more delicious. instead of using praline we use homemade peanut praline that KICKS ASS..

hi, tv is full of bad news pretty much all day. stocks going south, banks already have gone south (well pretty much so). when i watch news coverage about "financial ground zero" aka new york, they sometimes use to interview restaurant and shop owners who talk about losing 50% of their turnover. my question would be does anyone of you (especially in thechocolate or pastry business) already see turnover going down despite getting into high season, or at least have lower numbers than last year ?? cheers from cologne torsten s.

ghee = anhydrous butter ;-)

you should be careful with the valrhona anhydrous butter. it has been especially designed for use in patisserie applications. it has been altered to be liquid at room temperture, because of that it will drastically change the texture of your ganache towards the soft side... cheers t.

http://www.puratos.us/products_solutions/p...572020sk21.aspx something like this... t.

we do it same way, we roast the apples with lots of sugar and some butter in the oven with the grill on, to make them nicely brown. we blind bake the pate sucre shell with rice in a roasting bag, after removal of the rice bags we brown shells a liitle longer. now we get our reserverd roasted apple halves and fit em niecly but very tight into the shell. for the glaze we dry caramelize 200g sugar VERY DARK (until foaming stage) deglaze with water and cook until you have a very thick syrup almost a liquidish caramel, about 150-200ml. now you weigh about 500g miroir neutre and mix in the caramel, add some vanilla extract (the real stuff with the buds not the flavoring!) now you gently cover the tatin with a your glaze using a brush, thanks to the miroir the tatin will stay shiny all day ;-) cheers t.

we also had mold issues last year. but we changed all our recipes to have at least 20% water content max, 30% sugar content min, 20% cocoabutter min, 15% milkfat max. since we do so we never had a problem again. also i believe you cant do without different sugar types to bind the free water in you confectionaries, we usually use three, glucose, invert sugar and sorbitol. sorbitol and invert sugar have exellent water binding capabilities we use them in total quantities of 100-200g per 2.5 kg batch cheers t.

...thats why i bought myself an all metal airbrush ;-)

"anhydrous butter" is pretty much the same thing as butterfat or ghee or clarified butter. in germany you can buy butterfat in blocks, and it contains only 0.2 % water. besides that i talked to one of ramons co-chocolatiers at europain and they told me any clarified butter can be used. i follow his theory closely, its amazing that by examining recipes from famous chocolatiers like herme or greweling for example you will find out by using our (based on ramons theory) excel sheet that a lot of recipes are incorreclty balanced, which leads to accelerated spoilage of those chocolates t.

i had the same probs with pate de fruit until we once had a french patissier who gave me a standard recipe that works for each and every fruitpuree, no matter what. Pate de Fruit 1000 puree and 500 water bring to 50C 50 pectin 150 sugar mix with pectin add to puree mixture 1800 sugar 500 glucose add when puree mixture boils, boil to 108 C !! after cooking add 30 citric acid (or more to balance sweet/sour)

i guess your chocolate could be too cold, if you havent got a "new generation" machine you could be in a lot of trouble... cheers t.

thats what the cold technique is about, to NOT lose the stable crystals... one of our patissiers just returned from a chocolate course in france and there it seems to be " a la mode" to add the the cocoa butter in form of mycryo at the very end of emulsifying...

yep

i just got my hands on the new wybauw book and if i compare his ganache technique with ramon moratos technique it shows that both prefer a cold emulsifiing method where the emulsification takes place at around 30-35 celsius on liquid tempered chocolate. did anyone compare this against the "hot" process where emulsification takes place at around 55-60 celsius on solid or liquid chocolate ?? the essence of their theory is that with the "cold" technique you dont loose your stable beta crystals...

instead of sorbitol you can also use glycerol (add 3-5 % of total ingredients weight), it has even double the free water binding ability of sorbitol... cheers t.

for our petit gateau we sometimes need painted white chocolate squares. i never seem to get them right. usually i use a special plastic sheet made for chocolate work (60 x 40 cm) i paint the design with colored cocoa butter right on the sheet. i let it crystallize for 30 minutes or so, next i cover with tempered white chocolate, let crystallize, and cut it with a multi wheel cuter. next i put it in the fridge to let it fully crystallize. now when i peel the squares off the sheet some or most of the cocoa butter design still sticks to the plastic. does anyone know have an idea on how to get the design stick to the chocolate ?? cheers from cologne

dear jack, we want to do our own line of candybars, but i havent found the right way of wrapping them. since you already did a lot of them it would be really nice if you could post a few photos of how you wrap your bars... cheers from cologne torsten schoeneich

jkv is a great company, last week i visited their hq in holland. i have NEVER seen this many chocolate molds in my whole life... i totally love the little bunny too. jkv has it in three different sizes. did you know that this bunny has a kind of "brother" which undoubtly is done by the same artitst, it has a really sweet gloomy expression on its face... cheers t.

if you need it for chocolate ganaches/fillings you should definately use a non crystalliizing concoction thats sold by merck/ruth under the brand name "karion f" its speciallly formulated to bind as much free water as possible while keeping the filling soft you find it here (or at you local ruth dealer ;-) ---) http://www.ruth-online.de/der-grosse-ruth-...7C+Zusatzstoffe since we use that stuff our emulsion are XXX strong. our chocolates survived a room temp. of 28 celsius without melting or sinking :-) cheers t.