schneich

i have a nice recipe for a caramel liquid center which has invertase in it. you fill it, then it hardens to fondantlike texture, within 10 days the invertase melts the filling completely liquid... cheers t.

in the US you should be able to get wolfberger thats some great stuff (from alsace) :-)

the difference is that most (if not all) liquors are artificially falvoured, if your just after this flavour you might want to use artificial flavouring directly. eau de vie is a totally different story. its an alcohol destilled from the actual fruit, it has all the subtle flavour notes that the fruit has. in germany we make a difference between a "geist" and a "brand". when a geist is produced they will macerate the actual fruit (mainly raspberry) in pure alcohol, then the batch is distilled and you have "himbeer geist" or eau de vie framboise. when a "brand" is made the fruits will have to produce their own alcohol through fermentation, the result will also be destilled and you have a "brand" or "wasser". the latter contains the very essence of the fruit, perfectly made for creating chocolates. every williams is a "brand". a raspberry "brand" will set you back 80$ per 0,5l.... i would never flavour a chocolate with artificial flavouring but thats just me ;-) t.

yeah, you actually need the methylcellulose. i guess you can get it through willpowder. you have to basically make a strongly flavoured "tea" and then add the metil while still hot. the metil i better soluble in a hot medium. next you emulsify with a stickblender (without creating too much foam, metil is alsi a strong foaming agent!) the metil needs to go to the fridge at about 4c for min. 12 better 24h. you will have a thick paste in the bottom of the bowl, the liquid part is tossed. now you smear a foil (normally used for chocolate work) with glycerin. now you apply a very thin film of the thick paste with a spatula, let dry at room temp, and voila! you got the paper :-) cheers t.

iam pretty sure that its a "papel" of some kind, it looks very molecular to me, i thinks its made with methylcellulose, click here and watch the "papel hibiscus" video, i made the stuff for a shooting last week and you can fold it to any shape you want, once you put it in your mouth it melts into nothing... cheers t.

i totally dont buy that theory !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! concerning the pear, why dont you use eau de vie williams... we make liquid filled truffles now, and they are just great. its a recipe from chef morato, you put the oversaturated liquer/syrup right into the truffle shells, let encrust for 24h and close them (we enrobe them afterwards) they taste great!!! we make framboise, pear, jack daniels, and rose liquer... hicks ;-P t.

what you do is to wet your baking sheet and then put the baking paper on. this is important to get nice feet, and a nice flat base (important for filling) cheers t.

actually in the shops we store the chocolate at room temp. but the mold problem was also in our 14c storage room :-( actually we never had a problem with a fruit ganache (we use a lot of puree) they have quite a sour taste and so i think they have a low enough ph to be "immune" to molds and such...

was this ignorant fool really me three years ago... my god... :-) since we opened our french patisserie two years ago i learned quite a few things the hard way, including that a little custard powder here and there does miracles ;-) and yes the elsay stuff is really good...

we freeze the macs to help them GET glossy... also we found out that the result is far far better if you bake em on damp baking paper and not on silpats... :-) perfect result every time, and yes we use a sugar reduced italian meringue... cheers t.

sorry but thats simply not true. of course is invert sugar just an "inverted" form of sucrose - a mixture of glucose and fructose BUT Invert syrup has a much stronger ability to reduce water activity in the final product than plain sucrose . same thing with non crystallizing sorbitol ;-) cheers t.

i think chef moratos dimensions are a kind of guideline. as you all know a lot of factors participate to the shelflife of a chocolate product. if you use inverted sugars and sorbitol a lot of the free water is bound, that adds shelflife, so not only the amount, but also the variety of the used sugar is relevant. next thing if you use anything "sour" like fruitpurees and such adds shelflife, at a lower ph level hardly any mold or bacteria can grow. finally anybody knows of the preserving abilities of alcohol. all these elements have influence to the shelflife and i think its wise to keep those values in a proximity of the target. i think the more important values are clearly the water and the sugar levels. we operate 3 branches that all sell chocolates. anyhow it happens that certain flavors sell better than others wich results in having these chocolates around for at least two weeks or so. as is said one should not forget the "shelf life" given to the customer. i think he also should be able to store the chocolates for two weeks. even with a technically nice equipped chocolate lab its economical impossible to produce very very small batches (one guitar sheet) even if you have only 15 - 20 flavors. on my recent trip to paris i bought several samples from top chocolatiers like marquise de sevigne, hevin, maison du chocolat and roger to compare the sweetness levels, and i found out that our "corrected" recipes at 30% sugar content are well in line with them. cheers t.

hi, a while ago i wrote in another thread concerning water contents in ganaches, that it is not very wise to mess with your ganache recipes in order to get a well balanced recipe that also has a good shelf life. we had some big problems with some chocolates that were only about 3 weeks old but got moldy on us even if we produced, and stored them correctly. when that happend i read quite a lot of books. none of them seem to give a sufficient answer to the problem, there were even some books (sadly also including the book by peter greweling) who had very terribly balanced recipes in them. this is not a problem if you are producing chocolates just for friends & family, but if you really want to sell your chocolates your in a complete different position. my experience shows that you just cant produce chocolates and throw em away after week three. you need to be able to store them for a certain (if limited) amount of time, and the customer should also be able to keep em for two weeks or so. so the only book that i found that gave a sufficient answer is the one by chef ramon morato, who is the principal of aula chocovic. in his book he introduced a formula which he developed over the years and which proved to be true. if you go by this formula you can even save yourself the hassle of buying a aw-meter :-) the formula simply says that in order to get well balanced shelf stable recipes you need to match the following ratios: Water content maximum 20% sugar content minimum 30% cocoa butter content minimum 21% milkfat content maximum 15% since it is quite some calculating work to tweak each recipe, one of my employees (thank you julia) came up with an excel sheet which does moratos formula automatically. if you want to use it, you might need to tweak it because your ingredients might differ water, sugar or fat content wise, but other than that this tool is easy to use. have fun t. p.s. this excel sheet is really just "beta" so i cant guarantee that its completely free of errors... ;-)

we tried it out yesterday and iam certain that this guy uses 5 - 10 % oil in the chocolate. when we tried without, the chocolate got way too fragile and crumbly. cheers t.

hi, i think it really was a great show, especially patisserie wise. there was not much serious chocolate stuff going on. valrohna had a nice new bonbon mold which can be parsonalized. wolfberger had some really cool new liquers (we were drunk when we left the booth) which was chocolate, violet and rose. sosa had a whole lot of really great new products, like chunks of dried fruitpowders, a stabilizer called gelcrem which gives anything you want the texture of creme pat and a product called "pro gianduja" which lets you create ganachelike textures with 0% water activity (great for enclosing crunchy elements without having them to get soggy) you can find the video also under my youtube profilename: schneichs youtube profile cheers t.

back from europain, with some impressions: check out the chocolate decoration demo, it was a chinese booth with a chinese chef who had some incredible tricks :-) after watching him for quite some time i am sure that his chocolate has some oil in it to make it smoother... cheers t.

when it comes to ganache one syrup cant be substituted just like that. believe me i had to learn it the hard way. i had lots of chocolates turn moldy on me :-( i threw kilos of chocolate away because my ganache recipes were unbalanced. in chef moratos book is a very nice chapter on how to balance a ganache recipe correctly in order NOT to go moldy on you in less than 14 days. basically he says that you must have certain percentages of cocoa butter, milk fat, sugar and water. as soon as iam back from europain i will post an example. besides that trimolene and sorbitol syrup(karion f from merck) have the most waterbinding ability, which is what you are looking for. the more water you bind, the less free water you have in your product, which means your chocolates will be good for much longer. cheers t.

thats what bothers me ALL THE TIME when i see a chocolate/sugar showpiece. last year at the salon du chocolat i saw the creations from all those pastry chefs. i cant help it but most if not all of these looked to me like 7th grade art class results. before i started over in pastry i worked as a graphic artist for more than 15 years. i am as well trained in free hand drawing, airbrush and watercolors as in 3d modelling, product design and photoshop illustration. so my point of view to the artistic value of those showpieces is quite a different one. iam too much of a neophyte to start doing my own showpieces right now. one have to have a profound knowledge on how to do what and when at what temperature etc. but i think that once i practice and practice and practice i hope my works will have a different approach & visual quality... once you see the works of the contemporary catalonian pastry chefs you see what i mean: ramon morato, paco torreblanca, carles mampel,enric rovira, oriol balaguer etc. cheers t.

yes iam adding hazelnut oil, that makes the whole thing pretty oily... i also would love to start from praline, since i dont have a mill to get anything to Mµ size. these are the usual recipes if you google a bit, what iam after is a tried and true recipe, creamy and shelf stable. are milkpowder particles already small enough and/or soluble ?? cheers t.

hi, we really would like to do our own "nutella" spread. i tasted quite a few very good ones including the stuff from slitti and guido gobbino. what i didnt find is a reasonable recipe to make my own. the recipe from wybauw is basically just praline with a tiny little bit of chocolate. other recipes ask for ground hazelnuts. what i would like is a recipe that uses praline as a basis, but has a lot more chocolate in it. when i use more chocolate on the wybauw recipe things get solid. whe i add some oil things get unpleasantly oily, nothing like the creamy texture of nutella help is appreciated cheers from cologne schneich

since our customers want truffles, we will start making them using valrhona dark chocolate shells. i want to do a series of liquid alcohol filled truffles. so my idea was to use basically the same recipe used for sugar crust chocolates, only not to fill in a starch mold, but fill it directly into the shells, let it grow a crust, and close it. does that work ?? does anyone have reliable recipes ?? cheers torsten s.

the japanese use neutral soybean nori paper for sweet sushi, should be available at your local asia market. this stuff comes in different colors too :-) cheers t.

while surfing around i found this link. it leads to a dansish pastry website. this page contains .pdfs to all the wolrd pastry forum classnotes back to 2002. a lot of interesting recipes from famous chefs... here you will find a lot of boiron files to, some of which i have never seen before (table of fruit ganache recipes etc.) hope you like it cheers t.

hi, yesterday i tried the "kitchensink caramel" well kind of.. everything works fine up to the moment when the stuff really starts to boil. its an evil mixture that spatters all over the place, and its just as if it says "go on whisk me as much as you want IAM GONNA SCORCH ANYWAY" i only managed to cook it to like 105 c. i have now idea what it will be like.. any idea ?? i still have about 9 kg of chocolates left.... cheers t. p.s. to what degree is a soft but cuttable and enrobable caramel cooked anyway ???

hi, i heard of a new way to aromatize chocolate and gianduja. its from one of the "mad scientists" in barcelona. take some chocolate, melt it (untempered) and ad a lot of very coarsly roasted coffeebeans, throw em in the chocolate let crystallize, vacuumpack and let stand for 2 weeks. after that remelt sieve the coffeebeans and VOILA! coffe chocolate/giandija ;-) cheers t.