schneich

finally the book has arrived at my bookshop, and i was disappointed, didnt buy it. there is nothing in that book that screams "buy me" as earlier stated recipes are odd, dont double recipes is odd, dont use melted chocolate in you ganache is mega-odd (the author might want to discuss this with the german valrhona pastry chef who does so on all of his demos) the reicpes in general doesnt appeal to me (except very few). once i held the greweling book in my hands i knew i had to buy it... cheers torsten s.

i will get the exact figures on monday, the whole thing only works out if it would be possible to order a larger amount... right now i am just curious if there is a sufficient number of people who are interested...

no, sorry these are not my chocolates, i only took the photos ;-) cheers t.

Printing Chocolate Transfer Sheets in the last few weeks iam fooling around with the decoration of my chocolates. i still have to learn a lot to get things out as nicely as christopher elbow or chris norman for example. at the moment we order our transfer sheets from pcb, but i really have to say that the number of "cool" designs is very limited. most of the designs look very old fashioned or too whimsical to me. designwise i want to go more in the direction of the next generation of spanish pastry chefs like morato, torreblanca et cetera. i did some designs with the airbrush (or fingers, or brush) on blank chocolate transfer film . but i really find it very time consuming, and iam not satisfied with the results. i would for example like to use a flame tribal for a chili, or a skull for a pate reglisse chocolate. i looked around for quite some time now and finally i found a manufacturer in belgium that prints sheets in 60 x 40 cm. the onla thing is that if you order minimum possible (140 sheets) its still too expensive. once you order like 1000 or more things start to get really cheap. so if more people would agree on a number of designs we could make a centralised order which would still be pretty profitable even if we would add the shipment costs (5 kg ---) USA 32 euros) for now its just an idea... i add some pictures of some things i like... chocolate bar nyc the thing i wonder about most is that nobody does a selection of simple flat colors, they could be used for so many things, also simple gold and silver would be nice. i tried to do it with brush and airbrush, but it needs too much luster dust to get a really nice cover.. i think it would make sense to split every 60 x 40 cm transfer into 4 (30 x 20 cm) or even 6 (20 x 20 cm) slots. 1 to 4 colors is possible so we would have to agree on up to 4 colors that everyone likes... cheers torsten s.

in germany its the same thing (regulationwise) everything is standardized down to the floor tiles (they have to have a certain amount of water displacement) but on top of that you cant "simply" open your own shop and produce chocolates. you HAVE to be a "konditormeister" which is roughly the same degree as a cordon bleu "grand diplome". if you open anyway in the end they will close down your shop by the police :-( thats germany... cheers t.

iam considering the heads, but probably wont go for the truffle thingie, they just released a very cool coater called "comfit" ive ssen it work and its really marevlous... cheers t.

hmm.... actually i couldnt do without both... last year we made some chocolates by hand, and if you want to do enrobed chocolate you got to have an enrober, otherwise in my eyes it would be to expensive (we already charge 75 euros per kg) if you compare the two methods of chocolate production (molded and enrobed) time costing wise the molded method is a lot faster if you do it by hand (manual tempering) and if you got an enrober enrobed is a lot faster (i usually cut 200 centers from one frame, enrobing of one frame usually takes 25 minutes or so so if you work alone you should be able to pump out 4-5000 chocolates in a days work, in our case (about 10g per piece) that would be 3750 euros worth of chocolate. cutting with a guitar is much easier than i expected, it just can get a pain in the XXX if your ganache is too soft ( i rather like to keep it on the soft side) i paid for my used guitar cutter including 4 attchments 350 euros, since they are produced here in germany (dedy is only 50 km away from here in essen) you can find one from time to time on ebay or so. if i find another one cheaply i could manage to send it over to the US if you care ;-) cheers t.

good point, you just detach the hose and the curtain (and put it in a heating cabinet) and blow away some chocolate with some hot air. you can go from production to knock off in about 10 mins. and leave a quite clean machine. in the rare event that you would need a really clean machine (color change from dark/milk to white) you can put the enrobing part right over the sink and spritz it with hot water until its clean. color change from dark to milk and back is also no big deal, you just let the machine run totally empty and fill up with the other color...

hi, finally i had a chance to shoot some pictures inbetween production, so dont you wonder about the chaos ;-) what you see here is a panorama of the lab, its only about 12 qm big (small) the doorway to the left is still covered with foil, behind it there is still a lot of woodworking going on, but because chocolate is so delicate we sealed it completely. when this shop opens in a few days people will be able to watch from the shop into production. besides this shop we sell our chocolates in our two other outlets. the heart of the lab is my selmi "plus" workstation which is a computer controlled continous tempering machine with a max. quantity of 25 kg of chocolate. this picture shows the "naked" machine, which can be equipped with either a enrobing belt or a heated vibrating table. on the top display you see to displays the left one shows the melting kettle temp. the right one shows the tempering cylinder temp (the one that matters. in the middle there are 4 buttons which are kettle heater, stirrer, pump and tempering. pretty much what you do in the morning is push stirrer, pump and tempering button and in 15 minutes you have tempered chocolate. the nice thing is that you can always throw in melted chocolat, or even unmelted chocolate since only the chocolate that comes right out of the pump is tempered. enrobing belt folded this is the machine with the enrobing belt mounted, the little hose connects the pump outlet to the double curtain, on the left you see the blower attached (even though i dont use it much) the whole setup (minus blower), the sheet on the left is for the enrober pieces. centers marching in (this is my usual setup for PCB sheets 6x5 is half a sheet) pieces coming out of the curtain (you might notice the "hole" in one of the curtains, thats one small issue with the machine, if it has less than lets say 10 kg chocolate sometimes one of the curtains develops a hole, but it actually has no effect to the product... enrobed pieces, no feet ;-) on with the transfers finished chocolates on sheets and transfers waiting to be used... golden decoration palets precut red dot palets to be used with a framboise ganache. previously airbrushed on film... finished product packaged to be delivered to the shops... so that would be it for now, if you have any question i´ll be glad to answer ;-) overall (as if i havent said it yet) iam very satisfied with this setup so far (need more shelves, you can never have enough shelves.... t.

i own a french patisserie in cologne/germany and we recently added chocolate to our portfolio. we produce enrobed chocolates, chocolate bars and confections. we built a small chocolate lab just next rooom to one of our shops (3 in total) its about 12 qm and equipped with a chocolate cooling cabinet, a selmi chocolate workstation & enrober, a warming cabinet, a combined fridge and freezer (just for fruit purees, cream and such) and a few tables and shelves (ikea) we roughly spend on our lab about 40.000 euros (including small mat.) we are in production for about 6 weeks now and i really have to tell you i couldnt do it witout my selmi. its a continuos temperer that alows you to throw in unmelted or melted chocolate it doesnt matter. the nice thing is you will always have tempered chocolate in 15 min. even if you havent a lot of time you can always enrobe something without a lot of preparation and time. if you want i can u/l a few pictures of my lab, so you can have a look. cheers t.

sorry, but this seems totally wrong. to get the "gelatinization" AKA thickening effect you actually NEED to explode the starch granules in the first place, otherwise the thickening power is inferior. the only recipe i know where you destroy the starch binding power is a classic roux, but you literally have to fry the flour to denaturate the starch to a point where the binding power is significantly reduced. the hygroscopic effect of sugar in a starchbased system is negletable since the effect would be close to 0 (if using a sane amount of sugar) you are right about the acid, it certainly has a negative effect to the binding power. cheers t. p.s. Harold McGee, Hervé This, Heston Blumenthal duh! (--- no offence intended ;-)

get a white chocolate with a higher fluidity (more cocoa butter) or simply add some cocoa butter yourself (rule of thumb: 1000 g choc + 100-200 g cocoa butter) cheers t.

actually thats what you want, to get a nice stable creme pat you need to cook it vigorously for as long as you can what happens is that the starch granules get fully hydrated which also makes your creme pat more tolerant to cooling. usually when you put a baked (or cooked) product that contains starch in the fridge the starch shrinks and releases some of the previously bound water, aka water puddle on the pudding... so to make a stable creme pat cook it for a long time (5-10 mins.) when we make mille feuille we usually use poudre de creme and quite some eggyolks (not the whites) and dont forget a good lump of butter in the finished creme... cheers t. p.s. recipes from famous pastry chefs tend to suck

i use a very small ice cream scoop, an a hot air blower to keep it warm... cheers t.

david, did you say that you had a real difference in terms of ganache setting time between using untempered vs. tempered chocolate in the ganache, please explain in detail if possible. since i use a lot of recipes from the book here are my 2cents: "lime & mint" transformed into "vanilla & mint" its quite good even though i found overheating the mint is not good, since the mint developes a "cooked" taste... "earl grey" is my standard spice steppeing recipe now it works save and gives great results (even in larger dimensions like 6 kilograms) "madras" is quite fluid but kinda sets up nicely in the end..... "ginger" didnt work for me way too fluid... btw. does anyone have a base recipe for a creamy, save "eau de vie" ganache with fruitpulp and as much alcohol content as possible (slabbed & cutable) cheers t.

it seems to me that the "big" chefs like torres and herme make a fuzz out of everything. since they dont care about how much money something costs they have it. the only reason i could imagine buying vacuum blender is if you want to do do large amounts of cake glazing. to get a perfect result you must get rid of every air bubble. of course you could also mix it with a stick and then throw it in a commercial vacuum sealer to suck out the bubbles ;-) cheers t.

i cook quite some pate de fruit per week, so i can assure you that by the time the pate mixture reaches the 109 C there will be positively no alcohol left... what you could try is to cook the mixture to a higher C and add the appropriate amout of alcohol to get it to 109 C again.... here is my basic NOFAIL recipe pre mix 50 g pectin jaune with 150 g caster sugar warm 1000 g fruit puree with 500 g water to approx. 50 C whisk in the pectin pre mix THROUGHLY add 1800 g caster sugar an 500 g glucose (44 DE) cook everything to 109 C take OFF the heat and add 30 g of citric acid and mix pour into frames SWIFTLY (once the acid hits the mix it will gel in less than a minute!)

after six month of intense chocolate learning i must second that you cant get a good temper without agitation. if you dont agitate enough you get streaky results; even though it doesnt matter to me that much anymore since i am the lucky owner of a selmi workstation that does all the tempering for me ;-) but it takes quite some time for the solids to seperate from the butter (i usually have some large bowls of chocolate in my warming cabinet and it takes a week or so to grow an oilslick on the surface) also i dont see the point of spending thousands of $$$ to buy a vacuum mixer since mixing in vacuum doesnt buy you more shelf life or anything else. if you arent equipped with two left hands you should suffice with ya olde stick blender (which btw. is only 50 $ or so;-) cheers t.

we had the same thing, but since we make about 50 tartes per week now we obviously solved the problem ;-) first of all we use what we in germany call a 1-2-3 muerbteig which is one part sugar, 2 parts butter and three parts flour. of course there is also some egg in the recipe. we mix the dough so that it JUST comes together. its quite crumbly so you still have to do a little kneading by hand. next thing you do is wrap the dough in clingfilm and put it in the fridge for t least TWO days. now you will need some flan rings, or metal cake rings, we use 20 cm ones. now you roll out to about 4 mm and use one of the rings to cut out the discs. the discs go right back to the fridge. next thing is to cut 30 mm strips. now you grab a ring put in it one of the precut discs and insert the doughstrip and attach it to the disc. now you get a roasting bag make knot in one end and put the resulting bag into the ring. now fill with a few hands of dry rice and push it a little bit just that the rice reaches into every corner. now your ready to bake the sucker until its slightly colored, pull out the bag with the rice and bake for a few minutes more, and voila you got a nice prebaked crust... the bags with the rice is reusable many times, if you dont understand i could do some pictures of the procedure for you.. :-) cheers t.

btw. we are hiring a pastry chef at the moment, so if anyone wants to live in the beautiful city of cologne close to the rhine valley where all those good rieslings come from literally "be my guest" :-) cheers t.

sounds reasonable... so far to get that "cooling" effect they could use palm oil which has a lower melting point hence the cooling sensation in the mouth. there is a modified clarified butter made by valrhona which i have used to make chocolate chunks for icecream. this stuff is fluid at room temperature and its basically just butter... anyone familiar with that stuff ??

what iam after is of course a "high quality" way to go... i thought about: quite a bit of butter creme double some creme fraiche for a bit of zing 70% dark couverture / 30% milk some glucose.... hmmm unsure.. cheers t.

i guess everyone has heard of those japanese chocolate truffles called "nama chocolate" they are basically a soft ganache dusted in cocoa. they are supposed to be kept in the fridge, nevertheless when you take them out and eat them right away they are very creamy, but they wont melt even if you keep them at rooom temp for a few hours... my question would be does anyoone have a ganache recipe that would match that, very creamy velvety in a cold state, but not fluid at room temp ... cheers torsten s.

nutella is EVIL, better get some premium stuff like summerbird, guido gobbino or cote dor.... cheers t.

when i make ganache i for example melt the chocolate in the microwave,put the glucose into the boiling cream, put cream & gluco into mostly melted chocolate, stir carefully until a basic emulsion is achieved, at this stage the whole mixture is still quite warm NOW i add the spirity (if any) and then LAST i add the beurre pomade (which literally means "soft butter") now i hit the mixture with my zauberstab until its really glossy, (while its warm enough you cant actually overmix it) voila!! p.s. as said in the greweling book your in trouble if ou try to mix a cold ganache, you will always end up with a split ganache...