pastrygirl

Just spent 3 days in SIN and it seemed like there was no bad food! I mostly at at hawker centers - Whampoa was closest to my hotel. Seems like it would take years to try everything and be able to compare and come up with a best of list! Sorry that's not much help but my point is I think it is hard to go wrong!

I think you could be overmixing it. The larger batch is going to take a few more strokes, and if your cream is on the stiff side that could be enough to break it. I'm skeptical about the scorched chocolate theory posted above. Anything is possible, but since when does boiling liquid scorch chocolate? I have used boiling Caramel sauce with a much higher heat capacity to melt chocolate and not had problems. You changed your method of making your ganache base, so now you need To make sure your new method gets it to the same temperature. Agitating this mixture at too cool a temp could cause it to break. And with the bigger batch try whipping your cream a little softer so it will allow a little more mixing.

Ah, well then maybe you can teach me how to use quickbooks Or is accounting different from bookkeeping? I think chocolate can be profitable because you can charge a lot per piece. Even with higher end chocolate, your food cost on a 15 gram bonbon is going to be low just because it is so small, but labor cost is going to be higher. The key seems to be controlling labor cost by making big enough batches and being as efficient as possible in production.

It would be a huge turn-off for me. I may even leave.

And after that it's basic adding all the different ingredient/garnish costs up and dividing by number of servings. In the big picture, accurate portion control and minimizing waste are going to do as much for your food cost as how you design your dishes.

If they make the money on the coffee, I hope they are paying a good chunk of the rent!

Make a couple of batches and time yourself. Example: mixing and scooping one batch of chocolate chip cookies takes 20 minutes and yields 100 cookies. I want to be paid $15 an hour to make cookies, so the batch cost $5 in labor and each cookie has 5 cents labor cost. Maybe there is another 5 cents each when you consider clean up, then baking and putting on display. You'll want to consider that extra set-up and break down time, as well as allowing for some waste - especially with chocolate. What is the total time you put in vs the total sellable pieces? It seems like a huge part of the time I spend is melting and tempering, cleaning up, and packaging, probably only a third of it is the actual molding or mixing and dipping. I use my 'hours tracker' iphone app to keep track of the time I spend on chocolates. On a recent production day, I worked 8.2 hours and produced and individually wrapped 210 bars. As much as I would love to pay myself $30/hr to do all this, I figure that the market rate is more like $10 - $12 for the less skilled parts and $15-18 for the more skilled parts, and also have to consider what my selling price is. So on that day, if I was paying myself $15 an hour all day, the labor cost on each bar was about 59 cents (8.2 divided by 210 times 15). If I was paying myself $18, labor would be 70 cents. My pricing only allows about 65 cents for labor, so I'd better work faster if I want to make more $$! Hope that helps.

Agreed. Mix with boiling milk or water first.

I hope you're saying that the sales tax is included in the price at the farmers market, not that you are not charging the tax at all. If you are selling taxable goods and not collecting the tax, you're going to have bigger worries than pricing! Unless there are different rules for sales tax at the market? If at the market, the item is handed to me on a napkin and at the store it is on a plate with a fork, a slightly higher price seems reasonable. You can also add perceived value and not much cost by plating a tart with a squiggle of caramel sauce and a bit of whipped cream - now you can charge $5.50! Or offer the option of whipped cream for say 50 cents extra and hope enough people go for it. I think everybody knows that prices do sometimes go up, and if you're talking about a 25 cent increase on a $4 item I would not be outraged. You probably wouldn't want to raise prices by more than 10% across the board. Will the shop have other items with a higher profit margin that you don't have at the market? Like coffee? Beverages are higher profit, and you can offer a decent selection of drip coffee, nice teas, and fresh juices without needing an experienced barista and espresso set-up. You need to make a little money on the pastry and a lot of money on the beverages.

You may be interested in the newly legal distilleries with tasting rooms. I haven't been so can't recommend, but google will find them for you.

If you're looking for something in particular, you can use the liquor control board's site to find the stores that carry it. http://liq.wa.gov/

Probably underbaked, too much moisture left in the batter.

Carrie, I think jackal has the answer, commercial products are pasteurized/sterilized before going into the can, and the process leaves no room for contamination. Good luck with your business.

But then you can save the 'nice' plates for when you have dinner guests.

Have you tried melatonin? It's supposed to help regulate sleep cycles.

Are you saying no chocolate at all, or that it should be stacciatella-style bits/flakes rather than chips? I don't know much about cannoli, but I thought a little chocolate was the norm.

I just bought found the very narrow size i was looking for here: http://www.papermart.com/Product%20Pages/Product.aspx?GroupID=18881 GlerupRevere has a wide selection as well: http://www.glerup.com/gleruprevere/subcat.cfm?type=CAT&id=BAG

I agree with Matthew & Qwerty - I've seen very little roux happening, much more reductions and now MG thickeners. In pastry, I'm often more inclined to use an agar fluid gel than an extreme reduction. Sometimes you just want a lighter flavor, lighter dish. I recall seeing some roux in my first restaurant job 12 years ago, where the chef was a pretty old-school Swiss. Not in recent years in French, New American, or California cuisine in Seattle/SF. The gastropub I work at now has a roux-based cheese sauce to serve with pretzels.

You do realize that white chocolate is comprised of cocoa butter, sugar, and milk powder, right? Not sure how you'd avoid dairy flavors with that mix.

Agreed. I'll let something cool as long as it takes to eat dinner and wash the dishes so it's not going into the fridge still boiling, but that is as far as I worry about that.

Yes, but chocolate chips are not couverture. Chips formulated for being baked into cookies have more emulsifiers and less fat so they hold their shape. They may be suitable for ganache centers, but not so much for dipping and molding. The Callebaut website has an area with several downloads of useful product information: http://www.callebaut.com/usen/331 and the valrhona website has good info too. I don't know where you are, but if you are convenient to TJ's, you can't be too far from civilization, so there must be more options. For example, if you were near Seattle, I'd send you to the Chocolate man, who sells chocolate out of his garage, or PFI, which is an import store that happens to carry full size blocks and chunks of Callebaut for not much above wholesale, or the bulk section at a wide array of markets... I feel like it is a whole lot easier to find sources for a couverture that is ready to use than to try to re-engineer eating bars, chips, and cocoa butter into something usable. But maybe that is easy for me to say, living where I already know of so many options.

It is an honor to be confused with Kerry Beal! I think it would be safer to add superfine sugar to ice cream base because there is some water content to dissolve the sugar. No water in tempered chocolate, so you'd have to make sure that sugar is really really fine, fine enough to not be detectable on the tongue in a dry state.

If you have a natural foods store or any store with a large bulk section, you can often find Callebaut or Guittard in irregular chunks from the 11kg blocks. Guittard is generally not considered quite as high quality as Callebaut, but it would be worth checking those bulk bins for more chocolate options beyond TJ's.

The percentage on the package is the total amount of cocoa solids plus cocoa butter. The rest is mostly sugar, plus a little lecithin and vanilla. 70% can mean 40% solids and 30% fat or 50% solids and 20% fat. Against the same 30% sugar, those two 70%s will taste very different. Not many manufacturers list the cocoa butter content separately. Callebaut has many many formulations and uses a 1 to 5 drop system to indicate the fluidity of each formulation. 3 or 4 is recommended for dipping and molding, 5 may be too fluid to get a thick enough shell. Anything sold as couverture should have 30% cocoa butter or more. The working temp of your chocolate and degree of precrystalization will also affect fluidity. If you have a chocolate whose flavor you like but that is too viscous, you certainly may add cocoa butter to thin it down. I would not add sugar, because what sugar would you add? I suppose you could use powdered sugar, as the particles are too fine to detect and it is used in Greweling's gianduja recipes, but I haven't tried that with straight chocolate. You definitely do not want to add granulated sugar, because it will not dissolve in the cocoa butter but will remain gritty. To adjust sweetness, I would find a different chocolate or do a blend of sweeter and darker until I was happy. Chocolate is one of those things you can work with for years and still keep learning and exploring. Have fun and be sure to post some pics when you make something that delights you.

A fellow chef who had been living in Bali wrote this to me: There are some really cutting edge restaurants as well in Singapore - I went on a food trip in February and went to Waku Ghin and it was unbelievable. Andre Chiang also just opened a restaurant but there is a 3 month wait so book now but he is doing the best food in Singapore. Aside from the hawker stands of course.