pastrygirl

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.

Nikkib, when will you be in SIN? I'll be there at the end of the month, then flying out in late Sept, and will do my best to report back here.

I'm not crazy about the chalkboard, LCD, or other ideas where there is only one menu in a fixed place. I don't want to have to turn around in my chair or squint across the room. I've also seen smaller chalkboards with the specials carried around by the servers to each table, and that is just awkward. What is wrong with a paper menu? I like clean modern design, even that industrial/reclaimed aesthetic. If a place has great wooden beams from a century ago and vintage brick I enjoy seeing them exposed. There are a lot of newer places with too many hard surfaces that bounce sound around in an unpleasant way, so if you do go industrial, pay close attention to acoustics. Seems like a big trend is lots of super low wattage retro-style lights, either in big chandelier-like clusters or lined up along the bar. I like the look but I wonder if it is going to look dated in a few years.

Darker chocolate is always going to be "snappier" than chocolate with milk fat. The milk fat has a softening effect. I like the contrast of a brittle shell on a soft center. More cocoa butter increases fluidity and will give you a thinner shell, while more cacao solids make it stronger (as far as I know - at the world pastry forum a few years ago the chef doing the showpiece demo said to always use dark chocolate for structural strength, and to spray it white if you want the look of white chocolate). The best chocolate to use to enrobe your caramels is the chocolate that tastes best with your caramels. Sorry, probably not the answer you were looking for You can blend the 53% and the 72% to make a 60% if neither is perfect for you.

You might try a cold infusion, more sugar, or a little mini airline-size bottle of liquor.

Hmm, too close to bedtime to check references now, but I thought 'invert sugar' was a more general term referring to a variety of products - glucose syrup, corn syrup, honey, atomized glucose, trimoline, sucralose - with a variety of practical applications. Still so much to learn...

I usually use glucose syrup, which is similar to corn syrup but much thicker. This is what Peter Greweling calls for in many of his recipes. I get it from one of my restaurant suppliers, $10 for a 2 kg tub. Another chocolatier, either Ewald Notter or Jean-Pierre Wybauw often uses dry powdered sucralose, available from Chef Rubber or probably other places. In short, corn syrup is the cheapest and most accessible liquid invert sugar, or you can also use honey if the honey flavor works with your other flavors. There are dry invert sugars and liquid invert sugars, and I don't think they are all necessarily interchangeable. P.S. where do you live? Someone here or on a regional cooking & baking board might be able to recommend good local chocolate sources.

Maple syrup as well. According to the University of Maine extension, it takes about 10 gallons of sap boiled down to make a quart of syrup. Unless someone has been doing some serious low-temp dehydrating? (Anything's possible!)

Agreed on the Greweling book recommendation above. He covers many types of both chocolates and confections, explains the science of how things work, and has troubleshooting guidelines for when things don't turn out as hoped. Since Chef Rubber is in Las Vegas, you will need to pay high $$ shipping via next day air with ice packs for anything perishable - unless you really want to re-temper all your chocolate once you get it after it's melted in the 100+ degree heat that is summer in the desert. Or wait until winter. Check with specialty wholesalers in your area to see if they will do a will call order for you. If you can find Callebaut, Cacao Barry, or Felchlin at wholesale prices (Valrhona is still more than $10/# wholesale) it would be worth buying the 5kg/11# box. Polycarbonate molds are around $25 each, which is a big investment if you only use them once or twice then give up, but will last for years if taken care of. JB Prince has good prices on molds (better than Chef Rubber), as does Design & Realisation in Toronto (although shipping to the US makes up for most of the savings, or at least shipping to the West coast does ). Chocolate molds make a great gift, if you can drop hints around your birthday or other holidays to people who might benefit from encouraging your chocolatiering.

You usually want to keep the alcohol because it is a preservative. If the truffle is too soft, you can replace some of the cream with butter (therefore making the cream + butter + alcohol combination about the same fat:water ratio as cream alone), or just use less cream.

Well, Obese-wan, I'm at a loss. You gave an example above of using 1 cup cream in a 500ml dispenser, maybe it works better when full? Things can get weird in there with too many no2 charges, so maybe one charge for only a cup of cream is too much and one charge per two cups would be better?

You need to churn it somehow to incorporate air and produce the smallest size crystals of ice. If you just make the base and stick it in the freezer you will get a hard, icy block instead of scoopable ice cream. By specific container to put in the freezer, do you mean the Donvier/Cuisinart type where you freeze the bowl then churn your base in that frozen bowl? There are small machines available that have a compressor and are able to freeze batch after batch with no frozen bowl, but those tend to be much more expensive than the frozen bowl machines.

El Bulli, June 2005. Blown away - everything I'd hoped the experience would be. Here are the notes I scrawled afterwards, that don't come anywhere close to describing the food. I have pictures, but not digital. pina colada - dissolving foam w/ rum balls parmesan marshmallows "olives" olive oreos mini baguette (crispy & hollow) wrapped in yogurt croquant pumpkin seed oil caramel drop frozen (liquid inside) pistachio truffle sea bean tempura w/ saffron, oyster emulsion gazpacho - dissolving tomatoey 'cone' w/ frozen gazpacho, cilantro sprouts steamed brioche bun w/ truffle slices, butter consomme de 'tucapi' - brazilain thing? - w/ frozen passion fruit air yogurt w/ butter, geranium, capers mussels w/ assorted seaweeds walnuts w/ brown butter, pickled tiny daisy heads mushrooms w/ dashi cloud, sesame thai soup w/ coconut tofu white asparagus w/ olive oil gnocchi, lemon foam mackerel w/ chicken foam/jus, chinese vegetable w/ vinegar prawns w/ 'lentil of jamon' boneless chicken wing burrata - cottage cheesey balls w/ maple syrup, apple, pear, apricot frozen peach schnapps w/ peach coulis the desert - cinnamon ice cream, yogurt, strawberry, instant coffee, chocolate guanabana foam 'teppan-nitro' w/ caviar (fruity seeds)

I agree. Put them in a lovely bowl and use them as a centerpiece on your table.