pastrygirl

I doubt you'd have enough fineness of control for tempering or keeping chocolate in temper. I have an induction burner at work that is handy for many things, but the lowest setting is 100F and the temperature increases are increments of 10 degrees, so not suitable for holding tempered chocolate. A different model with different increments or that went below 100 might be useful, but I have no idea if that exists.

At the market to eat at home I go for : salmon scallops manila clams oysters trout At sushi: salmon scallops sweet shrimp mackerel uni

I puree my berries in a blender then push the puree through a chinoise with a ladle. I cook my berries with a bit of sugar until they fall apart, and puree and strain while still warm.

Definitely plastic wrap. Half sheet pans, microplane, chinoise...I wouldn't mind a vitamix at home

Molds can be too clean?? Ya learn sump'in every day....

NOT that showroom finish: Orange cocoa butter painted in, white chocolate finger-swirled then molded in dark chocolate (filled with Greweling's white chocolate passion fruit ganache). I did four molds this way and a significant number of pieces have places where the orange stuck to the mold, as with the bottom piece in the picture. I had the same issue with some chocolates I had made around New Years: Clearly I am doing something wrong. Is the white chocolate not warm enough to adhere to the cocoa butter properly? Am I just out of temper somewhere? The ones today were in new molds, so the molds should not have been dirty. I am sure I have done a combo like this successfully before. Hmmm

Jacques and Francois, just a coupla downhome American guys...

It's cherry season here (I'm going picking on Thursday!), and I would love to have this recipe, if possible. Thank you, pastrygirl! For the cheesecake, I put 680 grams soft cream cheese, 400 grams soft fresh chevere, 100 g sugar, 1/4 tsp salt and the microplaned zest of one lemon in the food processor. Process until smooth then add in 3 eggs and 2 egg yolks. I bake individual cheesecakes in disposable aluminum cups - 13 per batch - or this would make one decent sized cheesecake. Bake in a water bath at 325 for an hour or until done. For the thyme-infused honey, heat honey and fresh time gently and keep warm for a while, until flavor is infused. Strain out thyme. For roasted cherries, pit fresh red (bing) cherries, toss with a little sugar and water, and bake in a convection oven at 325F , stirring every 15 minutes, until cherries are soft and syrup is reduced. Enjoy!

here's a recipe i've used before with a caramelized apple filling- it makes a fair amount if i recall, you may want to halve it 25 oz ap flour 1/2 c sugar 1 tsp salt 2 TB cinnamon 1 TB ginger 1 lb cold butter 2 eggs + 2 egg yolks 1/3 to 1/2 c orange juice mix dry. cut in butter. add eggs and liquid to form a dough. chill before rolling & filling

60 ml is a quarter of a cup. Dried shrink a little, so I'd use about half the volume if I were using dried.

cheesecake made with cream cheese, chevre, and lemon with roasted sweet cherries and thyme infused honey butterscotch blondie with spicy peanut ice cream and bacon caramel sauce sweet cherry and pistachio tarts vanilla-white pepper shortbread cookies

Yes, put your color on the acetate, then spread a thin layer of tempered chocolate over it. If you have a guitar cutter, you can lay a frame over your acetate and use the strings as a guideline while you cut the chocolate with a knife. Use the same strings you'll use to cut the ganache. I have a few pics of the process starting here: but not including cutting them.

@ a french cafe: 'mister' = croque monsieur murr = medium rare i.e. 'order in one burger murr, one mister'

Agreed that 75 cents above minimum wage is really, really low for even the most basic kitchen job. There is some skill involved, isn't there? Even if legally you can't FORCE people to share tips, you can sit down with the bartenders and explain how far a little sharing would go to making the whole place run better. Its not forcing, its encouraging. Isn't it standard for servers to tip out the bar and their bussers? Why not the pizza guy? I have worked a few places where the kitchen got tips - a very small portion, maybe 3%? - usually ending up at around $100 a month per cook. Even that little bit goes a long way towards diminishing resentment. Encourage your bartenders to throw a couple bucks a night in the pizza guys direction and to stop talking about how much they made. A little discretion really helps too. The kitchen DOES NOT want to hear that the bartender is walking with $200 on a saturday night. Keep it quiet, share a little, and do give that guy an extra dollar an hour (at least) if he is doing a good job.

If you have professional experience, get in touch with the various international culinary recruiters. They mostly offer hotel jobs at management level (chef, sous chef, pastry chef) and a 2 year contract is typical. If you can get a job like that they will take care of your visa.

I generally agree with parchment over silpat for cookies, but with macaron I find they spread more evenly and stay rounder on silpat. Parchment seems to wrinkle and buckle while the macaron are resting, giving me mis-shapen cookies.

Surface was covered directly with plastic. That night I re-melted the batch and it set up smooth the next morning. I'm imagining that if I had stirred after an hour as directed, the seed crystals would get more distributed and maybe this was the result of seed crystals gone wild and allowed to grow in place? Gremlins, definitely gremlins

I made a batch of ganache (greweling's liqueur cream ganache with honey instead of glucose) on Tuesday and left it out at room temperature overnight. Wednesday when I wanted to scoop it there was a bit of fat bloom on the top and stirring turned up bb-sized lumps. These are not pieces of unmelted chocolate, it was totally smooth and I even used the immersion blender to emulsify. Obviously there is some kind of crystallization issue, but I would like to understand what is going on and why. I didn't agitate as directed after it cooled to room temperature, but that has never seemed necessary before. Insight, please!

Don't know about sharps but have used maida as an all purpose flour for general baking. It is a bit on the low gluten side but otherwise pretty much all-purpose. It is not particularly coarse, so I don't think the granular sharps you have would be a very good equivalent.

ahhh, but of course.

Sort of related question I was considering recently: why are there different tempering temperature ranges for different chocolates? If the cocoa butter is what is being tempered to begin with, why does it matter what other stuff is in there, and whether it is milk, dark, or white chocolate?

I had an avocado mousse at Cafe Juanita near Seattle that was pretty good. It reminded me of cheesecake. Avocados don't have much flavor of their own, they are just creamy. Might as well be creamy and sweet.

Along these lines, I've been making mousses this way but in a whipped cream canister charged with no2. I use about 150g chocolate to 120g water and usually add a little sugar or flavor of some sort. Right now I have one infused with fresh ginger.

Genius!

I've used it with lemon extract on french macarons. I'm sure they softened a tiny bit, but the extract evaporates really quickly so it doesn't have much time to soak in (it is more alcohol than water). You get a MUCH more saturated color using extract - otoh, you also use a whole lot more luster dust.