Kerry Beal

I might wash if I have a whole sheet and it's gotten mucky - certainly don't for those pieces I've cut. Don't polish. I kinda wonder if those might have been option 2 as the bottoms seem to have no lip to see.

So here we go - 400 grams cocoa mass, 1.6 grams of stevia ( working on the equivalent of a 70% cocoa bar). Melted, added stevia, cooled and tempered using the EZtemper. Looks like normal chocolate - tastes rather vile. Initially you get only the bitterness of unsweetened chocolate - followed way too much later by the saccharine sweetness of the stevia. So failed experiment - wonder if the organic folks at the cafe in Dunnville will go for it? I made a bunch of little samples as well. Might be worth a try.

The chemistry is simply phosphoric acid. Like vinegar on steroids.

For really bad rust I use naval jelly - then reseason quickly.

Dinner out tonight with hubby at Sakai - a great Japanese/Korean restaurant. Teriyaki for the hubby. For me - seafood pa jun. Nice veg and seafood pancake.

Found my cocoa mass, think I know where the stevia is - shall get to the experiments soon. Wonder how much stevia I will need to add?

It occurs to me I should ask the AudioVisual dept at the hotel if they have a big screen I could put on my table - would save me lugging my bigger (heavier) laptop along.

Definite RobertM Sue Casey Chocolot curls MelissaH Gwbyls tikidoc Robyn sarahdwyer Dilittante + 1 Tentative gfron1 - not seeing a commitment to come above but seeing an interest in Morato! lambrecht gourmet prabha YetiChocolates Lurking waiting to decide DianaM

Shipping something worth that much across the border will just complicate life too much I expect. I wish I could get one of my customers (who keep telling me privately how helpful the EZtemper is) to write up a nice report that I could put on my website and use in the FCIA's newsletter - but I kind of think that it's one of those dirty little secrets. "When people are looking I temper the old fashioned way cause that's what expected, and when no one is looking I use my EZtemper cause it's cheating"

There will be videos - we did some more filming the other day. Wish I had a bigger screen though. Think even small guitar might be a bit big for the luggage - but it's on the video. While we were filming the ganache set up in less than 5 minutes - it was a titch cool in the room!

I have nutmeg i the shell from Grenada - probably 18 years old. I just bash the shell on the counter and remove the nut to put in my grinder. They didn't come with mace attached - purchased that seperately. I think ground in shell would be a cheaper spice!

Need a little help. Alleguede, Chocolot and I are heading to the Fine Chocolate Industry Association Elevate Chocolate - Winter 2016 event next week and we are going to be demonstrating the EZtemper. Kind of a mini trade show. We will probably man our table for about 4 hours. We haven't done anything quite like this before - we've done lots of one on one demos where we have stuff available as needed but there will be limitations due to how much stuff we can take along, no ability to wash equipment as we go along, limited refrigeration... Our current thought is to take along a Mold'art melter, heat gun, some bowls and a couple of tasting sized bar molds. We will hold melted chocolate in the Mold'art, move it to a small bowl, temper with the EZtemper silk, pipe into molds and knock out of molds to show the excellent temper. I hope the hotel will be able to provide a bar fridge that we can put under the table to cool the molds while the chocolate is rapidly crystallizing. Ideas? Thoughts on how else we could show how well the EZtemper works given the limitations of the equipment and the venue?

I have some big chunks of charcoal in my chocolate fridge to control odours - so can't see why the filters wouldn't work.

They are bit too warm but if you put an Ikea dimmer switch on it you can dial down the temperature. Other's here use their Excaliber dehydrators with good effect.

Made this chicken soup in my Instant Pot at work yesterday - https://forums.egullet.org/topic/152484-instant-pot-at-work-a-little-help-please/?do=findComment&comment=2040844

Brought along the fixings for chicken soup today - Gave the chicken marylands 15 minutes, 10 minutes for the sautéed veg, then another 2 minutes for the added back chicken and some nice big cooked limas. Just waiting for it to cool sufficiently to eat.

Love the glasses. Agree on the food with it - over the years I have been a party to the drinking of 3 of the bottles of Chateau d'Yquem that my father bought in the 60's for the unheard of price of around $25 each - all accompanied by a nice aged cheddar. Perfect foil for the wine - but foie would go well too.

Heidi Swanson's Pan-Fried Giant White Beans with Kale from Food 52

Chefsteps recipe was mentioned I believe in the dinner thread earlier this month. Having run across some chicken livers in the supermarket I decided to give it a go. Poor planning on my part mean that I was trying to emuslify (and do it quietly) just before I ran out of the house to a funeral home visitation and hence my emulsion was rather poor. I had the brilliant idea (I think based on something I glanced at in the comments on Chefsteps) to bung the jars in the vacuum chamber to eliminate any bubbles. Not a good idea. After I was finally able to get the vacuum chamber open again I dropped the big chunk of plastic into the raw pate and had it in my hair, on my glasses, down my shirt... So after the funeral home visit - I hit the grocery store across the street - got another package of chicken livers and made a half batch. Anna had a bottle of schmaltz in her fridge that I was able to use to seal the tops. Much more satisfactory result.

So not cheap! Chocolot says I win!!!

Just before Christmas I finally purchased a Tricor temper meter so I could get some more evidence about the quality of temper that the silk is able to produce. I'm learning about temper curves - apparently a negative slope means over tempered, a positive slope is under tempered. The big question yet to be answered is what sort of distance away from zero means what. I'm dipping an offset in each sample at the same time I add the sample to the temper meter to determine the quality of temper the old fashioned way. I wrote a nice long post about it last night - then my screen shut down and all was lost! What I hope to test is the quality of temper with silk of different textures; comparing adding 0.5% silk to 1% silk; where the temper is at after 1 minute, after around 7 minutes (each temper test takes 5 minutes so can't test too quickly); the differences if I heat the chocolate to 40C or so and cool before seeding,vs just heating above 33.5 and seeding; adding silk to chocolate that is at 33.5 vs 34.5 C - and at lower temperatures as well. I have some organic, fair trade (keep wanting to call it free trade) chocolate that I purchased a few years back. Anna and I were helping the 'organic girls' to make some evil herb filled chocolates to help with 'female troubles'. I don't think that the product ever came to market - but I ended up with a case of milk, dark and cocoa mass of some rather nice swiss chocolate. The milk went the way of all flesh but the dark and the cocoa mass are still fine. I was approached by one of the docs in Dunnville where I work in the ER - he runs a cafe called The Minga which sells politically correct plant based, locally sourced, organic food - asking if I wanted to sell chocolate there. Great opportunity to get this chocolate used up. So my first experiments have involved this chocolate - it does not contain lecithin - just organic cane sugar and some extra cocoa butter for flow. It's not difficult to work with. So 1% silk applied to chocolate that was only heated to 37C and seeded at 33.5C gave me a slope of +0.35 at 1 minute and +1.06 at about 7 minutes. The same chocolate heated to 40C and seeded at 33.4C gave slopes of +0.67 and +1.06. Both manual tests showed good temper. 0.5% silk, chocolate heated to 39C and seeded at 33.4C - slope was +1.28 and +1.71 - manual temper was only fair. Milk chocolate heated to 38, seeded at 33.6 - slope +2.15 and +2.08 - manual tests both looked great.

No - it won't get the consistency of silk. My trials on this failed to prove that it would make good seed either. You can put 6 containers - 3 stacked on 3 - mason jars will fit if your health department allows them. Given that each holds about 150 grams (sufficient to temper between 15 and 30 kg of chocolate) you may find that 6 containers aren't needed.

Don't know if it's any better than Smucker's but it's Dole - http://shop.doleplantation.com/browse.cfm/4,266.html Was trying to find the pineapple and coconut preserves that I purchased at the One of a Kind craft show a bunch of years ago (and promptly came home and cloned) - but it appears that company is no long in existence.

It was still tasty - just not quite what I was expecting. I've got a hankering for a sauerkraut soup now too.

I happen to have one (surplus to the needs of the lab) with stir bars that I have purchased from amazon and some nice old beakers that were never used - and I have been known to use them. Haven't hooked them up to a PID however to keep a steady temperature. K