Kerry Beal

Here you go - not perfectly smooth as you can see - but I only let the Preethi run til it liquified. Would be smoother if I ran longer.

Pretty sure Andie is a big fan of the Cadco ovens.

Sure - but I'm working a 24 hour shift - will do it tomorrow. It did occur to me last night I should do it!

The end result - a couple of bars of cocoa mass - unsweetened. Will use these to play with stevia when we get up north.

I'm quite pleased with myself! One of the stumbling blocks for some the bean to bar manufacturers is that they wish to be two ingredient only - cacao and sugar. They don't want to add 'foreign' cocoa butter in order to temper. Trials into using the bean to bar chocolate itself as the seed has been less than encouraging. So when one of the bean to bar guys who had seen the EZtemper said he was considering one if he could extract his own cocoa butter - that got me thinking. I actually have ordered a little oil press called a Piteba from Holland and will play with that when it arrives - but a YouTube video of extracting cocoa butter reminded me of cracking coconut milk or frying the spices in a curry paste - and I started experiments into 'stovetop extraction' of cocoa butter. I have a new Indian spice grinder since my Sumeet started giving me trouble. I put a couple of handfuls of cacao nibs in the grinder and let her rip for 5 minutes or so until I got liquor. Added some water and cooked down until the fat started to separate out. Collected the cocoa butter a bit at a time as it was released. Gave it a chance to reach room temperature - then placed in the EZtemper for a few hours until it was silky. Used it to temper a batch of 'nib to bar' that I made - again using the spice grinder. Will put up pictures of the finished bars later - had to leave for work before they were ready to knock out.

Saw one just like it in a thrift store today.

They are making poor cuts - they are trying to get all the alcohol out of their fermented product rather than throwing away the first bits that contain all the acetone like compounds. When alcohol is distilled you get the methanol off first, then the acetone stuff, then finally the 'hearts' and finish up with tails that can smell like wet dog depending on what the wash is. You air out the various cuts, sniff, taste and decide which should be added together to get good flavour, which should be used as cleaning fluid and which should be added to your next batch for another run.

It was the Korean supermarket - got some in the freezer.

My mother always mashed potatoes with the Mixmaster stand mixer taken off it's base - all 10 lbs of it. Made wonderful mashed spuds!

Something like that should work. Then apparently I can pasteurize it as well.

I know you can use the remaining rice as a dish - but I think that the wine does need to be separated out.

Doing a little reorganizing of the upstairs freezer this morning - found some frozen red peppers slated for red pepper jelly. Did the grinding up in the thermomix and decided to make the jelly in there too. Mise en place has never been my strong suit - so about half way through I realized there was no certo in the house. Fortunately there was some apple pectin that had been a complete failure in Pate de Fruit because it was made for jam so I was able to recover. It's a little loose - but actually that's the texture I like for this particular jelly.

Picked up a 7 quart basket of tomatoes at the farmer's market in Dunnville yesterday morning before my shift started. The lovely woman trusted me with the basket - given the assurance that I'd bring the basket back before my shift next week. Of course then I'll probably come home with another of her baskets! One of the tomatoes seemed to be suffering from some congenital anomolies. Tomato juice made in the thermomix from half a dozen of the lovely canners.

It's fermenting season and this year I decided that it was time for something new. A bit of reading on some home-brew sites resulted in a cobbled together recipe. I used thai glutinous rice, chinese yeast balls as well as some red yeast rice. I found the red yeast rice easily enough in the aisle of one of the asian groceries in Hamilton - but was having trouble finding the yeast balls. I pulled up a picture on my phone, showed it to the store owner who pulled a handful of them from a candy jar right next to her on the counter! I tried to say I wasn't after candy - but indeed it was the yeast and we had a good laugh. Alternating layers of steamed rice and a sprinking of a mixture of the ground up yeast ball and the red yeast rice. Day 1. No water is added. 3 days later - look at all those lovely mycelia. The fungi will convert the carbohydrate in the rice to alcohol and a certain amount of liquid will form. It already smells quite wonderful. I've filled the better part of a 10 litre stainless container - I suspect I'll get around a litre or perhaps more of rice wine. It should finish in 30 days or so. Then I'll figure out how I'm going to strain and perhaps cold crash to clarify.

We shall name them Andie's Scwafflles - they will be bigger than Cronuts!

Amazing what you can put together at work with a microwave.

Hit the grocery store early this am before work - happened to notice these on sale so picked them up for the gang at work to try. So the Cowboy BBQ Beans were like a really nice BBQ chip with a hint of bean flavour in there. The smoked meat had a pastrami like flavour on first bite - faded in subsequent bites.

Not a success as I recall from here.

I like it with veal schnitzel.

Fortunate?

I like to add some milk powder to the milk I make yogurt with to make it thicker.

Made some peach and red pepper chutney the other day - will need to figure out what to do with it.

Yup - all those other flavours were available too - doesn't mean they don't suck!

Found this wonderfully round popcorn in the Korean store - knew it was perfect for panning. Of course then I realized it needed to be caramelized. Used Jayme's recipe for caramelized corn - sans nuts. Then I realized it wasn't coated in white chocolate - it needed to be caramelized white chocolate - so I put some into my stainless screw top container and into the pressure cooker for a couple of hours. Added some extra cocoa butter. And finally engrossed the caramelized popcorn. Not polished yet.

That is such a shame Rob. With a little fiddling you might find that it actually helps you when the weather is less cooperative - but the first time is clearly not the time to experiment!