Kerry Beal

Ruth - put both jars in there - the one with that's mottled and the one that looks so gorgeous and see if they temper the same or not. My theory - as I mentioned before a few posts ago - is that cocoa butter that is heated above the melting temperature of all the crystal types and allowed to simply cool without seeding - will contain mostly form IV crystals initially, which will give streaky chocolate when used as seed. In a couple of weeks of just sitting - the form IV will transform to form V.

Weck - as in beef on weck. Western New York.

Will be purely experimental! Maybe I can find some volunteers up there to be my guinea pigs.

Discovered about 20 kg of cocoa mass (read unsweetened chocolate) in a dark corner of my chocolate room. Picked up some Stievia at Trader Joes. Will take some north and do a little experimenting.

Rehabilitated cocoa butter after 12 hours. After 24 hours. On the right 300 grams of chocolate tempered with 3 grams of rehabilitated cocoa butter, on the left with regular old EZtemper silk. This is about half an hour after introducing the silk, and a few minutes in the fridge. It still feels a bit warm - but snaps cleanly and resists marking.

I think that almost everyone will experience the laxation effect of maltitol if enough is taken in! It's everything in moderation IMHO.

I realized that my child's last day at school is Tuesday and that I have no goodies prepared for the dozen or so teachers, educational assistants and volunteers who help in her classroom. When I was making the video of making and cutting the ganache I had some camera issues (battery now replaced and larger memory card in there) and had to make the ganache over a couple of times because I thought I had recorded video that I didn't. So I had a couple of slabs of tasty ganache sitting around to use. Melted around 1 kg of chocolate that has seen better days (a combination of various dark chocolates used for various projects, some of which spent way too long forgotten in the fridge and suffered from sugar bloom due to condensation), cooled to 33.5º C, added 10 grams of silk to temper it and started dipping. These were dipped first - chocolate was still around 33º C, topped with the transfers, and placed in the fridge for a few minutes after the whole tray was dipped. At about 30 minutes after I started dipping them I was able to remove the transfers and because the chocolate was warm when I dipped and it fully crystallizes so quickly with the EZtemper silk the transfers all worked. In the past I would wait overnight before removing the transfers to allow the chocolate to fully crystallize and ensure the pattern would transfer. Playing with gold in alcohol I discovered that one of my little whisks makes and interesting pattern on the surface. Twelve boxes of chocolates ready to go to school on Monday.

New issue being worked through. Old cocoa butter suffers from transformation of form V to form VI. So I've had a couple of folks who have put old cocoa butter in the unit and ended up with lumpy (and not particularly silky) silk after 12 hours. Increasing the temperature by 0.1 or 0.2 still leaves you with a silky background with lots of little crystalline lumps in it. The first person who had this issue simply melted some additional old cocoa butter, cooled to 33.5 C, seeded with the rather lumpy silk and ended up with cocoa butter he was then able to put in the unit and produce silk that was silky as it should be and functions as it should when tempering. I spoke with another individual who was actually using the same cocoa butter as the first person - explained what had been done and suggested he try it. Unfortunately he added the not very silky silk at 35º C so melted out all his form V and form VI crystals. He cooled the cocoa butter back to room temperature, then placed it back in the unit. The silk he produced was wonderfully silky but didn't temper his bean to bar chocolate (given the temperatures used he probably has cocoa butter silk that now contains predominately form IV crystals). He now needs to let his cocoa butter sit for a week or so in order for the form IV crystals to transform to form V which they will do. So I've been playing around this morning to confirm that I can short circuit this wait time by seeding my melted cocoa butter with the EZtemper silk and be able to use it in 12 hours or so. Just happened so have some 'older' cocoa butter in the unit - best before date on the bag 2013 - you can see it's lumpy with little pockets of form VI crystals. Melted it to around 45C. Cooled to 33.5C - added around 2% or so of silk made from cocoa butter best before date of 2016. Poured some into a container, cooled to room temperature and placed back in the EZtemper. Made some little plaques with some. A slightly bigger bar with the rest. The plaques and bar were cooled in the fridge for 10 minutes or so and fell right out of the mold. Later this evening I will take the rehabilitated cocoa butter that is in the EZtemper and confirm that it works as it should to temper.

Yup - just dip into a container of tempered milk chocolate - they do use a fair amount - and because they are such good insulators they need to go into the fridge fairly quickly or the latent heat of crystallization can actually cause them to bloom.

Experiments in using chocolate instead of cocoa butter as seed continue - I haven't gotten my hands on a temper meter yet - so I'm just looking at the things I normally do to determine good temper. This is a chunk of bean to bar chocolate I was sent to play with. I melted some of the bean to bar - added EZtemper silk, poured it out overnight, broke it up and put it back in the EZtemper unit. Some I simply added to a container and put in the unit. I had around 1 kg of badly out of temper chocolate sitting around - so melted to around 45 C then cooled to 33.5. I split this into 3 bowls with 300 grams each. Added 3 grams of cocoa butter silk to one, 7 grams each of the bean to bar 'seeds'. This is the addition of the bean to bar version that had been tempered, cooled and put back in the EZtemper. On left - cocoa butter silk, in the middle tempered bean to bar, on the right - untempered bean to bar. The two bean to bar were very difficult to mix - quite lumpy after adding the seed. After pouring out - smooth with silk, lumpy with bean to bar. After a few minutes in the fridge. Clean snap with the silk, a little less snap with the tempered bean to bar, less yet with the untempered bean to bar. Minimal marking rubbing with finger with silk. More marking with tempered bean to bar. Most marking with untempered bean to bar - picture doesn't show it well though. Take away message - cocoa butter is the best option to get great temper - you can use bean to bar - but it will not mix in well. You can get a bit of improvement by tempering some of the bean to bar and using that as your seed - but it is still firmer and difficult to mix in. One thing I might try next with the bean to bar seed is carefully heating after seeding or immersion blending to get rid of the lumps and see if that disperses the seed better.

Here just use cod roe instead.

Was going to suggest that one - I recall it does have a recipe for bialys.

When Rodney and I were playing with sugar panning over chocolate we used dextrose - fast and doesn't require warm syrup. You could probably try with a cool sugar syrup and sucrose. The white chocolate was dyed with IBC Power Flowers - lovely way to get intense colours - there is a palette of colours that you follow which allows you to get consistent colour batch to batch.

Is the syrup a caramel?

Nice job filling in those raisins - they are one of the most difficult for sure. Those malt balls were looking pretty crappy a couple of weeks ago - I'd tried to polish them too early and added too much polish too soon. Rodney (Alleguede) took them home and repolished them for me. I believe he told me that he changed the amounts he added - but standard for the polish is to use 0.3% of the weight of the items for the first polish, then 0.2%, then 0.1%. If they start to shine nicely anywhere along the line - don't bother to add more. If they don't shine - continue adding 0.1% aliquots until they do. Once polished - add 0.2% shellac. I've used Capol 127 and 155 as polish and shellac. I've also been using a polish and shellac recently introduced by Centerchem. So it sounds like you are using just lacquer but not polish. Beeswax and carnauba are used to polish sugar finishes rather than chocolate.

Here you go

Well the 12 V power source I purchased didn't have the oomph required to power the unit - and the little Kensington inverter was also under powered. Thank god for hubbies with voltmeters - here's the cludge that works - not elegant - but functional. And when the 14V power supply is running down the inverter chirps to let you know. Just testing the number of hours I can get with a full charge.

Finally managed to get another video edited - making ganache with EZtemper. Now have a new camera battery and a larger memory card! Camera kept cutting out in the middle of things.

kayb - that brings to mind mango and sticky rice - that would work well with leftover sticky rice from the meal.

Speaking of applesauce - it always accompanied pork chops for dinner at my house - then would be served as dessert - so that works!

Purchased - first batch from Nuts.com, second batch from Superior Nuts (aka Nuts in Bulk) - the second batch were less expensive and nicer, lighter centres. They are made under vacuum - not an easy thing to do at home. I made up that container full of panned items with a bunch of odds and ends I had left - there is quite a variety of things in there - the person who guessed closest to the number of items in there took it!

I have the DeBuyer pan that goes on the Kitchen Aid - and falls out of the 6 quart Kitchen Aid!

Yes they are - they taste kinda like chewy turkish delight done that way. They are always popular - probably sold more of them today than anything else (not saying much given the disappointing day) - but kids seem to love them I suspect because they recognize what they are.

Anna N and I were driving home tonight from an event - discussing food as we usually do - and the discussion evolved from pancakes (and the differences between what are called pancakes in North America vs in GB where Anna grew up) to dutch babies, and how much they are like yorkshire pud - to how sometimes part of dinner becomes dessert. I was telling her that my mother used to take still warm rice, a bit of butter, brown sugar or maple syrup and heavy cream - and that became dessert. I still enjoy that to this day. Anna's family would take leftover yorkshire pud - sprinkle with raspberry vinegar and that would be dessert. Anyone else?

So one of the last things I finished up before the fun fair was a batch of sponge toffee - it turned out perfectly! Too bad it didn't sell! Setting up at the fun fair.