Tri2Cook

I don't know your age and I'm not gonna ask but... wow. I have to go all the way back to great-grandparents to get to the 1800's and I am not young.

It's actually pretty easy to avoid that. It was a little slower than the flood and scrape method initially but I've done it enough now that it's almost as fast and probably faster overall if you account for cleanup. Even if it's still a little slower, it's a price I'm willing to pay to avoid some cleanup. In a well equipped chocolate kitchen with all the big machines that make life easier, it would probably be less helpful... but that's not the environment I'm currently working in.

That's pretty much the way I do it minus the fancy chocolate squirting machine. I'm pretty sure I've dedicated more time to figuring out ways to minimize the mess of chocolate work than I have to practicing techniques. I hate a big mess to clean up. When I do bars, there's no scraping at all involved. I toss the mold on a scale, add chocolate to the weight needed for that particular mold and just zero the scale and repeat for each cavity. I gave the acetate capping thing a try a few years ago and struggled mightily with it. I'm sure that was all me and I just needed to practice it more but I like the "just enough chocolate to fill the spaces" approach enough that I'll probably never get back to attempting the acetate again.

I follow a few chocolate related instagrams. That's about it for food stuff. I keep saying I need to add more but I honestly only remember to check the ones I have now maybe once a week at best. I don't think I have any of my own posts on my Instagram, I mainly just made it to follow the already mentioned chocolate related stuff.

Ah well, temptation removed... for now.

I like that "Fragment" mold from the linked page. I don't do 100 gram bars but if it shows up on the chocolat chocolat site, I just might change that and give it a shot.

I'm starting to think a lottery win would come with the serious risk of me looking into immigration to Italy so I can eventually die smiling while I stuff one last bite of food down my gullet.

If you're not of the variety who finds evil in drinks from the sweeter side, there's a whole range of coconut drinks in tiki land. I have no opposition to sweetness in drinks but what Hassouni posted above sounds pretty tasty. Gonna have to give that one a try.

When you realize that meal you go to a fine dining restaurant and pay $200+ for is just weeknight dinner to people in Italy. That's not a gift, that's bride price.

Kerry is the better person to answer EZtemper questions but in situations like that, I usually just follow the recipe as written then add the 1% silk at the end. I don't even make adjustments to the cocoa butter which I realize means I'm adding a very small amount (proportionally) of extra cocoa butter in the form of silk. I figure we're adding that extra cocoa butter in every case because there's no other recipe adjustments for adding silk so I just don't worry about it and haven't noticed any negative effects from doing it. But like I said, when it comes to the EZtemper, I'd suggest going with what Kerry suggests. She knows the ins and outs of working with it more than anybody else.

I come to look at all the nice food and then contribute nothing but a sandwich. Needed food for the college football championship game last night and didn't want a lot of work or a big mess. The game was in New Orleans and with Bama not in it, I decided to stick with the SEC and was pulling for LSU so the muffuletta seemed like the perfect solution. Instead of the traditional giant sandwich, I went with individual sized on ciabatta buns.

Yes, please... but my brain doesn't comprehend tacos in numbers smaller than six and generally prefers larger numbers than that.

I've never worked in the settings you describe so I can't be of much help in that area. There's only 2 possibilities really, either someone already thought of it and couldn't find a large enough market for it or there is a large enough market and nobody's recognized it and filled that void. If it's the second one, you just may be on to something.

I assume these wouldn't be full size ovens in width and depth with just less vertical space or they wouldn't be much cheaper to run. They would probably be more costly to run once you were running more than one. The problem, outside of buying and wiring a bunch of single shelf ovens, is that you have a bunch of single shelf ovens. So you either have them all on or you hope you aren't busier than what you have on can handle or you're waiting (which means your customers are waiting) for additional ovens to heat when it's busier than anticipated. Even if it's a single unit with multiple independently controlled single shelf ovens built into it, that would only solve he wiring difficulty... the other problems would remain.

Well, there's the part where 1/3 the size is not going to be 1/3 the cost but I don't know if you're factoring cost as an important consideration.

Howdy. I'm one lottery win away from being retired from a food career... so I'll probably never get to use the "retired cook" user name.

And???

Had to go back and refresh the memory... no reason to fix what isn't broke, looks tasty.

New Year's eve, no idea what or if I'm doing. New Year's day will be pork, greens, black eyed peas and corn bread in forms I can munch throughout the day while watching the Citrus, Rose and Sugar bowl games. It took me 5 days to eat the leftovers from Christmas dinner, I'm not doing another big dinner. I already pickled some collard greens with pearl onions and hot peppers. I'm making a salad tomorrow with the black eyed peas, the ol' "cowboy caviar" style. For the corn bread, I'm breaking out the cake pop baker. I'm gonna load the cavities with corn bread batter with a frozen ball of pimento cheese in the middle and bake them as needed. I'm still deciding what I want to do with pork. There will be the already mentioned pimento cheese in it's more natural state as well and I made some hot chow chow just because it's always been a part of the more traditional version of the New Year's meal for me. And I'm using a lot more sense with the quantities than I did at Christmas so I don't have to eat this stuff until I temporarily hate it.

Don't hesitate, that wasn't my intention at all. The girls don't always listen when I tell them not to spend money on me. Younger young'un went on a trip a couple months ago to visit a friend and she brought me a couple nice food-related gifts from a craft fair she attended while there. They just weren't given as holiday gifts or I would have posted it here. I enjoy the posts in this thread, seeing people happy about what they received is part of the joy of the season.

No food/drink related gifts this year. My only gift was seeing happy faces on the girls and grandsons. That's plenty gift enough for me. The older girl and her husband work hard to pay the bills and take care of their two boys, it doesn't leave a lot of extra. I insisted they just spend on the boys, there's nothing I might want that I would tell them about because I wouldn't want them to spend it on me. The younger girl is still in school. She works but doesn't make a lot, I told her not to spend it on me. In case it sounds like it, this is not complaining or bemoaning the Ghost of Christmas Disappointment. Entirely the opposite, in fact... I'm thankful for all that I have. The only thing that could make it better is if Ann was still here. Happy Holidays to all of my eGullet friends.

Christmas grub decided. That beautiful free-range, farm raised, etc. etc. turkey I received at work weighs just a few ounces short of 22 lbs. It's just me and the kid so I foresee a whole lot of turkey-based leftovers in my future. I'm going to spatchcock the bird today, blanch the skin with boiling water, salt it at 1% and toss it in the fridge uncovered for 24 hours or so. My number one rule of poultry... thou shalt not eat skin that is not extra crispy. It's my problem with chicken wings. I hate soggy skin but if you pull it off, you also pull off whatever seasoning or sauce was used. Anyway, to accompany said bird will be gravy (of course), stuffing that will include a healthy dose of my homemade breakfast sausage (I made a batch a little heavier than usual on the sage for this purpose), jalapeno mac & cheese (I make a big batch of the nacho cheese sauce from chefsteps, mix it with the pasta, a little butter and some additional grated cheese, top it with crushed Ritz crackers that have been fried a bit in butter, then bake), collard greens sautéed in bacon grease with onion, cranberry sauce (the jellied kind, straight out of the can) and, non-traditional with turkey but by request of the kid, Yorkshire puddings. She likes to dip them in gravy, something she's done since she was a small child. Dessert is going to be a honey vanilla cheesecake. I'm making lots of everything. I'm actually getting a few days off work and I don't intend to do a whole lot of cooking during that time after tomorrow's big meal so I scaled everything to provide adequate leftovers to allow for my planned laziness.

Don't grow your own unless you really like them or have a contained area to plant them in. The small patch in the corner of our garden at the house where I used to live turned into the air smelling like onion every time I mowed the lawn because they spread out and took over a large section of the yard within a couple years.

It works fine. I've always thought of it more as thinning the chocolate with additional cocoa butter than coloring the cocoa butter with chocolate but it ends up in the same place whichever way you say it. You don't need to waste a lot of resource to try it. Just combine a little melted chocolate and cocoa butter until you get a consistency that will spray easily then spray a cavity or three and see if you like the result. I wish I had a specific ratio to give you, that would probably sound much more professional, but I honestly have never measured it out that precisely.

I'm not sure what Christmas dinner is going to be in it's entirety. I knew it wasn't going to be turkey, was leaning towards ham. Until today when I found out we were getting turkeys as a gift at work. They're supposedly some fancy turkeys with all the buzzwords attached that means they're much better and more ethical than the average grocery store turkey. I don't say that to be flippant, I realize how our food is produced is important, I'm just not the world's #1 turkey fan so my excitement level isn't as high as those birds probably deserve. But be that as it may, I do appreciate the thought and it looks like I'm cooking a turkey for Christmas because I don't really have freezer space to give up for it right now.