Chris Hennes

Greweling presents both techniques - the critical thing for him seems to be keeping the chocolate in temper, either through careful combination of hot cream and solid chocolate, or through adding both together at the correct temperature. In my experience a ganache made with tempered chocolate sets up much faster, but is otherwise about the same as one made without regard to tempering the chocolate. Of course, others here have vastly more experience than I do...

I found them for about $60 at Kalustyans. That's a bit ridiculous, IMHO.

One of these days Wybauw's new book, "Fine Chocolates 2: Ganache" will become available. No in-stock info on Amazon, but various people have found it at other stores, I believe. Hopefully the translation is better in this one than in the first...

Those look great - I especially like the "turtle" bar. How firm is your caramel?

Not a wholesale source, but the price is OK (at least, compared to the places selling them for $60/lb): BuonItalia It says they are peanuts, but they sure look like pistachios to me...

I think you could make tire-shaped meatballs work, without a rim, if you had a way to get them shaped such that the meat was relatively compact (dense). Then, instead of frying them in a frying pan, deep-fry them at a pretty high temp to give them a good crust - it doesn't matter if the inside gets cooked or not, since you will be giving them a good re-heating later. I do this to good effect with regular meatballs because my wife likes them crispy on the outside. The crust holds them together pretty well, but they stay moist on the inside.

In my apartment the exhaust fan doesn't exhaust outside, and is really pathetic besides. So I have set off the fire alarm (in the whole building, mind you) a time or two. Now I heat up a heavy pan on high, put a fan in the kitchen window, pull the pan off the heat and go stand in front of the fan and *then* drop whatever I am cooking on it. But it better cook fast! I can only hold it there so long.

Great thanks - of course, now Chocosphere calls me to tell me that both the white chocolate and the cocoa butter I ordered are out of stock.. great timing, I get new toys and can't play with them yet!

I wasn't sure where the most appropriate place to put this question was: I just got a honeycomb texture sheet from Chef Rubber to play around with, and I can't tell whether it is supposed to be reusable or not. That will make a difference in what sort of "playing around" I do . I assume that the chocolate is supposed to release cleanly from the sheet -- do I wash it after that, or just leave it alone? Or throw it out?

Well, after all this discussion about habañero oil, I ended up making the Coconut Lemongrass truffles instead (many more images on my website): I really like the coconut coating - it makes them look great, despite any imperfections in the coating. I'm still getting the hang of the white chocolate, but thanks to whoever suggested I use the immersion blender on it -- that worked great. I do have a technique question, however: how can I prevent back-contaminating the chocolate I am using to coat the truffles with coconut? I tried to employ the "wet hand - dry hand" technique, but it takes both hands to coat the truffles (I am hand-rolling, not dipping, since the chocolate is so thick). Inevitably I ended up getting coconut in the bowl of chocolate, which means I can't re-use it for anything.

In "Charcuterie" Ruhlman's got a recipe for a Foie Gras sausage - most sausage keeps well in the freezer due to the high fat content. I imagine this would be no exception. Alternately, I accept donations...

I've wondered about this myself. It seems to me that Greweling has tried to get things to work out so that the addition of the hot cream just melts the chocolate, without bringing it out of temper completely (at least, making sure there is enough tempered chocolate remaining to seed the rest when you agitate it), but it didn't work out for me on the Chai Tigers. Trying Shotts' Coconut-lemongrass truffles this weekend I had let the cream cool down for a few minutes before adding it to the chocolate and the final temp after emulsifying was 86 degrees, which I think was very good, and resulted in the ganache setting up pretty fast.

I spent $100 on eBay for this one: It is way more than I need for home use in terms of power. It is also very quiet -- the biggest problem is that it is MASSIVE. I had to buy a cart to put it on (so tack another $100 onto the price tag if you will need to do that!). Cleanup is easier than I expected, but not totally trivial. It probably takes 5-10 minutes to wipe everything down. I count that as a bargain compared to the time it takes to hand-slice 10 lbs of bacon!

Tabbouleh - it's basically a parsley salad, at least the way I make it.

Oh, I wasn't worried about using it all up! Quite the opposite - infused oils have a fairly limited shelf-life before they go rancid. So I figured that basically every time I wanted to make this recipe (say every couple months) I would have to make new oil.

Thanks for the input - that's exactly what I needed to know. I'll just pick up some hot oil at the local asian foods store and use that. Maybe this time I should taste the ganache before letting it cool... what a concept! Yeah, that's about what I found. The problem with making your own is that it's not really any different from just using the habanero directly - every batch of oil will have a different heat level, so every few months when you made a new supply you'd need to re-learn the heat level.

We're talking about, what, a $10 duck breast? I just don't understand why you'd want to risk getting sick over something like that. Sure, chances are slim, but why take the risk? I'm sure we've all got anecdotal evidence that we've done it and not gotten sick, but I'm telling you: food poisoning is NOT PLEASANT. We're not talking like just "bad hangover" kinda sick here... talk to someone who's had it. It's just not worth the risk.

Yeah, I'm definitely in favor of using the oils, I am just wondering what the stuff *is*. In the image in the book it looks like a nearly-perfectly clear liquid, which certainly does not describe the various "hot-sauce" type products, or even "hot oil" type products, I have seen. That, and the local Wegman's was out of habañeros last night. Doh!

Pitch it and get a fresh one. No question. Food safety experts would say that it shouldn't have been allowed to thaw on the counter for any length of time, let alone overnight. I know, I hate tossing stuff too, but you could regret it, very very badly. Risk/reward just isn't there...

Greweling's got a recipe for "Habanos" which use a whole habañero infused in the cream. It is Shotts who uses the oil (I can't recall the name he gives his truffle off the top of my head).

In fact, when I make it I totally ignore whatever quantity of lemon juice is listed in the recipe and simply keep adding it until it tastes good (i.e. not just like butter!). Adding the correct amount of salt also seems to be critical, in my experience. Again, I generally ignore the recipe here and add salt until I like the flavor. In a sauce that is so reliant on the butter, the variations in brands of butter actually has a real influence on the finished product, so just following the recipe is not guaranteed to give you a good-tasting sauce, in my opinion. Sounds like you had the right approach, trying to tweak it, but I think sticking with the original ingredients and just slowly adding more lemon juice and salt until it tastes good is your best bet. Edited to add: just re-read your original post and it seems that you are not a fan of the "lemon butter" flavor. So these "more lemon" suggestions may not be what you are looking for. Nevertheless, in a sauce whose components are butter, egg, lemon, and salt, "lemon butter" is basically the flavor you are going for, with an ethereal, creamy, emulsified texture. Think veggies with a lemon/butter sauce, but taken up a notch. I like it on some fish as well. And eggs benedict. And...

OK, now I'm looking for a source for habañero oil -- is this just a "hot sauce" type product, or is it more like an extract of habañero? I'm going to make a quick batch of hand-rolled truffles while I'm waiting for this mold to arrive... I'm impatient .

I was actually surprised by this suggestion, since my understanding of how microwaves work is that the waves cause the water molecules to vibrate, which then gets transmitted to nearby non-water molecules. So I would not expect a plate to get hot from microwaving. Of course, I've been known to be mistaken...

Nah, they wanted to say "it's only got a bit of cream, so don't expect a 'cream sauce,' and don't panic about the fat content -- it's health food, we swear" but it didn't fit on the menu.

That's clever - I was thinking of trying an immersion blender or something along those lines. Have you done it that way before? How does it compare to manually shaking the drinks?