Ben C

All the bars, regardless of height, are 3/4in. wide.

Ah, you're talking about a having an intact, single-piece 4-sided frame, correct? Now that's the way to go. I'm working with bars (2 long, 2 short for each height) for flexibility purposes, not to mention the fact that I'm still fine tuning my recipes quantity-wise. Either way, turns out to be a very functional and cost-effective solution.

Hi, I wanted to update: The acrylic bars worked as a flawless substitute for aluminum caramel bars. They're an ideal weight, the don't flex, and the polished surface is perfect for sliding a spatula across to cleanly slab whatever you're working with. So far I've used them exclusively for ganache. And if you work on silpat, it'll provide sufficient friction to prevent the bars from moving around. I'm working with a self-healing cutting mat and a metal ruler to make accurate cuts. In most cases having a ruler etched into the acrylic as I suggested in my previous post would be useless as the ganache usually works its way onto the bars, obscuring the markings. That, and little ridges cut into the bars would be a pain to keep clean. There are some acrylic fabrication houses that offer laser etching inside the acrylic a few millimeters deep, without marring the surface. This is something I'll look into down the road. Ben

Thanks all. Yeah, info on the various California/Los Angeles city/Los Angeles county websites seems inexplicably hard to come by. There is this one page on LA's Public Health Department site that seems hopelessly out of date, and I haven't been able to reach anyone thus far at the number at the bottom. If the folks at Premier Food Safety are to be believed, all the cert. programs I mentioned in my original post are acceptable. ServSafe does appear to be the program of choice among all the test organizations; I just wish there was some hard info explaining why. It's always slightly more expensive than the others as well. Ben

Hi there, Can someone explain the qualitative differences among the various food safety certification programs like ServSafe, Prometric, NRFSP, etc.? Or are there any to begin with? I'm launching a chocolates business and will shortly be investigating commercial kitchen rental. I must confess that at this preliminary stage, I am utterly clueless about the bureaucratic side of things. Based on a cursory search, ServSafe appears to be the most "popular," if that means anything; however, here in Los Angeles it appears that any formal certification is acceptable so long as it's administered by an accredited organization. Thanks for your help, Ben C

I may be jumping the gun here—I haven't actually used the things yet since I just picked up my order today—but another material to consider if you wish to avoid the high cost of pre-fab caramel bar/confectionery frames is solid acrylic. I had a series of bars cut to order from sheet-rolled, foodsafe acrylic. They must be cut from sheets, as extruded acrylic bars come in limited dimensions and are usually imperfect (the sides are not quite flat, and thus will not rest flush on your work surface). Solid acrylic is heavier than aluminum and quite rigid. I had a series of 40 (!) bars made in 2 lengths to fit a half sheet pan, of varying heights, for 116 bucks. The real ace in the hole is that you can have a ruler laser etched into the bars to make neat hand-cutting a breeze. That, however, is expensive, (for 40 bars, anyway) and I'm still soliciting quotes...