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dcat

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  1. Mulberries, despite appearances, are not related to blackberries and raspberries and grow on trees rather than canes. It's been so long since I've had a red, or American, mulberry that I don't remember what they taste like, and I've never seen or tasted either a white or black mulberry. Blackberries and raspberries are both members of the genus Rubus (as are dewberries, cloudberries, thimbleberries, and salmonberries, none of which, as far as I know, are cultivated commercially). Dewberries are similar to blackberries while thimbleberries, which look like a strangely formed raspberry, don't have much flavor at all. I've not had an opportunity to try either cloudberries or salmonberries. Crosses between blackberries and raspberries include loganberries, tayberries, and boysenberries. Loganberries are more tart, and tayberries less tart, than blackberries. Both have a distinctly different flavor than blackberries. Boysenberries are slightly less tart than many blackberry varieties and tend to be larger, but I don't find their flavor difference to be much different from blackberries -- more like the difference between different varieties of blackberries (e.g., Marion, Chester, Brazos) -- compared to the difference between blackberries and tayberies or, especially, loganberries. The red raspberry is probably the most common raspberry type but there are also yellow varieties that are very similar in flavor. The yellow raspberries I have access to tend to be even more fragile than any of the available red raspberry varieties. Black raspberries are smaller, have a higher proportion of seeds, and are less productive than red raspberries, but they have a distinctively different flavor that makes them worth searching out. Red raspberries seem to me to have a brighter, sweeter flavor than black raspberries. There's also a purple raspberry that's a cross between a red and a black raspberry, but I've never tasted one.
  2. dcat

    nonfat dry milk

    Maybe it's a difference in brands. I seem to recall some odd aromas from the stuff I used years ago (I can't remember the brand) but I've been getting my non-fat dry milk powder from Bob's Red Mill for the past few years and its aroma and flavor is pretty mild. I just grabbed the container out of the pantry to evaluate it. Dry, it has a slight buttered popcorn aroma; when mixed with water the odor is reminiscent of tapioca. The flavor is fairly bland, not unlike the flavor of non-fat milk out of a carton. (As if I needed a reminder of why I don't drink non-fat milk.)
  3. One way to eliminate the rounded corners of the structure sheet is to use a puffy blush/cosmetics brush on the top. It would be a lot more work. I think you'd have to cut the structure sheet into individual squares and place each piece one at a time. Currently I don't have an enrober, but that's what we did when I worked at a chocolate shop in France. ← I use a 4-tine dipping fork to apply just enough pressure to set the individual squares of structure sheet to hand-dipped pieces. (No enrober for me either; I haven't found one small enough to fit in my kitchen.) The 4-tine fork is the right size to fit the dipped pralines and allows me to apply the sheets quicker than when I used a narrower fork or my finger. There's still a bit of rounding on the finished piece, but it's usually not very noticible unless the chocolate is too thick. The thicker the chocolate, the more pronounced the rounding seems to be. One of these days I'll get a brush and try it for comparision.
  4. I recently switched from dusting marshmallows with a 50/50 mix of potato starch and confectioners sugar to straight potato starch and have been having problems with the starch picking up so much moisture that the starch isn't really usable for dusting after about 1/3 of a 1/4 sheet pan of marshmallows (it clumps up, won't stick to the marshmallows, and has to be replaced with fresh starch). I never had problems with the starch/sugar mix picking up any significant amount of moisture. I prefer the end result from using all starch but the moisture problem makes for a frustrating work session. I also don't have much use for all the wet potato starch that I have left at the end. I've tried drying it in a 200F oven, but even after 12 hours of drying it's still not as dry as the fresh starch out of the bag. (Would a higher temp or more time help?) The first time I encountered the problem I thought it might be a humidity issue, but the humidity level in the house was typical for springtime here (about 45-50% RH), in other words not any higher than during previous marshmallow sessions. The only difference was the switch to straight potato starch. The marshmallows themselves also did not seem to have any more moisture than normal. In fact the strawberry marshmallows I did yesterday had less moisture than the strawberry marshmallows I did a month ago (I modified the recipe so they wouldn't be as wet this time), but I had problems with the starch picking up moisture that I didn't have with the starch/sugar mix before. Any ideas on how to deal with the moisture problem? Or is this just the nature of potato starch? I'd prefer to not go back to a starch/sugar mix if at all possible.
  5. Thanks for all your reports. There's a lot of good information here and I'm looking forward to the rest of your reports.
  6. Did JPW discuss the reasoning behind adding the butter to the hot cream? Did he metion any pros and cons of doing so? Every other reference I've seen says that you do not want to melt the butter. Greweling, for example, says to not melt the butter "so as not to separate that [the butter's] emulsion and to preserve the smooth mouthfeel." I've not, yet, had any problems incorporating softened butter into the ganache once the chocolate and cream are combined, but if there's no advantage to doing so, it would sometimes be easier if I didn't have to warm the butter up from fridge temp first.
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