Edward J

Corn flour will weep more readily, but I have found 2 tricks to stop it from doing so. I sub 10-20% of the milk with 33% cream or 20-25% of 10% coffee cream. The higher fat content tends to keep it from weeping. When the mixture has thickened, I let it boil for a good 45 secs-1 min longer. From what I understand, the cornstarch is fully dissolved after this.

The best thermometer for working with chocolate is the one you have in your medicine cabinet: Cheap, accurate to 1/10th of a degree, and you already have it!

(1)Vegetable oil is liquid at room temperature. (2)Cocoa butter is solid at room temperature. (3)The more oil you put in perfectly good chocolate, the softer the chocolate will become, and the "greasier" the mouthfeel will become. These facts will ever change irregardless of which TV prsonality or author is flogging "a new way" of tempring chocolate.

Garlic from China is cheap, and doesn't/shouldn't require refrigeration. Many supermarkets buy a case or two and just let it be. Because garlic from China is cheap, many local growers have given up on it. Growing garlic may require the same care as other produce, but the harvesting and subsequent drying and storing prior to sale does require a bit more time and effort. So, we have a choice, cheap garlic, or good garlic.

It doesn't freeze well and will weep when thawed. It will, however keep for at least 3-4 days in the fridge and takes maybe 10 mins tops to prepare.

The grey/white scum at first boil is dead protein. The fresher the meat/bones are, the less of it there is.

I don't know if the poster YWalker was talking about an electric potato peeler or the small knife kind. An electric potato peeler, found in large commercial kitchens is a tumbler of sorts, a cylinder with rough-coated walls and a spinning bottom that is rough coated as well. Water is introduced, the machine spun, and the peels abraded off. Works well with onions and garlic too, and "back in the day" we would do carrots and parsnips as well. You would, of course, have to remove all knobby bits before running it in the potato peeler.

(....sigh.....) I'll explain just once more: Mycro is pure, 100% cocoa butter. It is melted at 50 c and sprayed into a frozen chamber. Basically, it is pure beta 6 crystals. From my suppliers, I can buy deodourized cocoa butter for around $18.00 per kg, mycro costs about $28 for a 1 kg tub, last time I looked. You can temper with mycro, but you HAVE to hit a very certain temp--34 or 35 I think, before you add 1% of the wieght of the couverture. I'd rather spend the money on a really good quality couverture.......

When my relatives from Switzerland visited us in the '70's they were shocked by the size of our refrigerator (very modest model) and the fact that we only went shopping for food once a week. In Asia, the house hold fridges are pretty small too. My m.i.l. would prepare Chinese n.y. meals of up to 10 dishes for over 50 people, and her fridge was slightly smaller than a bar fridge. And when I was "invited" to my parent's place, when they were still alive, my Mom who was totally N.Americanized (but still retained her accent) was astounded that I would buy a whole chicken and debone it just for the bones to make stock, neatly wrapping the leg and brst meat for her freezer. It never dawned on her that it was far cheaper to do so and that the bones could actually be utilized.

What that paper didn't tell you is that adding lecithin in quantities over 1/2 of 1% will make the chocoalate more viscous--thicker. If you read the label on virtually every couverture*, the lecethin is already added in at the factory--should be the second last or last ingredient on the list. *Some of the really high end ones don't add lecithin, the sales price reflects the lack of it.

Why not use a higher quality chocolate, i.e. one that has a higher percentage of cocoa and less sugar for flavour boosting? I am highly suspicious of any chocolate extracts, as I am highly suspicious of "wine extracts"

For what it's worth, there is very little emulisifiers in chocolate. True, there is soy lecithin in most couvertures,* but this is added in dosages of under .5%. The main reason soy lecethin is added is not to "emulsify", (you need water phase to make an emulsion, and there is no, "0%", diddly squat, water in chocolate), but in small amounts, this dosage of soy lecthin mimics the addition of more cocoa butter. In other words, it is added to make the chocolate more fluid. If dosages exceed .5% the chocolate thickens up waaay too much. * Some of the real expensive couvertures, a.k.a. Cluizel, Felchlin, etc, have no soy lecethin added. The couverture is expensive enought that more cocoa butter can be added for fluid properties.

None. My daughter set up a F.B. account for me, but I haven't looked at it yet, and that was over a year ago. Most of my time is spent with my business, my family, or sleeping. I spend maybe 2 hrs/day on the 'puter, with most of my time on forums like this.

Stupid question, but...... Why can't you put the freezer in your home? Ther are stand up models as well, and they're not such space hogs as the chest type.

I dunno about that one. True, my visits to Germany have been very brief, but I lived and worked in Switzerland for many years, and have worked with many Germans, Austrians, and Swiss. As the regions change, so does the pronunciation, shape,and to a certain extent, the ingredient list of the beloved spaetzle (sorry, no umlaut on my keyboard. On a previous thread, I questioned the pronunciation of "Caramel" which I feel should be pronounced "Care-a mel", but was reminded that according to some new wiki, it is accepted to proniounce it "Car-muhl" with the "a" in the middle silent. Meh, it's a moot point....

A big "Thank You!! for that statement. Owners have been telling Groupon and clones the same thing (3 e-mail requests and 2 followup phone calls since Jan 3 for me--and counting), but if customers tell 'em the same thing, maybe this (deleted) stuff will finally go away for good.

Where does it vent out to?

Bought about $300 worth of specialty chocolate books (Wybauw) last year. Don't know about this I-pad/kindle thing. I've got a funny feeling that in the next 5 years or so the big boys (Mac, and who ever else is still around) will duke it out. On a competely different subject, my Dad sitll has his beta vcr and a couple hundred of his beta cssettes.

I've got a problem with this concept..... Gas is a fossil fuel and it does produce waste as it burns. Running a kithen fan usually removes this waste, but in order to heat a kitchen it would be counter intuitive to run the fan. Thoughts?

I started off with a 8 lb melter and a cruddy chocovision table top jobbie. The following year I got a 25 lb melter, which I used exclusively for dark. Milk went in the 8 lb, white in the chocovision. In October I got another 25 lb melter. I split this one 50/50 for milk and white. The 8 lb melter, melted. Gawd what a stench. By April I got a wheel for one of the 25lb melters. Right after got it,my table-top made in Korea vibrator went. Got a new,larger,and quiter vibrator. Had to pay freight charges all over again. I can pop the wheel into the milk melter, but have to clean the whole thing before going from milk to dark The following Ocotober I got a new 8lb melter, exclusively for white. Build your equipment gradually, in accordance with your orders

I dunno about specials and loyalty programs. Twice a year I have a "special sale" when I ofer my chocolates/pastries at heavily discounted prices--boxing day, before I close down for a week, and early August, before I close down for a week. I find that many of the people show up for specials only come on those two days. In other words, I am training my customers to wait 6 mths for a special to come into the store. Loyalty programs often get abused. Cards/credit is often transfered onto other people, long expired cards are presented and disccount demanded. These are just my humble opinions from my side of the cash register....

Don't use them much, and when I do, the cheapest variety available. For greasy pots and pans I use..........(Drum roll please) cardboard box tops and newspapers. It's a habit I picked up as a 16 yr old while washing dishes at Greek restaurants, Owner caught me hosing off bacon grease laden sheet pans down the sink and freaked out. Made me cut off some box tops, and using them as a scraper, shoveled off all the grease and crud directly in the garbage. As a special treat, he made me muck out the grase trap to reinforce the idea of how much grease I was sending down the drain. Plastic pastry scrapers make quick work of scraping/shoveling off pre-soaked or moist crud quite easily. There is a chain of local bbq house (Memphis Blues) that has a paper towel holder on each table of it's restaurants in lieu of napkins. Cute, and probably cheaper..

I for one have a real issue with that statement. Are people being forcefed McD's burgers? 2 l bottles of pop being shoved into their grocery carts with death threats not to remove? Forced at gunpoint to consume hot chocolate with whipped cream at Stawbucks? Who, then can we blame? Society on the whole? Advertisers? The Senate who just recently allowed that Pizza is indeed healthy and french fries are a serving of vegetables for school hot lunch program? Blame anybody, just not ourselves. We have nothing to do with what we put in our mouths and how we use our bodies...

Glasses don't really matter for me, if I have the space, I like to hang them upside down. Mugs are a different story. Pick up your mug and turn it upside down. If it is ceramic, odds are that the underside rim is not glazed--it will be chalky white. This is actually quite abrasive, and will scratch the glaze on the drinking rim if stacked ontop of each other.

Wood cutting boards: -Wood is a natural material, it swells with moisture/humidty and shrinks in dry enviroments. This happens with 300 and 500 year old furniture as well as modern kiln dried wood. No body has been able to stop wood movement--other than impregnating the wood with acrylics--so the natual thing to do is expect and make adjustments for wood movement. A cutting board is usually made up of several pieces of wood which are glued together. The glue is waterproof, but will eventually fail becasue of the high heat and steam generated in the d/washer. Almost always a wood cutting baord that has been washed in a d/washer will crack and fail at the glue joints, starting first at the edges, then weakening along the glue joint untill it falls apart or the joint is so wide the it just traps crud. Knives: As others have said, the edges invariably bang on something else. Only a diamond can cut another diamond, and only something as hard as the knive's steel can damage the edge of the knife. If the handle is wood, if will suffer the same fate as wood cutting boards and will shrink away from the steel, causing big gaps in which crud can fall into. Also, if the handle is wood and riveted on with copper rivets, the rivets will loosen. As the wood swells and shrinks, the wood fibers around the rivet are compressed and fatigued, leaving the rivet to rattle around in a larger hole. Kind of the same thing on why you should't soak and axe head in water to tighten it onto the handle. I belive Mr. A. Licoln found this out the hard way. Of course, if the handle is plastic, or all metal, this damage won't happen, it's just that the edges will be exposed in the d/washer. For small paring knives this is no big deal, as they sit in a plastic divider and can only bang around on plastic surfaces in the d/washer. Non-stick frying pans: Most mnfctrs have, or used to have a caveat about only washing the pan in water--no soaps or detergents. I do know that with older styles of teflon pans, high heat and soaps would render the pan pretty much useless. I don't know if that is true today, I haven't bought a non-stick pan for about 10 years now.