tonylombaardi

Kerry, I found that demo thread of yours so I'll just consult that if I ever try it. That Kitchenaid attachment was pretty cool, though way too much money for something I'd very rarely use.

This is my first experience making dragee, based on the method in the Grewling book. Anyone have any experience polishing these with some sort of food wax? They don't look all that appetizing in my opinion, though they taste pretty good. I have to note I just did this at home in a large stainless steel bowl. Can they be polished with a little wax without one of those professional machines?

Was the cocoa butter tempered? Chocolate only shrinks from a mold if it's tempered. I think you can do with a little bit of non-tempered cocoa butter on the mold if later tempered chocolate is used, but too much non-tempered cocoa butter probably isn't a good idea.

Looks awesome! I bet it tasted that way too.

So sourced some methylcellulose (not the right one, about 400 times 'stronger' apparently - and tried these with raspberry puree. Not crispy - more like a puffy fruit leather. Tasty though. I guess you really need juice to get cripsy. I kind of forgot about them in the dehydrator - nice and quiet when it's in my chocolate room - so they got to dehydrate for about 36 hours - but still chewy! Now to find myself an airtight container to store them until I can dip them in chocolate. Interesting that it didn't end up crispy. Maybe even with the seeds strained out there's a lot of other fiber or some other solids in the raspberry pure. Did it foam up and get very light in color? I'd imagine it should look the color of pink chalk. It's not humid where you are is it? The fact that it's chewy may actually make it stand up better to the chocolate though. I wonder if it's possible to make thin layers like the kind in a Kit-Kat bar with this stuff. You could put a filling between them like those Loacker wafer cookies. I don't know how long they'd stay crisp though.

Spring, Was the cocoa-butter you painted the molds with tempered? I don't have experience tempering pure cocoa-butter, but I imagine if it's not tempered it's not going to release. On the other hand, when people put colored cocoa-butter in molds for designs, is that just melted cocoa-butter with coloring? Does it need to be tempered? I don't have much experience with this.

A while ago I made a java webpage for figuring out chocolate substitutions. Feel free to use it. Chocolate calculator It's based on the information in Medrich's Bittersweet book and will tell you how to change sugar and fat amounts.

My guess would be cold coffee. How long was it in your fridge? It's a little hard to guess without the big picture of how the whole recipe was done though.

That's not a bad idea. They're extremely light though. I'm afraid the chocolate may be overpowering unless it's quite a thin coat. I guess it would need to be thinned with cocoa butter or something. They'd definitely handle the coating though. Another way it might work with chocolate is to add it to a chocolate coating for some kind of citrus truffle, after chopping it up pretty fine. I thought of making french style macarons with it too. Just to test I was going to put some ganache between two of these bars and see how the texture changes with time as it absorbs some of the moisture from the ganache.

Crispy Tangerine Sticks One of the stranger things I've made, but very tasty too. This is tangerine juice, sugar, citric acid, methylcellulose, and xanthum gum, all blended together until it increases in volume 8 times. Then it's baked in a 150 degree oven for 9-10 hours. Recipe from Johnny Iuzzini's book Dessert Fourplay. It reminds me of cotton candy in the way it melts in the mouth. I wonder what else one could do with this sort of thing. I guess whatever you'd do with crisp meringue might work. I was thinking I might get a weird aftertaste with those additives, but it's not there.

I've had pistachio gelato a few times and at the time I thought I was tasting pistachio but later realized it couldn't be because I made my own pistachio gelato with just pistachios and it tasted totally different. I wasn't that fond of what I made, but perhaps it wasn't the best kind of pistachios or the best recipe or execution. Is that brand you mention available at specialty stores? I'd like to try really good pistachio gelato sometime.

Has anyone ever tried to make Cuneesi Al Rhum? I tried them for the first time when I gave them as a gift to my girlfriend, and they're these unbelievably good chocolate truffles, but made in a very unique way. Here's a link I found: http://prodottitipici.provincia.cuneo.it/prodotti/altri/praline/index.jsp?lang=en It's chocolate rum pastry cream inside of a baked meringue, then the whole thing is dipped in chocolate. The description says they're dipped in "hot" chocolate, which makes me wonder if it's hot in order to seep into the meringue layer. The outside of it definitely does not have the typical crisp snap of tempered chocolate. It's just a little bit crisper than the filling. I was going to attempt to make some myself but was wondering if anyone here has done it before.

I've updated the program so that it now suggests changes in butter amount, based on the changes in cocoa butter. Note that the calculation assumes you want to keep the amount of cocoa solids fixed when you do the substitution.

Thanks for clarifying. I'll update the program to account for the change in cocoa butter content and do another post here when it's ready. I think I'll add it as another parameter to enter, but I'll also post the averages as listed in Bittersweet for those who don't know what it is.

If you have the nutritional information on the chocolate, it should be possible to calculate the cocoa butter percent since the label will show grams of fat. Grams of fat per serving/grams of serving should tell you percent cocoa butter right? I think that's actually how Alice Medrich explains it in Bittersweet. Alice actually thinks the cocoa solids affects the outcome far more than the change in fat. From Bittersweet: "Many chefs cite the increase in fat to explain problems that arise using high percentage chocolates in recipes designed for standard bittersweet and semisweet chocolate. But, in fact, the proportionately larger increase in nonfat dry cocoa solids affects the outcome far more than the increase in fat." Anyone else have opinions? I haven't tried substitutions enough to have an opinion on this. Anthony

Merstar, That's a good point. Maybe I'll research that a bit more. Obviously that'll make the program a little more complicated if I also suggested adjustments to the amount of fat. Most likely that would mean changing butter by a certain amount. I have the Bittersweet book too and do remember reading that part. That's probably my favorite chocolate baking book so far. I'll have to compare my results with Alice's. I just got another idea for a program. It would have common baking ingredients like butter, eggs, flour, sugar, milk, cream, whatever.. and it'll calculate %fat, %water, %protein, etc based on the amount of each. Might be useful for comparing recipes. Lisa, I'm sorry but I don't know what you mean by "split". I just bake for fun so maybe that's lingo I don't know. Anthony

Sure no problem. First off I should say this is for dark, not milk chocolate. Dark chocolate is made of chocolate and sugar. When the percent says 60%, roughly 40% is sugar. The program calculates how much pure chocolate the recipe calls for. As an example, if it says 4 ounces of 60%, that's only 2.4 ounces of pure chocolate (4 * .6). The rest, roughly, is sugar. The amount of pure chocolate you get when you use a different percent should remain the same, so recipe_chocolate_weight * recipe_chocolate_percent = substitute_chocolate_percent * substitute_chocolate_weight The program just solves for substitute chocolate weight by dividing both sides by substitute chocolate percent. But you want the sugar to remain the same too. recipe_chocolate_sugar = recipe_chocolate_weight * (1 - recipe_chocolate_percent) substitute_chocolate_sugar = substitute_chocolate_weight * (1 - substitute_chocolate_percent) The program then just finds the difference between these two numbers. If your substitute has a lower percentage of chocolate in it, it makes sense that you need to subtract some sugar from your recipe, and vice versa. Hope that clears things up. I probably ought to post the formula on the program too.

Hi All, As an avid baker and software developer, I decided to make a chocolate calculator that people could use to substitute one percentage of chocolate for another in a recipe (of course the recipe has to state a percentage to begin with, which is starting to occur more these days). You can check it out here: ChocolateCalculator Once you fill out the recipe percent and weight, you enter your substitute percent and it'll tell you the weight to use. It'll also suggest sugar to add or subtract. It's done with Java. I make no guarantee that your recipe will turn out exactly the same as if you used the original chocolate but it'll probably be the best you can do with the substitution. Please let me know if you have trouble with the program. Anthony Lombardi