jrshaul

I'm wondering if I made a measurement error or forgot to tare out the scale, but there's an awful lot of liquid. It's also kinda oily - the "moisture" they keep harping on about. It wasn't bad; just not what I had expected. As for the blandness, I'm quite keen on the syrup. Swapping the sugar for brown sugar and ramping up the cinnamon isn't a bad idea either - it's hard to taste anything over all the buttermilk, which I found excessive.

If you're cooking for Halal consumers, they will NOT accept alcohol-based flavorings in their food. It's vanilla paste or GTFO. The mormons I've met seem to operate on the basis that if you're cooking out the liquor, you might as well - it's not quite so rigid.

I made Food52's Banana Upside Down cake and wasn't terribly impressed. I made the recipe per instruction with two additions - some rum added to the brown sugar and butter before being entirely cooked off and 1/2tsp cinnamon added to the batter - and while I liked the overall idea of the thing and the crust produced baking in a skillet was great, but it had issues with texture, flavor, and preparation. Issues I had include: Texture. It's less of a cake and closer to bread pudding. The best upside down cakes I've had were closer to a quick bread in consistency. It's not sweet enough. The amount of brown sugar on the topping doesn't compensate for the lack of sugar in the recipe. My bananas ended up ludicrously tough. This may have been an issue of using underripe bananas, though they seemed okay when I ate one. It's bland and - due to the huge volume of buttermilk - sour. This was with the added cinnamon. The topping was not liquid enough, though I might have just overdone it cooking out the rum. Proposed amendments include: Swapping the butter and brown sugar for a cooked sugar caramel similar to tarte tatin. I've had excellent banana tarte tatins before, and this is not so different. Using a lower liquid volume and less oil or perhaps switching to butter entirely. Maybe just use a quick bread batter and see how it goes? Adjusting the recipe to use a 9" cast-iron cooking pot would allow for a taller cake, which I would prefer. Adding a rum syrup after baking (it's upside down anyway) as per rum cake would be nice. Any ideas?

The short answer is that I don't own a slab, and making it in my food processor is a lot of work and mess for not a lot of fondant. I was in the process of making a new thread to ask if a stand mixer would be a viable substitute. Evidently, it is. Incidentally, have you tried using the stand mixer to agitate fudge?

Hey, that's more like it! I'll see if anyone has it locally; if not, I get to figure out how to make this stuff in a stand mixer.

This is the only pure-sugar fondant I could find. Bit more than I wanted, unfortunately. I might need to just start producing the stuff in bulk by seeding a syrup with old fondant. https://www.amazon.com/Fondant-Patissier-White-Pastry-Icing/dp/B01HBSHE34 I am unable to find straight-sugar fondant on these websites - L'epicerie seems to be out, and I'm having trouble finding it on the other two at all.

I'd like to obtain commercially produced fondant and invert sugar to produce some of the recipes in Greweling's book - the homemade fondant is a pain, and my invert sugar likely contains enough cream of tartar to disrupt recipes anyway. All the fondant I can find online or in stores is the greasy cake-topping stuff, and invert sugar on Amazon is almost $10 a pound - I pay less for coverture! Any ideas on how to find this without a business license for a cash-n-carry?

It's also advocating raw milk, something I would dissuade given the dangers. I'll give the Trader Joe's version a shot in a buttermilk pie, though I suspect the stronger fermented flavor of the homemade stuff may require adjustment of the recipe. Commercial kefir has a thin consistency and far less fat than the procedure described by Smithy. Presumably, homemade stuff is thicker.

This is a bit out of left field, but has anyone tried using a melanger to combine clarified butter and powdered milk to make a smooth product? Something that could be added into other confections or frosting without adding water?

They're mostly hippy nonsense from raw-milk fantatics. I don't trust dessert recipes from websites where everything is made with palm sugar to make it "paleo."

1. BUTTERMILK ALL THE THINGS 2. da heck do I do with clabbered milk? Sounds interesting; never heard of it.

Here's a few notes from my attempt to find a fudge base: Penuche - produced by heating 400g white sugar, 200g brown sugar, 3g salt, and 250ml milk to ~113C, allowing to cool to 160F before adding 45g butter and 1t vanilla and cooling to 110F before beating - is a chocolate-less reasonable starting point. The milk seems to brown pretty heavily, though - you get visible milk solids as it cooks, though it mixes in nicely later. My half-assed minimalist coconut fudge (1 can coconut milk, 600g sugar, 100g corn syrup, cook whole mess to 115C before cooling and beating) has a decent consistency, but it's too sweet. I think it'd benefit from using whole coconut instead - something to bulk out the fudge without adding sugar. Also, it mysteriously turned to goo later; presumably, it inverted, although this may just be a result of storing in the fridge. Any advice on this one? Pumpkin fudge (600g sugar + 125g pumpkin puree + 1t pumpkin spice + 1/4t salt + 45g corn syrup to 113c, add stick of butter and 1t vanilla while cooling, beat at 110c) works really surprisingly well. I'm not sure if it's the pile of starch or what, but the consistency is very good. Tastes decent, too - might just cook it to just past boiling, add butter, and use it as the dehydrated base of some sort of frosting. (Maybe add meringue or cream cheese?) I think this is the base of future fudge efforts - but it needs some significant added solids, as is evidenced by the superior texture over the coconut fudge. Anyone know where to get cheap frozen coconut? I was kind of hoping for the specifics on these. We're all doing the "modernist" thing around here; may as well see what tricks mass-produced junk can teach us. Cannot tell if sarcastic or or just not familiar with Kilwin's terrible candy. I would like to do some non-chocolate flavors, hence the curiosity. White chocolate is spendy, and you get that odd off note from the cocoa butter. Also, I'm not a big fan of chocolate-heavy fudge in general - it's either the wretched evaporated milk "millionaire fudge" or it goes weird when you add the chocolate to the sugar base. Might just need a better recipe.

My suggestion only sounded good until someone said "pumpkin spice rolls." I just picked up a copy of Greweling's book. If I wanted to seed a fudge with the right crystals for consistency, what kind of fondant am I looking at? And any thoughts on the use of lecithin?

I do not. I really need to keep some around for this sort of thing - but first I'd have to sort making it...

It burnt a bit - just a little caramelized, but I've had issues with singed sugar recrystallizing in all sorts of unwanted ways. That, and the pumpkin puree burns stupid easy already.

I overcooked my pumpkin fudge a bit, and now it's highly granular buttery pumpkin sugar. Tastes pretty good, though. I was thinking about mixing it into some heavy cream to make pumpkin sauce, but does anyone have any other ideas? Maybe beat it into cream cheese to make cake frosting? Would running it in a food processor make it less granular?

For the plebes in the audience, what should I know to get up to speed for this?

I've been having the devil's own time getting consistent results with my alcohol thermometer, and holding the thermocouple probe in hot sugar just so is not ideal either. A thermometer that'd alert me when I'm in a few degrees of cooked would be nice - but the options from standards like Polder and CDN do not have good reviews on Amazon. Can anyone suggest something?

Is there a "fudge base" that people use when making fudge with non-dairy flavors? The commercial stuff seems to use a shared base with various flavorings; it'd be awful convenient for, say, a ginger fudge.

If you want to buy parts, the bowl/wiper assembly is arguably the most important part - the rest can be fudged a lot more easily. Getting them to fit closely is a pain.

As someone with a wee bit of experience in building stuff, I'd recommend: 1. Assemble at a wood box with a hole in the top to fit a metal bowl and a wooden shelf below the bowl. Box should be about 300mm taller than the bowl, with substantial space below the shelf. Birch ply for preference - it's a good thermal insulator. Paint it with something that'll withstand some water. 2. Fit a metal bowl with ~14mm a hex bolt on the bottom using JB weld. Center it carefully, or it won't really work. 3. Laser cut from acrylic a wiper that fits closely to the bowl. You'll likely need to add some sort of flexible wiper to keep chocolate from sticking to the bowl and getting burnt. Fit a standard K-type thermocouple probe to the wiper so the metal bit is poking into the chocolate area. 4. Fit a geared brushed (yes, this matters) motor with a socket that fits the hex bolt. Asynchronous brushed motors can be controlled with a lamp dimmer. Alternately, an AC synchronous motor of about 80RPM should work. 5. In the cavity below the bowl, fit 3 light sockets with 60W bulbs. (These can be increased later if required.) The shelf for the motor should obscure these from the bowl. 6. Fit a small AC fan to blow over the light bulbs. You're going to need one that can take a lot of heat. 7. Connect the 3 light sockets to a standard PID controller, connected to the K type thermocouple in the wiper. This will get you a more-or-less reasonable clone of a Chocovision. The bowl and wiper sit on top of the unit; the motor sits within it to spin the bowl, and the lightbulbs and fan provide even heat inside the unit. Wood is recommended for its' low thermal conductivity and relatively low thermal density - it won't likely give you any overshoot problems. Similar designs work for soldering work... If this sounds like a giant pain in the rear end, I would look into getting one shipped from the USA as a used item. Some sellers will do this, and you're still under $300USD with shipping and customs.

Which one? I think I found the recipe online, with a lot of warnings about de-emulsifying the oil, which is possibly why mine is a little bit goopy. (I thought it was the powdered sugar.) Would an emulsifier help? 115 degree fondant? There's a commercial pistachio flavoring on Amazon that's well rated, though it might just be green almond...

Incidental question - can anyone recommend some good pistachio flavoring? A lot of what people think is "pistachio" comes from International Flavors and Fragrances - or, at least, mostly almonds. I'm curious - can you get this formula stiff enough to hand dip? I was thinking a fairly hard fondant would be needed. (Or perhaps I'm thinking on a different scale?) An interesting idea, and one I'd probably go with nougat instead - I had some illegally smuggled Iranian candy once, and the pistachio-nougat thing really has legs. I have found the same - pistachio gets lost real quick. Using straight sugar will at least minimize distraction. The chopped pistachios is a good idea, though.

Jumping back in on this a bit late, trying to temper pound plus bars is friggin' impossible - at least, it was when I tried. Proper coverture is much easier.

I just bought a used revelation mini for about $70. eBay is your friend - can't build one cheaper. If you're somewhere bereft of ebay and commercial stuff has crazy markups, you're basically looking at a blow dryer attached to a sous vide PID controller and some sort of constant stirring device. Not easy to fabricate, but not impossible. I'd just practice using the microwave. An electric blanket will help you evenly warm it if it gets too cool.