teonzo

You can go the tiramisu way: use ladyfingers (or whatever) and soak them with strawberry puree. Teo

Great stuff, especially the chicken card! Teo

I could exceed in all my pedantry and reply with something uber annoying like "so Yoda said". Politeness would suggest to delete what I just wrote, but I can't resist Star Wars jokes. Teo

There's a way to save it. You just need to add the right amounts to get a double batch. Which is pretty easy since you don't need the stabilizers (assuming you agree it's better to cut them in half). This is what you have now: Heavy Cream 520 g Pistachio Paste 140 g Sugar 100 g Salt 3 g Locust Bean Gum 2 g Lambda Carrageenan 1.3 g Polysorbate 80 0.5 g Glycerol Monostearate 0.1 g This is the "correct" recipe (cream at 35% fat), doubled: Heavy Cream 380 g Water 660 g Pistachio Paste 280 g Sugar 200 g Salt 6 g Locust Bean Gum 2 g Lambda Carrageenan 1.3 g Polysorbate 80 0.5 g Glycerol Monostearate 0.1 g So you need to add these amounts to what you already have: Water 520 g Pistachio Paste 140 g Sugar 100 g Salt 3 g Just add all these ingredients to the base you have in your hands, homogenize and it should be ok. Better using superfine sugar to dissolve it more easily. No need to cook anything. To be precise you should make it triple and not double since you started with too many cream for a double recipe, but you would end up using a lot of pistachio paste which costs a fortune. If you want to do things properly then add these amounts for a triple recipe: Water 1040 g Pistachio Paste 280 g Sugar 200 g Salt 6 g The big difference here is given by the pistachio solids, which change things A LOT as far as balancing ice-cream. It's not just a matter of high fat ice-cream, it's a matter of high fat ice-cream containing tons of pistachio solids. If pistachios and raspberries were less expensive (or if I were rich) then I would eat them together every day and in huge amounts. Teo

You can cut them by half. From what I understand the pistachio sorbet by Modernist Cuisine is intended to be processed with a Pacojet, not a standard ice-cream machine. Pacojet allows a much wider balance for ice cream formulations, especially about viscosity. Ice-creams made for restaurant service (plated desserts) call for high quantities of stabilizers, that's because 99% of ice-creams are served as one spoon quenelles (I'm talking top restaurants, which are the ones Modernist Cuisine was aimed for), they must keep their shape for long. Beware you did not keep the correct fat ratio. You are making 2/3 of the recipe you linked. This means you would have 453 g of water and 68 g of pistachio oil. 520 g of cream should have around 182 g of fat (this considering you are using 35% fat cream, which is the standard here, don't know about there in the USA). So you have 114 g fat exceeding, a bit MUCH. You should use 190 g of cream (35% fat) and 330 g water. High viscosity is given by the excessive fat too, not only the stabilizers. Teo

The pool effect is unavoidable when you pour more chocolate than optimal. If you pour the correct amount of chocolate, then after the first spin (the one to cover all the mold surface) there is not much chocolate left fo flow around. If you pour much more chocolate than optimal, then you have a big amount of chocolate free to flow. As you keep spinning that chocolate will become less and less fluid, at the point that it will stop moving, ending up making a pool no matter how much you spin the mold. Teo

Way too thick, at least for the standards here. Besides that, a well done egg: almost no bubbles in the section, no visible defects (the pool is unavoidable with that much chocolate). Teo

We are still waiting to know how a duvai tai tastes. Teo

I know, shame on me. Even more shameful is that I don't have any Duvel bottle here, finished the last one some weeks ago. That bottle was around 15 years old and still in great shape. Teo

This is what the producer says, so it should be respected with a tolerance of 0.2°C. Personally I'm heretic and prefer it around 8°C. Teo

If you ever decide to buy a funnel, then absolutely don't try to save money. Buy a solid one with a good choice of nozzles of various sizes. Go only for stainless steel, forget about the plastic ones: sooner or later something you are pouring will gel and clog the nozzle, you want to be able to heat it without damage. Teo

You lost some eG credit here. Next time you should buy all of them, or at least lie and claim you did so. Teo

There's a detail that nobody points out and I think it's dreadful. Sugar is an addictive drug in all the senses as crack is an addictive drug. The consequences of sugar addiction are much worse for society than the ones for crack addiction (or heroin or meth or all that $h|t). I suppose people in the USA should know this pretty well, since it's the country where sugar gives the worst consequences to the health of its inhabitants. If we talk about "crack pie" then the word that refers to the worst addiction is not "crack", it's "pie". All this is said by a pastry chef (aka sugar dealer). Teo

No failing, no learning. A failure is a chance to learn something you could never learn if you did it right from the beginning. So it's better to keep this attitude. By the way, you should be proud to be able to do this kind of things as an amateur, it's stuff most professionals never dared to touch. I would insist in suggesting to contact Greweling himself and pointing out these troubles. He won't be offended by this, I'm pretty sure he much prefers to be noticed about these mistakes. And I'm sure he would be delighted to see that an amateur is making his most difficult stuff, that's one of the most rewarding things for a cookbook author. First of all, I agree with @Jim D. that milk chocolate is a better choice for pecans. I really like the shape you chose (square with a single dome), I'd keep out the ground pecans on top and add a single linear colored brushstroke. For the smoke flavour, I would avoid smoking the pecans and use a peaty whisky like Ardbeg. Not in the sense to use only Ardbeg as the spirit, just sub around 5-10% of your preferred whisky with a peaty one. If you use 100% Ardbeg you'll end up thinking you are eating a fireplace. About spicing, my favourite choice with peaty whisky is nutmeg. Shortbread would cover the pecan taste, it's a side effect of all the butter. I would suggest a dacquoise made using pecan flour and the spices of your choice, then adding ground pecans (not as fine as flour, say like 1/8") for additional taste and texture. You spread the dacquoise batter on a baking sheet at about 1/8" thickness, then cook it to tender texture (not crispy) as all dacquoises should, let it cool, cut the squares, put them back in a low oven (around 180° F) to get them dry and crisp (you need to cut the squares when they are tender). After the squares are dried and cool, brush their top and bottoms with milk chocolate (or dark chocolate if you want to keep with that), if you have the equipment for spraying then that's quicker than brushing. This way you'll get a much cleaner pecan taste than with a gianduja. You'll have some added texture due to the pecan bits. A dacquoise is always seen as a really sweet component, that's true, but you add pecan bits and spices (this cuts the sweetness); a dacquoise has similar sugar content as a gianduja (around 50%). I have a bit of job experience as pastry chef. You need to attach multiple models (domes in this case) to a bar that's as long as the pan containing the starch, then press the bar (models side down) on the starch. This way you get the exact same thickness for each cavity, assuming your models were all the same. @minas6907 is the expert on this, maybe he can chime in. That's something to plan on week-ends. Teo

These are wonderful, especially when in group, compliments! Teo

Don't worry about me, you have much much more important things to care about in the next month! Have as much fun as you can! The opening weeks are super hard work, but can be fun if faced with the right attitude. There aren't many openings in a chef's career, so get the most out of it! Teo

If I were Tosi, I would make a new pie with a deliberate crack on top, say I was inspired by Lucio Fontana's cuts, then call it Crack Pie. Just for trolling reasons. I lost a cousin to heroin overdose, saw other bad stuff with people I know, but I can only say this story is completely absurd. Teo

What if a pie has a crack on the surface? Teo

For the bonbon, probably not. For the bar / snack, most probably yes. Teo

Did not notice this, thanks for pointing this out. I checked the 1st edition and it's not there, so it's a new addition too. I always thought the only new content in the 2nd edition was the snack / bars section, so that assumption was wrong. There are various details that lead to think it's a faulty recipe. First of all the cream content: it's way too high even for a standard ganache, more so for a ganache that includes a nut paste; when you add a nut paste to a ganache formulation then you need to lower the cream content, otherwise you'll end up with something much softer. Second, the working method. It has no sense to temper the gianduja until it's 18°C then add the cream+glucose when they are at 40°C, too big a difference. Third, some misprints. In the bonbon recipe it says to temper the gianduja to "84°C/183°F" (totally off track), in the bar / snack recipe to "29°C/85°F". If you temper the gianduja then you need to go lower than 29°C, you can get tempered gianduja at 29°C if you add the nut paste to an already tempered chocolate, if on the contrary you add the nut paste to untempered chocolate then you need to go lower (the usual reasons). Then it says "checking to see that all of the chocolate has melted": if you add cream+glucose to a gianduja then there's no need to check if all the chocolate has melted, you are already sure since you tempered it by the tabling method. Fourth, it has no sense to use a ganache base in that bar / snack. A gianduja is a much better choice, both for handling and shelf life reasons. A ganache base would be much less firm than a gianduja base, the structure of a bar / snack calls for the firmer base you can use with the flavours you are planning, plus it's a really thin base, a ganache would risk to break when hand dipping. Bar / snacks call for long shelf life, a gianduja is shelf stable and would make that whole bar / snack shelf stable. All these things point to a copy-paste fault. Which is totally understandable, since this is a 2nd edition, hard to imagine the editing team was the exact same as the 1st edition. Such things happen anywhere anytime, we are humans. Just think about the 1st edition of Modernist Cuisine (well, that's on the other end of the spectrum, that was a really shameful case). Teo

The recipe in the book is definetely suffering of copy and paste errors. Seems like the editor took a pre-existing recipe for another product (they do so to use the same template) and deleted part of the text instead of deleting all the text. The ingredient list should include pecans, sugar and chocolate. Cream and glucose should be deleted. If you read the gianduja instructions they should go from step 3 ("temper the gianduja") to step 7 ("spread into a frame"). Steps 4-6 should not be part of this recipe. The editor corrected the term at step 5 ("tempered gianduja") but did not so at step 6 ("ganache" is used twice). The term "ganache" has been used also on step 1 of the following "TO COMPLETE" instructions. Steps are numbered automatically by the editing program used by professional publishers, they are not numbered by hand. Stuff like this happens in almost all books, since all writing processes are made by different people and editors are not uber skilled confectioners. I would suggest you to contact Greweling himself, @Jim D.always said he got quick and precise answers, and point him about these errors, so they can be corrected in the next prints. We must consider these snacks were not present in the first edition of the book. Some lessons for the future: never take for granted any recipe, always be skeptical even when you are dealing with one of the most solid books out there (like this one is). There were various signs. A gianduja is made with nuts, sugar and chocolate, if you add cream it's not gianduja anymore. The cream to chocolate ratio is really high (1 to 1.2), while Greweling usually uses low ratio (1 to 2.5), even lower in the presence of nut pastes. The instructions talk about "ganache" instead of "gianduja". About correcting this error, I think you took the best road possible. It has no sense to redo everything from scratch and waste that ganache. The safe way for saving it was adding more chocolate to add firmness, which is what you did. Don't worry about not knowing how much chocolate you added, in these cases you are not interested in it: you go by feel until you get something workable, then proceed. Knowing the chocolate quantity you added would be needed if next time you wanted to recreate the same exact thing, which I think is not what you want. Since it's a cream ganache and not a gianduja, you will end up with a snack with a much shorter shelf life, so please remember this (should not be a problem since you wrote you make chocolates for passion and not as a business). Pecan taste will be diluted, this should not be a problem for 2 reasons: people who will eat these snacks will not know this unless you tell them so; you smoked and caramelized them and added paprika and chili, so they will cover all of this. Teo

There's no need to make foot and "roof" for enrobed bonbons, if you use the proper technique for hand dipping then the fork always stays in contact with the foot and never touches the other sides . So it's just detrimental: more work for you, thicker shell for the customer. Your goal is to spread the foot as thin as possible, whatever method you use you'll end up with tempered chocolate due to the act of spreading it thin (I'm meaning the standard methods with brush, palette knife and similars). To keep it untempered you need to spread it thick, which is not what you want. In my opinion the best thing is brushing untempered chocolate on the acetate sheet, then pouring the ganache over it, then cut the slab keeping the foot at the bottom and not top. If for whatever reason you need to cut it upside down, then warm the foot with a heat gun / hair drier (withouth melting it, it just needs to change matte). If you spread the foot on top (which is a forced choice in some cases, like when you are making a pâte de fruits layer) then the surface will be a bit wavy and bumpy no matter how skilled your hands are, this means the final bonbons will be more irregular (some will tend to be oblique). If you spread the foot at the bottom then its surface will always be flat, leading to better final results. Sorry to be a term nazi, but "chablon" refers to a particular mold (flat and thin, with shaped cavities), not to a thin sheet of chocolate. Teo

I was forgetting the short explanation, I must accept I'm getting less young. The big culprit to your viscosity problem is the lack of lecithin. Lecithin works properly when the ratio lecithin / cocoa butter is within a precise window. If you start from a chocolate that has 6% cocoa butter then add enough cocoa butter to reach 30%, then you are adding only cocoa butter but not lecithin. The native lecithin ratio is for a 6% cocoa butter chocolate, you are transitioning to a cocoa butter content that's 5x, so you end with a lecithin content that's 1/5 of the optimal. This explanation is not precise, things are more complicated, it's just to give a clue. Teo

Viscosity does not depend only on the cocoa butter content, but on all the ingredients. If a producer uses much less cocoa butter (compared to good quality couverture) then he needs to change the ratio of the other ingredients. All ingredients affect in different way how cocoa butter behave. If you are using this white chocolate then it has only 6% fat, while good white couvertures are around 30%. The difference is pretty big. The solution to your problem is pretty simple: just buy couverture, then adjust on that. You will face over-crystallization problems no matter what, but things will be really different than what you are facing now. There are technical / scientific books aimed for the industries that explain these things, but they are really expensive ($100 or above) and are really technical (you need good notions about physics and chemistry, if you didn't attend university then those books are really hard to digest). Studying the hows and whys is always a good thing to do, so if you choose that road then you make a very fine choice. But for now it's just overkill since the only thing you need to do is buying the correct produce. Teo

Personally I would suggest you to avoid baking chocolate and use couverture. It has not much sense to go through the hassle of hand tempering and so on, then cutting costs on the chocolate. At the end of the day (considering all the time you loose for the troubles you are having) you are not saving money. Teo