teonzo

Chocolate Doctor Who. Teo

No video, sorry. It's something you learn when you are little: you make a big mess at the beginnings, your mother scolds you, you get sick of being scolded until you learn to not make a mess. You just need to pick few bucatini with the fork and roll them gently. It's easier if you put your fork near the rim of the dish, not in the center. If you approach them like spaghetti then you are dead. If you are cautious starting from the outside, then you can eat them even at your wedding party. The "al dente" phrase does not mean a defined texture (not soft, almost hard) and it being the only correct one every time. It just defines the correct point for each food, which varies each time. Bucatini al dente have a different texture than spaghetti al dente. Paccheri al dente are hard, angel hair al dente are soft. So on with every pasta shape, rice, every vegetable. Teo

I would not worry about all these things. Gelatin melts above 30°C, if you reach that temperature then you start having troubles with chocolate too, since it becomes soft and the sphere gets ruined. So the temperature to avoid risks is the same. We are in autumn-winter, so there are no risks for hot room temperatures. Only risk is if the customers put the spheres near a heat source, but there's no solution for dumb customers, plus the sphere would get ruined even without the jelly. Gelatin melts almost immedialy when in contact with hot liquids, so no risks there even if you use more gelatin than normal. Syneresis is a problem if you freeze gelatin, at room temperature it's negligible. The really really small amount of liquid will be absorbed by the cocoa powder and the marshmallow inside the sphere. No risks about shelf life, we are talking about booze jelly, booze is shelf stable, adding gelatin won't change this. Teo

Usually it's about 24 g gelatin for 1000 g of liquid. I would say it's better to use more in your case, I would go with about 35-40 g gelatin for 1000 g booze. Gelatin will melt really easily with hot milk/water, so you don't have problems if you use more gelatin than normal. Melted gelatin will contribute to viscosity and silkiness, which is a nice feature for hot chocolate. A cube of booze jelly gives a very nice visual touch, just give a look at these pictures of champagne jelly on google. To make the jelly you need to bloom the gelatin in water. If you use gelatin powder, then mix it with 5x weight in cold water (10 g gelatin, 50 g water), mix it (using a fork if the quantiy is low, a whisk if quantity is high), then put in the fridge for about 30 minutes. If you use gelatin sheets, then you pour cold water in a bowl, put the gelatin sheets in the water (one after the other, not all attached together, if you put them attached then they won't bloom correctly) so they are completely covered, then let them rest for about 10-15 minutes. When the gelatin is bloomed you can prepare the booze jelly. If you used gelatin powder, then put the bowl with the bloomed gelatin in the microwave, give some short bursts at low power (300W or less) until it is melted. Do not continue heating it. Pour about 1/5 of the booze in a bowl, heat in the microwave to around 40°C. Add the melted gelatin to the warm booze, whisk to mix. Add the rest of the booze (room temperature), whisk to mix. Pour the mix in a pan and let it gel (in the fridge would be ideal). If you used gelatin sheets, then pour about 1/5 of the booze in a bowl, heat in the microwave to around 50°C. Pick the bloomed gelatin sheets and squeeze them with your hands, to get out the excess water. Put the gelatin sheets in the warm booze, whisk to dissolve the gelatin and mix. Add the rest of the booze (room temperature), whisk to mix. Pour the mix in a pan and let it gel (in the fridge would be ideal). Teo

If you call farfalle "butterflies" or "bowties" you are correct in both cases. The main meaning for farfalle is "butterflies", while bowties are called "farfalline" or "cravatte a farfalla". For us it's an ambivalent term. Bucatini is the real test if you are Italian or not: if you have troubles eating them, then you need more time here. Angel hair pasta is meant to be served in broth (only broth and nothing more), serving it with a sauce is not "orthodox". Teo

I would advise against placing a sink in an island. First of all you have splatter troubles, with water drops going anywhere and causing a nightmare (especially with chocolate). Then it forces your choices: if you need to change island then you face troubles; if you want to fake a standard kitchen then you can use an island with blockable wheels, so at needs you can move it away and put a kitchen table on its place (can't do that with a sink); if you will ever sell the place, then most people can't stand a sink in an island. Teo

The big question is: did you prepare some night sandwiches for Ronnie? Teo

When you make the "mayo" with a whisk or blender you are going through the mayo mass with a whisk's wire or with the blender's blade, so you are carrying air inside the mayo. Some of this air will remain trapped inside the mayo. Not as much as when whipping butter, that's for sure, but butter works in a different way, since i's composed by different fats with a wide melting range. You whip butter when a part of its fats are solid and another part are melted. When you mix two different ingredients then the final volume is not always the sum of the two starting volumes alone. If you make a syrup, the final volume is not the sum of the starting water volume plus the starting sugar volume. Same goes for a lot of things, especially when there are physical / rheological changes like in the mayo case. You could try putting the mayo in an open jar, run it in a chamber vacuum machine and see if it keeps the same volume after the cycle, but you risk some troubles (the couple times I tried the mayo separated). You need small air bubbles for the baking powder to work: if there are no air bubbles in the dough then the gas formed during cooking won't find an escape. In this case you are making cookies, not a cake. You need a sufficient amount of air bubbles for the baking powder to work, so the cookies spread and gain some volume. If there is too much gas inside the cookie dough while it's cooking then it will collapse, which can be a desired result in some cases. That's a problem you face when making cookies with a whipped butter dough (the ones you form with a pastry bag and a star tip): if your recipe calls for too much baking powder then they will collapse, same if the recipe is not balanced (too few egg proteins). With cakes it's different, your goal is to get the more gas possible inside the finished product, so you need the more extra air possible you can add during the mixing stage. Even there you need to be careful with the baking powder, too much and the cake will collapse. Teo

I'm a bit confused, so what's this row? Alt-butter liquid 0 0 45.4 (actual was 20g) I thought it was additional 20 g of coconut oil. Xanthan gum is added to gluten free flour as a gluten substitute. It's the gluten that acts as a binder and allows you to get a uniform dough. If you take out the gluten, then you end up with sand, not with a uniform dough, unless you use huge amounts of butter (meaning butter, not oil). Xanthan gum is there to absorb water and act as a binder, so you get a proper dough and not a sum of really small sandy particles. I'm confused here too, since you wrote you were doing it dairy free and eggs free. If you start with eggs, then they should be enough to accept the coconut oil. If you start with soy milk, then it's possible you will face troubles. No creaming... you are already adding air during the mayo-like emulsion process. If you keep mixing then you risk breaking the emulsion. Teo

So the overall recipe should be about this? 200 g coconut oil 40 g water 340 g sugars 360 g starches I would say the amount of coconut oil is a bit too high, this can be a reason for the greasy feeling. I would lower it to 180 g. The sugar amount is really HIGH for my tastes, usually I go for less than 50% compared to flours/starches, here it's 95%. But this depends on personal taste. The problem here is working with gluten free starches, you need to bind the dough with something different than gluten, so you use xanthan gum. But there's a bit of a difference between working with emulsified fats and non-emulsified fats/oils. I would sub the water with soy milk (if you are not allergic to soy, otherwise use water + non-soy lecithin). You make a mayonnaise-like emulsion using soy milk and coconot oil (liquefied): start with water, then using a whisk or an immersion blender you pour slowly the coconut oil to get a proper emulsion. I don't know if that amount of soy milk is enough to accept all that coconut oil, if the emulsion starts breaking then reserve the remaining coconut oil. After you get this emulsion, mayonnaise like, you add the sugars, mix, then add the starches and mix. If you reserved some coconut oil, then add half the starches, mix, add the reserved coconut oil, mix, then add the other half of starches. Teo

I hope you will do that blog next year, when all this mess will be over! Teo

You can make a jelly (booze + gelatin), cut it after gelled, then add it inside the sphere together with the marshmallows and the rest. Since this sphere is going to be melted in hot milk, gelatin will melt too. Teo

I don't have experience in making cookies with coconut oil. Plus the link to the Food Network recipe is not working. If you can write the recipe it would be nice, I'm curious to know what flour you are using, the fat to flour ratio and the mixing method. From the look on the photos, it seems like you made a mistake somewhere during the mixing. That big difference can only be explained by differences in the dough, meaning some pieces had more coconut oil than the others. Are you using water in the recipe? If so, probably you did not achieve a proper emulsion. For sure it's not a problem of room temperature in relation to melting temperature of the fat. If you bake cookies made with butter then they are not oily at touch when you pick them out of the oven, and their temperature is well above the melting point of butter. Teo

I opened a thread last year: but I was searching title by title, basing on bibliographies taken from books about cooking in the past centuries. So good to know they've been indexed, thanks! Only problem is finding the time to browse through them. Teo

Alicia Silverstone - "The Kind Diet" (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) Worst photoshopped cover ever. Teo

You can use a oyster knife with a "covered" handle (don't know the English term), like this one (first one I found with google). Teo

You should check your math about viennoiseries. Especially considering the front of house costs: to make a kg you need about 15 pieces. So this means for each kg you need to consider the costs of serving 15 dishes, collecting 15 dishes, washing 15 dishes, collecting 15 payments (ok, less than 15 since we need to consider coffee and the rest). Takes quite some time, takes a good portion of a dishwasher cycle. If you make a profit of 0.10 euro per piece and sell 200 pieces each day, it's 20 euro profit per day. You don't go far if that's your most profitable side. Teo

I blow, then swallow. Teo

I strongly suggest to read the mixer's manual about the speed you can use for this kind of doughs. Going over speed 2 on a Kitchen Aid or Kenwood lead to high risks of breaking the gears in the medium/long term. Using speed 5 or 6 is not recommended. Teo

Thanks for opening this thread, it's really interesting and I hope more people will chime in with many more photos. Unfortunately I don't have a camera (I can't stand smartphones), otherwise I would post what is available here. Those viennoiseries by Reunion look great, I can count on my hand the places here that sell stuff of that quality. With "here" I mean a radius of about 30 km. Some considerations about prices. As I read them I had a similar reaction, thinking they were really high. But the whole market is really different. Those viennoiseries are much bigger than the ones on sale here. The ones in the photos are well above the 100 g mark, I would say they are near the 150 g mark (maybe someone can give some exact weights). Here a croissant weighs around 50 g. Filled viennoiseries (most people eat their croissants / Italian brioches filled with pastry cream or apricot jam) can reach around 70 g, it's really really rare to find something bigger. So much rare that in the last 10 years people started requesting small versions (about 25 g for the empty ones) for "dietary reasons". Breakfast here is totally different than in the USA, the typical breakfast is coffee/cappuccino plus croissant/brioche, It's something consumed every day, while, from what I read, eating a viennoiserie in the USA is seen as once in a while, not an everyday breakfast item. Besides this, here in Italy viennoiseries are considered a money looser. I'm talking about quality pastry shops, who make their own viennoiseries (most buy the industrial ones) using quality ingredients. Prices range from around 1.10 euro to 1.50 euro for each piece. The most expensive places went from 1.10 euro in 2015 to 1.50 euro in 2019, quite a rise in a small timeframe. So on average the price ranges in the 18-25 euro/kg zone, which is pretty low for an artisan product. People keep these prices to attract customers: you need a wide base of customers to stay in business, so you need as many people coming for breakfast as you can. You don't make profit from viennoiseries, you make profit from coffee and cappuccino and from the other items. Viennoiseries are seen mostly like a bait, to get as many people as you can to come for breakfast and become regulars. Teo

Many people in Italy think that renaming a restaurant will bring bad luck, just like renaming a boat. So when they buy an existing restaurant they keep the same name. Maybe there are Koreans with the same superstition. Teo

This other typo is funnier. Seems like your L key is azy. Teo

That's the way to go! Simple solution: another day, another package. Teo

It will put the old "sex drugs and rock'n'roll" in the cemetary. Teo

You could write something like "the best moment to be happy is now, not tomorrow". People should get the message, especially during this peculiar period. Teo