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My favourite pumpkin filling is made this way. Cut the pumpkin in quarters, discard the seeds and filaments (well, better using the seeds for something else), keeping the pulp attached to the skin. Cover each quarter with aluminum foil, then bake in the oven at 180 C (350 F) for 60-90 minutes, until the pulp is tender. Take out from the oven and let it cool. With a spoon collect all the pumpkin pulp (beware of skin pieces), put it in a food processor and blitz until you get a smooth paste. Transfer the pumpkin paste on a baking sheet with parchment paper, then gently bake at 80 C (175 F) to loose moisture (without drying it totally). Temper 1 part milk chocolate, add 1 part pumpkin paste, a pinch of salt then mix (for example 500 g of milk chocolate, 500 g pumpkin paste, 1 g salt). Since it's partially dehidrated you have a good shelf life and a strong pumpkin flavor. I prefer to pair it with a bitter ingredient, like rhubarb root, marigold flowers, gentian root... Teo

Torta Kopi Layers from bottom to top: - eucalyptus cake (a vegan recipe based on eucalyptus leaves' infusion in water) - pineapple ganache (milk chocolate + pineapple juice) - chocolate mousse (dark chocolate + cream + semiwhipped cream) - eucalyptus cake - pineapple mousse - pineapple glaze Decorations are dark chocolate chunks on the side, green colored white chocolate leaves on top (I used the wrong green, I needed a darker one). Taste is a bit weird. I love chocolate + eucalyptus. I really like pineapple + chocolate (as I like other yellow acidic fruits with chocolate, like passion fruit or lemon). I tried pineapple + eucalyptus and liked it, it's like a cross between pineapple + mint and pineapple + thyme (both works well for me). The combination of the 3 ingredients give a result a bit different than what I imagined. It works, but being weird you need to be more explorative than conservative to appreciate it. Teo

Crostata Metla A pie made with: - sorghum shortbread - coriander seed cake (thin layer between the other 2) - quince cheese (it's quince season so I'm abusing them) I'm happy with the result. Taste is really good and balanced, there's the fruity/honeylike of the quince cheese, citrusy spiciness of the coriander seeds, hearthiness of the sorghum flour, all 3 complement and work fine together. It's a vegan recipe that uses forgotten ingredients (at least here in Italy quinces and sorghum have disappeared from the kitchens), so I think it has a good marketing appeal. Teo

Good question! Same as mine everytime I see their advertisings, they always show cut entremets, almost all entremets have a sponge layer, which will absorb moisture even if frozen. I've never seen one of those machines live in action in a pastry environment (I used industrial waterjets to cut metals, plastics and marbles, never food), so I don't know how they affect the food they cut. Honestly speaking I think the bigger question is their economical viability. Considering how much they cost and the limited use, you need TONS of production before covering the investment. Plus there is the waste issue: the part under the waterjet just go wasted. If you cut square mignons 30x30 mm, with a 2 mm waterjet you get 14% waste, a bit much. Knives and guitars work as fine for straight cuts. I can understand that this machine would be the best way to get weird and fancy shapes. But you would need TONS of requests (plus considering that the weirder the shapes, the bigger the side wastes). I fail to see how this can be a viable investment for a pastry shop, but since their business is growing then there must be the buyers. The only thing I would say is sure is that it's the only hope to cut honeycomb with precision. What result you get, I just don't know. Teo

You can always spend a huge amount of money and buy a waterjet cutting machine. Teo

My latest creation, Torta Almaba. I don't have a photo of a slice and it's been already eaten. Layers were (from bottom to top): - pistachio crunchy base - quince cheese flavoured with calvados - pistachio bavarois - quince mousse - calvados glaze Side decoration is quince cheese, top decoration is chopped pistachios. Teo

That's the way to go!!! Teo

Maple is quite subtle, especially if you pair it with something with similar flavour profile, like candied pecans. For bon bons my favourite is pairing it with something contrasting, this way its taste gets more pronounced instead than partially covered. Years ago I made a bon bon with 2 layers, one was a milk chocolate ganache with maple syrup, the other a dark chocolate one with jalapeno. For the maple ganache I used 200 g milk chocolate and 120 g maple syrup (just 2 ingredients, no cream, invert sugar or anything else, this way you maximize the maple flavour). Teo

You can use the hollow balls by Valrhona: http://www.valrhonaprofessionals.com/ready-to-fill.html You can fill them with your preferred spirit using a syringue. Closing them needs a bit of practice. Take a disposable plastic pastry bag, fill it with tempered chocolate in the low working temperature zone (about 28°C for dark chocolate, if not a bit lower, it must be pretty viscous), cut a small hole at the tip of the pastry bag, then start piping a spiral from the outside of the hole of the hollow ball. The chocolate you are piping must attach to the border of the hole, then you make a circle to follow all the border, when you reach the point where you started you continue to pipe following the previous circle you made, so on until you reach the center of the hole and close it. It takes a bit of practice at the beginning, you need to be quick because you need viscous chocolate and the thin hole in the bag tends to get obstructed if you wait some seconds and the chocolate in it starts to cristallize. Of course you need to advise your customers to put the whole piece in their mouth and not cut it in half with their teeth, otherwise they get pretty messy and ruin their clothes. Here in Italy various chocolatiers use this method to fill those hollow balls with grappa. Teo

If you have 225 g of sugars (sucrose + glucose), 250 g of apricot puree and need to reach 107°C, then it means the apricot puree will be reduced to about 150 g, this will give a stronger apricot flavor than the usual % used in pate de fruits recipes. 3 g pectin for 225 g sugars is way lower than the amount used for standard pate de fruits, this means the final result will be thick but spreadable, it won't be set like standard pate de fruits. So if you blend it with a hand-held mixer then you should not face much troubles (like trying to blend a full set pate de fruits). Shelf life will be great if you cook it to 107°C. The water/sugar ratio is constant at a given temperature, reaching 107°C gives you a shelf stable product at the contact with air, so you won't have any problems regarding shelf life in an enrobed chocolate. The key in this recipe is the low amount of pectin, the result (before blending) will be more similar to jam/marmalade than to pate de fruits. Teo

Lavender! Teo

I have bookmarked these ones (mostly professional stuff): Mark Ladner - The Del Posto Cookbook Marcus Samuelsson - The Red Rooster Cookbook Virgilio Martínez - Central Jiro Ono - Sushi: Jiro Gastronomy Pierre Hermé - Chocolate William Curley - Nostalgic Delights: A Sophisticated Trip Down Memory Lane Jamie Boudreau - The Canon Cocktail Book: Recipes from the Award-Winning Bar Sasha Petraske - Regarding Cocktails Teo

It's up for preorder on Amazon, estimated release May 30, 2017. Now it has 5% discount on the .com, 33% on the .ca. Teo

Last year I made a 2-layered one with gorgonzola and mace (here is the page of my blog if interested, it's in Italian). For gorgonzola I used a white chocolate ganache (Valrhona Ivoire), for mace I used a dark chocolate ganache (Valrhona Guanaya 70%). The recipe for the gorgonzola ganache is: 30 g milk 50 g gorgonzola (traditional type, not the "sweet" one) 10 g honey 180 g white chocolate Melt white chocolate. Boil milk with gorgonzola and honey. Add to the white chocolate. Mix, then temper the ganache. I thought it was good and was expecting mixed feedback since it's a weird combination, but I've been surprised, all comments ranged from "good" to "great". I would have been less surprised if everyone said they didn't like it. About shelf life, the last one was eaten after 3 weeks and was fine. Can't say how much more time they can last. Teo

Melissa Coppel has some recipes, like this one: http://www.melissacoppel.com/en/recipe5.html Teo

Do you mean I won't become Popeye if I eat spinach??? Teo

I gave a look to both "Los Postres de el Bulli" and "Natura", there isn't any dessert that looks like an apricot. I suppose you ate it at the restaurant, if you remember the year then it must be on the elBulli book of that year. I have 1994-1997, 1998-2002 and 2005-2011, so I can give a look there (I still haven't bought 2003-2004 so if it was one of those 2 years then I can't help). "Natura" has state of the art modern plated desserts, you can't get any better than that. As PastryGirl wrote, the style is a bit different than Migoya. Migoya is more geometrical and abstract, Adrià (on "Natura") tends to recreate natural sights with dessert components (like a woodland, algae and so on). Each dessert has a lot of components (6-8 on average), the difficulty level is quite high (as is for Migoya). You need an ice-cream machine, almost all desserts have an ice-cream; and a syphon of course. You need access to a lot of special ingredients (modernist stuff, exotic things like shiso, essential oils and so on). Ah, a peculiar thing: the book is only photos, the recipes are in a CD-ROM included in the book. Teo

I live in Italy and never been to the USA, so I don't have experience about US ice-creams and US freezers and the eventual differences with what we have here. It's quite normal that an artisanal or home made ice-cream freezes solid in a home freezer. These ice-creams are meant to be served at a higher temperature than the one of every freezer (at least here). Serving temperature of ice-creams is generally between -12°C and -14°C, home freezers work between -18°C and -20°C. If you make ice-creams at home and they freeze solid in the freezer, well, it's how things are meant to be if you do them right. Industrial ice-creams remain scoopable even at -18°C because they are made in a different way than "normal" ice-creams: they remain soft due to a higher overrun. The higher the overrun, the lower the freezing point (air bubbles work as anti-freezers). You can't get high overrun with home ice-cream machines, you need professional machines. Best way to solve your problem is working on the de-freezing phase. Try this. Put a plate with parchment paper in the freezer. Churn the ice cream, portion it with a scooper, place the ice-cream balls on the freezed plate. Put the plate in the freezer, let the ice-ceam balls freeze. After they froze, collect them in a closed container and keep them in the freezer. When you want to eat some ice-cream you just need to pick the ice-cream balls you desire, put them on a cup, then microwave at low wattage (80-100 W) until you see the surface start to become soft (if I recall right it takes 2-3 minutes), then you are ready to eat them. If you portion the ice-cream before freezing it then you avoid the hassle to cut through a block of ice. The microwave is able to warm the inside of the balls, you just need to use it at low W. Teo

New book by Morato? Can you give more infos please? Thanks! Teo

I can speak for direct experience. Tried 3 different pistachio ice cream recipes, one with egg yolks + cream + milk, one with cream + milk (no egg yolks), the Modernist Cuisine one. Each one came smooth, I used a cheap blender, nothing professional. Teo

If you have a good blender then there is no need to buy pistachio paste: cook your ice-cream base, pour it while still hot in the blender, add the whole pistachio nuts and blend at full speed for 15-20 minutes (if your blender risks overheating, then run it 5 minutes, stop it 2 minutes, run it again a couple of times). The amount of liquids in an ice-cream recipe allows you to get a smooth result. And you get a nice green color. Personally I would suggest to look for Iranian pistachios, you can find high quality nuts for much cheaper prices than the Sicilian ones. Sicilian pistachios became a sort of a hoax, especially the one labelled as Bronte. If you sum up all the stuff that is sold as Bronte then you get an amount far superior than the one produced in the whole Sicily (Bronte is just a little subzone, few square miles, not the whole Sicily). I've been able to taste the top quality pistachios from Sicily (thanks to people living there) and from Iran (same), the Iranian ones were superior. If you buy pistachio paste then read carefully the ingredients. Pure pistachio paste is never pure, it must have a little % of vegetable oil otherwise you can't get a paste from 100% pistachios (they don't have enough oil like hazelnuts). Avoid with all strength the sugared creams or similar products: you can be sure they used low quality nuts for those products. Teo

Working with 8oz of tempered chocolate is pure suicide. 2lbs is just the minimum amount to work decently, I would suggest you to work with 4lbs to have more time before it cools. Tempering 8oz, 2lbs or 4lbs by hand takes almost the same time, the only difference is the time those quantities take to melt (but this job is done by the microwave not you). If you are taking this hobby a bit seriously then it won't be a problem to have 2-3lbs of leftover chocolate, you will use it after few days for your next experiment. Working with 3-4lbs ot tempered chocolate gives you a good window of working time for hand dipping, molding or whatever. To keep it in temper you just need to use a hair dryer, the hot air will help you to solve the overtempered problem too. If you feel nervous, consider you already learnt how to temper chocolate. If you are still nervous, apply your studies to yourself! I would suggest you to learn hand dipping before molding, it will help you to develop more sensibility to temper zones and all the chocolate temperamental behaviours. So just start to enrobe pieces of pure chocolate as Kerry suggested. You can practice basic molding while doing this: just pour pure chocolate in the molds you already have, let it set, then hand dip those pieces to practice hand dipping. After you are confident with the hand dipping technique, then you can experiment with real pralines. Make some basic ganaches, cut them and dip them. This will give you more infos on the quantities of pralines you want and can make for each session. After knowing your production volumes you can start move to molded pralines. Start with molds with an easy geometry (half sphere is best), buy as many molds (of the same model) as will be needed to reach your production quantity. Then practice a bit until you will feel confident with this technique too. After this you will have enough experience to see what you want to do next and decide your own path. This would be your best choice. If I'm right the user Pastrygirl is in the Seattle area. You can volunteer to be her slave, ehm, her part time stagiaire. Teo

Love this description! Teo

It gets awful. The color changes to a totally unappetizing brown. The texture becomes mush, it doesn't hold the nice bite of the other candied stuff. The taste is even worse, it becomes overly bitter and unpalatable. I'm talking about candying all the "flesh" of the fruit (the yellow peel and the white "albedo", don't know how it's called in English). If you candy only the yellow peel then you get fine results. Teo

Andiesenji already wrote great infos as usual. Here in Italy candied citron is used in a lot of traditional cakes, but all pastry shops buy it from specialized manufacturers since it's a really painstaking process. You need to start with raw (green) citron, but you can find for sale only mature (yellow) citron, so it's quite difficult to start unless you have a tree. Then you need to brine it for some weeks, here experience is key. Problem is that if you fail your batch then you need to wait for the next year before trying the next one. You grow old before being able to master this process, that's why now they are made only by n^th generation artisans and industries. Well made candied citron has a nice green color because it's made from green fruit and the brining phase fixes the color. If you need to use it then look for the "cups" (half fruit, like in your photo) and avoid the cubed / striped / already cut ones. It's a great ingredient for cakes, since its bitter and acidic taste makes it more balanced and palatable than all the other candied fruits. It's also great for garnishes, just google "cassata siciliana". If Lebowitz doesn't like it then most probably he never tasted the high quality stuff: low quality candied citron is atrocious, much worse than the other low quality candied fruit. The high quality ones are difficult to find, but totally worth it. I suggest you to avoid trying to candy mature (yellow) citron, unless you like bad surprises. Teo