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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

I really hope someone will start to document all these cultures, it would be a shame to let them go unnoticed or forgotten. 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

As usual, thanks for posting some more stuff from China, really fascinating. Teo

A'Qi: A Kitchen Dialogue is the book of a Belgian restaurant with 1 michelin star. It seems like Amazon mispriced it for only $3.41 (original price was $70 if I'm right), quite a steal and better hurry up if you are interested. Teo

Wow, they look totally smooth! No added cocoa butter, ground with blades and no mills? Impressive. Can you break one of the bars and post a photo of the section? Thanks. Teo

If you look only about money, then it's almost impossible that this deal will give you a better perspective than the DIY route. Teo

Can you give more infos about this, please? I tried a quick google search but didn't finf anything. Thanks. Teo

I wish I would be able to make such great photos! Thanks for your post! Teo

Here in Venice "goto" is the dialect word for "glass", if we say "goto" without specifying then we mean "glass of wine". So this name seems even more appropriate! Teo

I can talk from experience, never tried to look for scientific explanations. If you are trying to get nut pastes with home processors/blenders/whatever then it just depends on the kind of nuts. If you use hazelnuts or macadamias then you just need patience: run the machine for 4-5 minutes at full speed, stop it for about 10 minuts (to cool down the nuts), then repeat until you get a smooth paste. It can take 20-30 minutes of grinding, it depends on how well the blades are sharpened and the machine speed. If you use walnuts, then you need to add some oil, but you get a smooth result. With pistachios and peanuts there is no hope, you will end up with a grainy paste unless you add a boatload of oil (pistachios always need added oil). If you want a really smooth pistachio or peanut paste then you need to use a professional machine like a "refiner" (don't know the correct English name, it's the machine with 2 granite cylinders) or the other ones you mentioned. But if you want to make gelato, then you can use to your advantage the fact that you can blend the whole gelato base, not only the nuts. If you blend the nuts with the hot syrup and the oil, then a home blender works fine. You just need to run it for 15-20 minutes, at the end your gelato base will be pretty smooth. You need to take advantage of all the water included in the recipe. Teo

A strong taste of pistachio. I used rice oil, which is almost flavorless. The resulting gelato had a strong pistachio flavor, much stronger than the classic recipes. It's quite obvious, since the pistachio ratio is higher and there are no milk nor cream (which tend to cover the taste of other ingredients). I suppose using pistachio oil would give a bit stronger pistachio taste, but not much: the majority of the aromatic compounds are included in the dry parts of the nuts, not in their oil. For example I tried two versions of black sesame gelato, one with sesame oil and one with rice oil. You could notice there was a difference, but nothing big. Teo

I tried both. You can get fine results if you use a powerful blender (like Thermomix for instance). Best choice is blending the gelato base in the blender, not only nuts (or nuts + oil). In this way it's much easier for the machine. I pour nuts + oil in the blender, cook the syrup (water + sugars + salt + stabilizers), pour the hot syrup in the blender and then turn on the machine. It must blend for some minutes, but you get a fine result even with difficult nuts like pistachios and peanuts. About neutral oil, it works just like the original nut oil. Texture is almost the same, of course taste is a bit milder, but not that much different. If you use neutral oil with pistachios (instead of pistachio oil) you get quite a strong taste. The nuts ratio in this modernist version is higher than the one of the classic recipes. Teo

(sorry but my memories about physics terms in English are a bit nebulous) If you add the sugar to the milk and not to the eggs, then you have a bigger mass at high temp and a smaller mass at room temp. This means that the final temp when you mix both components will be higher, so you may risk to scramble the eggs. Just a basic example. Suppose the recipe calls 200 g yolks, 200 g sugar, 40 g starch, 1000 g milk (just random numbers). First case: you add the sugar to the yolks, so you have 440 g at room temp (say 20°C) and 1000 g at boiling temp (100°C); when you mix them you get a final temp of (440*20 + 1000*100) / (440 + 1000) = 75.5°C (this is just an approximation). Second case: you add the sugar to the milk, so you have 240 g at room temp (say 20°C) and 1200 g at boiling temp (let's say 101°C due to the added sugar); when you mix them you get a final temp of (240*20 + 1200*101) / (440 + 1000) = 87.5°C (this is just an approximation). The higher the final temperature, the more risks to scramble the eggs, you can't be sure you will or will not scramble them, it depends on if and how you mix the yolks while pouring the milk, on the pouring speed, on the termal mass of the bowl and other factors. It's mainly a matter of the balance of your recipe (the ratio between room-temp mass and hot mass), room temp and yolk temp (you can start from fridge-cold eggs). Teo

I would try a fluid gel made with agar agar. Teo