keychris

@akonsu The reheating stage is insurance. When you go below the working temperature, you start to form other unstable crystals that effect the temper. By reheating it back to working temperature with warm chocolate in the tank, you melt those unstable crystals. If you hit the working temperature perfectly, with the right amount of beta crystals in the liquid chocolate, you don't need to reheat it. But if you miss it, then you have to reheat with a heat gun or something instead, warm chocolate is easier but you don't have in the tank any more! This is why understanding what tempering is actually doing to the chocolate is important, not just slavishly following rules about temperatures and heating and cooling (But those rules are important too lolol) HTH

I make mine by beating equal quantities of egg, flour, butter & pure icing sugar then spreading super-thin and baking until nice and golden crispy. I only make it because when I buy it it goes stale before I've used it all.

Peanut shortbread, pecan dacquoise, cinnamon crunch, chocolate mousse, caramel, caramelised pecans, caramelised almonds in the glaze and a caramel chantilly cream. By the time I'd remembered I wanted a cross section, I'd already finished mine!

Did you google this at all? A short session found this (polishing wax in this is a finely powdered carnuba wax) Example how to polish Glazing tablets is generaly done in the following manner. Process 1 Shut off inlet and exhaust air of coating device. Rotate the pan and sprinkle Polishing wax-105 on the tablets (around 0.01% per tablet wt). So that tablets do not slide, gradually increase the number of pan rotations and maintain for a few minutes. Process 2 Repeat Process 1 until a glaze is obtained (usually 3 – 4 times). Process 3 Run inletand exhaust air for a few minutes to remove excess wax powder on the surface of the tablets. From http://www.freund.co.jp/english/chemical/additive/olishingwax.html

I imagine they're dissolved in some solvent that evaporates away for a panning application

crystallised sugar is very different to polish than chocolate. I remember when I did these in a class I was in it took about 3 hours to coat them with the sugar syrup properly, it had to be really slow otherwise the coating just fell off because it was getting too thick before it was crystallised properly. We then covered it with chocolate and polished that.

I have far too many body rolls, probably from eating things like cruffins 🤣

I believe the people who did Andrey Dubovic's Pralinarium course were told to keep room temperature around 18C. Still a bit higher than 62F though.

I would classify W2 as "gluggy"

tempering isn't as hard as people make out. melt the chocolate to 45C, then "cool it to 32C". How you melt it, up to you. Microwave it, leave it in the sun on a hot day, sous vide, stove top, bain marie... doesn't matter. How you cool it, up to you. Either table it 2/3 of it down to ~27C then add it back to the hot chocolate to get it to 32. I know a guy who tables all of his chocolate directly to the working temperature. Or you can seed it by adding callets, or add mycryo, or silk from something like @Kerry Beal's EZ Temper. That might sound confusing, but all I'm trying to point out is that there's so many ways to temper if you understand what the process is trying to do. If you don't understand what you're trying to achieve, all those combinations are going to seem pretty daunting. I'm sure if you want a crash course there's a tempering thread not too far away

It's funny how things are for different people, I use pretty much the exact same recipe as you've got there but get much better results on baking paper! Edit: compared to my baking on silpats, not your beautiful macarons in that picture

As much as I like using my thermometer for bread, I do cakes by feel.

In my experience it's extremely hard to not get moulding marks from those large block moulds because of the sheer amount of chocolate in the block and the amount of contraction it undergoes. When I use solid polycarbonate block moulds, there's sometimes a millimetre (which isn't huge but it is if you know what I mean) gap on the sides after it's set up overnight. I don't know how you can control that contraction rate to reduce the marks in a non-professional setting.

When I saw the weather forecast for this weekend, I was pretty sure things weren't going to end as well as they did: 38C on Friday, at midnight it was still 28C in my kitchen... Had to get creative! (I dragged my piece of stone into the lounge room and tempered on the floor in there as that's where the AC is!)

If it's printed on actual paper I feel that you're just going to have more problems!

My recipe is easy. I make a normal ganache, then throw all the matcha in the bin, because matcha tastes like the devil's... Let's just say it doesn't taste nice and leave it there 😛

Well, because they are quiet? I can use mine at midnight in my kitchen and no-one knows I'm using it, even if it does turn on every 30 seconds. But if you want this lack of noise, you're sacrificing power to pressurise a large tank to provide continuous flow for spraying whole moulds. You can make a small quiet compressor work, but the time you take to spray will be increased. I bought mine and made it work for me because I couldn't afford getting another compressor or a different gun. If I could go back and change it, I probably would try a larger iwata instead.

can you define what you're doing when you're airbrushing? Are you looking to coat the whole mould in a short time or are you looking at individual cavities? If the latter, I have an Iwata SmartJet Pro which is very quiet, however it struggles to cover a whole mould, I need to wait for a few seconds after every pass or two before doing the next row of cavities.

you could also add a pinch of bicarbonate soda to help with the emulsification, but you still need to put in a bunch of effort mixing!

Hah, I just bought 8kg of Felchlin SaoPalme 36% milk and 4kg Accra 62% dark today for tempering milk, do exactly the same but your final temperature you're aiming for is 30-31C.

It depends on your kitchen, how clean it is, the temperature your product is stored at and how much water is in your product. The last one is probably the most important. Low water content = low microbial activity. This doesn't mean "I didn't add any water" it means "cream is 65% water" & "<insert type of> alcohol is 90% water" or whatever. You can add products to your formulations to extend shelf life, things like potassium sorbate, or try different types of sugars like sorbitol that can reduce your Aw. Things that are very high is sugar are also relatively shelf stable.

Room temperature Properly pre-crystallised chocolate at the right temperature Polished moulds

that wrench is AMAZING ❤️

when I'm doing moulded chocolates, it's pretty much fill, clean the mould and empty back into the tank. But when I'm doing something like a large easter egg, I'll leave that for up to 5 minutes before I empty it back in, if I empty it straight away the shell is super-thin and not practical.

sometimes, no matter what you do, you're going to get those marks. No-one else will see them, just you