JoNorvelleWalker

Sweetzels and milk, hold the peanut butter. Long day, incredibly tired.

My chocolates were a success at work. One friend said till now she'd never liked dark chocolate. The difficulty was convincing folks I made them. I'd say the Precise Heat Mixing Bowl was a success for tempering. I was working with 600 grams of chocolate though a kilogram at a time seems not out of the question. I wouldn't want to try much more than that. Obviously a kilogram limitation is a disadvantage for commercial chocolate makers. But then one can melt batch after batch. The downside is that if your Precise Heat Mixing Bowl is full of chocolate you can't make ice cream or yogurt.

This morning (OK, granted I keep oddish hours) another Simple Curry -- Yogi Vithaldas' term. As I was enjoying my dinner I was perusing VIJ'S at Home. Wherein I stumbled upon Yogurt Curry (pp 92-93). Same recipe, except Dhalwala and Vij grind their fenugreek and Vithaldas omits the garlic and onion. For most of my life this was the only curry that I knew.

But we can have fun all day arguing about the temperature! I do 55C, 131F myself. On the subject, I was wondering earlier today how long pasteurized eggs can be kept. But the store had no decent looking broccolini so the point was moot.

After my disappointing results two days ago I decided to borrow a leaf from Kerry's playbook. I was facing a deadline that had to do with grand kids. So I anovaed up some cocoa butter(and congratulations to @Artisanne for choosing the correct color of anova, it makes all the difference). I added what sure looked like silk to my melted chocolate at about 1 percent, with the chocolate at about 33.5. Hopes of an instant solution were dampened by a temper test. I cooled the chocolate down to 31 and did another temper test with similar result. At this point I was cooling the chocolate down to 29 to see what might happen, but between 31 and 30 the chocolate went in temper. I don't know if it was stirring by Teo's method or if it was the silk, but the chocolate was in temper and still fluid. Fluid enough to ladle into molds! The mass was thickening with time so I scraped the last blobs I could gather on the spatula into a lovely heart mold that Kerry sent. This sure made an incredible mess...or possibly a quite credible mess for some of us: My Thermoworks is waterproof, not sure if it is chocolate proof. Any suggestions for cleaning molds without washing them would be most welcome. Licking doesn't count. No picture but my kitchen floor looked like I'd stepped in dog poop. I have a cooling cabinet that fortuitously accepts quarter sheet pans. Six bars just fit on a quarter sheet pan. Sometimes one gets lucky. As hopefully will be my coworkers this afternoon. Thanks again for the help and encouragement!

If an Indian curry recipe calls for yams, is the ingredient genus Dioscorea, or what we in the US call sweet potatoes? Wkipedia tells me yams are eaten in Asia. Yams here are hard to come by but they are available. Unrelated to the above I made a batch of "Simple Curry" from The Yogi Cook Book by Yogi Vithaldas and Susan Roberts. I've been making this recipe for close to fifty years. My rice ended up rather dry and this time it was not the greatest.

Thunderstorms tonight: rain, heat and humidity. Not nice weather, a front is passing through -- so I dared not take up my chocolate. But for a sanity check I gave a second look at my thermometers. The meter and probe I've been relying on are reading a little low, but I believe close enough for chocolate work. With my anova bath set at and reading 33.4, the thermometer measured 33.3. Whereas my reference instrument measured 33.42.

How is Ozark cooking different from Appalachian cooking? (Serious question.)

Much as I read and enjoy The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, The Economist is my newspaper of choice. This evening I perused a serious report on the difficulties faced by small, artisanal cheese producers in the Congo. Excellent cheeses are manufactured on small farms in the face of low wholesale prices and ethnic and tribal hatreds (i.e. the militia comes to kill your cows). The last sentence of the article: "Not all cheese makers are blessed."

I wish I liked chocolate ice cream.

Say that ten times fast. And a fast is related to food.

My vote is aluminum.

Opps, it seem I already own it. Now if I could only use a donabe on my electric stove...

One of my vices is collecting thermometers. The probe in the picture has been checked against my precision reference thermometer. And the Precise Heat Mixing Bowl is surprisingly accurate, though not a substitute for an external thermometer. What I haven't tried is using the PHMB for mixing. I've just been stirring the chocolate with a spatula. The machine will happily stir for hours, day and night. And I ended up with horrible hand and leg cramps. Unfortunately I doubt I will have a chance to experiment for the next two days.

I've remelted the batch a couple times. It remelts beautifully. I'm about to head into work. I'll see if my boss has an opinion.

I think I am about to cry. My temper test turned out lovely. Could all 2 Kg be ruined? It sat in my cool bedroom only a few days.

I'll second that, Thermoworks' magnetic boot is really nice.

But if the problem were water wouldn't the chocolate still be seized when I heated and cooled by Teo's method? I have read that there is such a thing as over-tempered chocolate but I have not found much about it.

I don't believe so. I've seen no condensation anywhere near the chocolate. Any way to test? The weather has been damp but I have an hygrometer and I have been running the air conditioner. Right now the relative humidity is 49.

You told me it was this: https://www.cacao-barry.com/en-OC/chocolate-couverture-cocoa/chd-p64exbg/extra-bitter-guayaquil Here were my results tonight: About what I was expecting actually. The bars unmolded easily and had nice snap. No finger prints. But there was no question about tapping out air bubbles, the chocolate was too thick. It was rather like molding playdough. I had to abuse the spatula to force chocolate in the mold. And by the time I filled one mold the rest of the chocolate had solidified in the bowl (this was at 31). Same result as yesterday. Didn't help that my hands had cramped. Reminded me of stirring polenta. So at 31 by Teo's method I have beautifully fluid chocolate that is not in temper, and by this method at the same 31 temperature I have solid chocolate. Amazing the difference four degrees will make. There must be a solution. Thanks again to both of you for all the help.

Sweetzels, milk, and peanut butter. I blame @gfweb

Passes the temper test but the chocolate looks too thick for molding? Certainly too thick for ladling into molds. I'll try anyway and report back.

Apparently not. I stepped out to the store and when I returned I had lovely fluid chocolate at 30.3. I stirred between thirty seconds and a minute but it flunked the temper test. I stirred again for a few minutes but still no success. I'm letting the bowl cool down. Not sure yet how far.

Teo thank you so much for the timely help! This is dark chocolate. I'll cool to 31 and see what happens.

The chocolate is now melted. I've been thinking though...if a piece of chocolate is sitting on the counter at 27 it is solid, not melted. Why should I be surprised that the chocolate in my bowl at 27 is likewise solid? Earlier in the thread @teonzo suggested I might try a two step tempering method instead of three: https://forums.egullet.org/topic/157239-build-your-own-chocolate-tempering-machine/?do=findComment&comment=2170021 Perhaps I'll try cooling to 29 and test the temper. (By the way, I reset my meter to Celsius.)