JoNorvelleWalker
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Posts posted by JoNorvelleWalker
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There is a keep warm setting but, yes, basically full blast. Did I mention no smoke and (so far) easy to clean up?
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It never would have occurred to me to try chicken thighs on the Philips, but since @rotuts asked I obliged:
I pulled the thigh (singular) at exactly 165 on my Fahrenheit reading Thermopen. The skin was crisp and rather acrid. The meat near the bone was raw. For me thighs are all about the flesh and I prefer steam bake in the CSO at 300F for one hour,
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Too much. Or maybe not enough.
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15 hours ago, teonzo said:
My apologies, I did not watch their video when I wrote my previous replies. Now I did.
The technique is correct. The chocolate amount poured in the molds... not so much, with all that chocolate you get THICK walls: you don't get a hollow figure, you get a full figure with a small hole inside. If I poured that much chocolate inside a mold then I would be fired (with a blowtorch) on the spot.
You made a beautiful egg, compliments!
But I'm sorry to ruin the party and keep suggesting you to break it to check if you are happy with that thickness. Use a hammer to break it, if you go the traditional way (with a fist) you'll get hurt.
Teo
I have exacted a promise of an interior photograph. You will be among the first to know. I can say the center of mass feels like geometric center. And since we can roughly calculate the surface area and we know the mass of chocolate, we can approximate the shell thickness. But not me, not tonight.
Anyhow, my egg pictures were good but my son's egg picture was better*:
Again I can't express how pleased I am with the result. Thank you, everyone, for your help and encouragement. I regret I did not get a picture of the bagged up egg. I thought it was truly beautiful. Taking Kerry's suggestion I spent half a day perusing cello bags. I found some really thick ones made in the US for wrapping gift baskets. They turned out to be just right for the application.
*and, yes, both of us have double jointed thumbs.
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The egg is beautiful. No marks, no obvious seam:
The egg is now resting, just barely, in my 17C cooling cabinet.
I am quite relieved and happy. If I didn't have a doctor's appointment in a couple hours I would have another mai tai.
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Update of work in progress: I decided to melt more chocolate. My final batch weight was 1800 g and I could have worked with more. I underestimated the little PHMB. It did take longer to temper this amount than my usual 500 g batch. Typically I wouldn't bother to take a temper test but it's a good thing that I did. Took three tries till I was happy. Even so not all of the last addition of cocoa butter fully melted.
I used close to 2% cocoa butter before I got good temper. Wish Kerry would stop gallivanting around the globe and design a home size EZtemper with Alexa built in to tell me when my chocolate's done.
Anyhow I made a foil mask for the mold. Not necessary as I did not spill any chocolate but a good precaution:
The filled half mold:
Forgive the reflections and the shadow...I was in a hurry. Note the level is not all that near the top. And this was 1800 g. I spun until my hands were numb. Fortunately the mold fits in the refrigerator. Last I checked all of the chocolate had separated except for a band along the widest part. I'm trying to stay up until I can unmold the egg.
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3 hours ago, kayb said:
More to the point, does it mean your IP will shatter into a bazillion pieces if you drop it?
I'm sure it will be fine unless you get it hot.
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Teo, unless I am misunderstanding Brunner is not using your method 2. Please, if you would, take a look at their short video and let me know how it differs from your procedures.
https://www.brunnershop.com/en/Spinning-Moulds/
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Teo, Brunner does not specify a weight for the mold I have. They say to fill the mold half completely. As reported above I measured the mold half to be 2,138 ml. Brunner is of course German, not American. I can't recall seeing an egg like this in the flesh. When I was growing up the eggs in shops were pretty obviously made as halves and filled with vile coconut cream. Interesting if there is such a difference in the German and Italian traditions.
At the moment I have 1400 g of Felchlin melting. Unmelted the chocolate is above the PHMB fill line but will probably be below once melted.
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5 hours ago, teonzo said:
I don't have the tables here at home and my memory is faulty (I haven't been on Easter egg duty in the last years), but if I'm right those dimensions are for a 600 g egg. For sure the weight range is between 500 g and 800 g. If you pour 2400 g of chocolate in that mold then you get a brick, not a hollow Easter egg.
I don't know what method you are planning to use to make your Easter eggs. Since you are working in small quantities then the best thing is pouring the desired amount of chocolate (around 600 g for that size) into one half egg mold, put the other half egg mold on top (to get the full egg) and use a couple of clips/clamps/whatever to close it securely. Then pick the molds in your hands and start spinning to distribute the tempered chocolate on all the egg surface. Keep spinning for a couple of minutes, it depends on your room temperature. I assume you are not going to do dozens of eggs, so it's better to avoid going in the snow: better spinning by hand for 30 seconds more than risking to get a badly formed egg (with really uneven width).
If you need to insert a surprise then be careful. You need to open the egg molds (just to divide the egg in 2) when the chocolate is making the transition from fluid state to crystallized state. Since it's the first time you have no experience, so better erring on the fluid side than on the crystallized side. Try opening the molds after 1 minute, you just need to open on one side (the base) for 1 cm to see if the chocolate is still flowing. If it's so, then close immediately and keep spinning for other 30 seconds, then repeat. If the chocolate is semi-fluid (it's not set, but it's not flowing neither) then open the egg, insert the surprise, close the egg and put it to rest.
Teo
Teo, I think a football* sized egg will be quite enough of a surprise.
As a future project I would to fill the hollow with chocolate espuma but not worrying about that now. Interesting though that I was reading in Beckett's The Science of Chocolate that taste panels prefer nitrous oxide to nitrogen or CO2.
What company's molds were you using to require so little chocolate? Brunner's video is pretty clear about filling the mold half almost completely. Though the figure in the video was only about six inches.
*American
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5 hours ago, pastrygirl said:
2 liters won’t fit in the bowl? I know it’s smaller capacity than a regular 5 qt KA bowl, but if it holds at least 3 qts, that’s more than 2.1 liters. (1000 ml is about 4.25 US cups)
This gives me a thought. The bowl has a fill line, but that may apply more to mixing than to heating. Since I'm not mixing maybe I can get by with adding more? ...One way to find out.
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Mapo tofu:
I have at least half a dozen recipes for mapo tofu but this one is from Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees. One substitution was I had no Chinese leeks so I just sprinkled on cilantro. Very good.
What prompted the choice of dinner was that amazon sent me some beef round by mistake. They refunded the cost but I didn't want to waste it. All right, actually I wanted to pitch it but I would have felt guilty. I double ground the beef and didn't over cook it, and actually it was not half bad.
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Well, Brunner says to start with I should fill one side of the mold with chocolate (eg. 2,138 ml of chocolate). Afterwards I could also try with less. Which may or may not work. Be it known 2,138 ml is not going to happen in my PHMB. At least I don't think so. 2,138 ml is a lot of chocolate for one piece.
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2 hours ago, Ann_T said:
Another Sunday Pizza night.
I decided yesterday morning to feed my starter and make a biga before leaving for work.
Used the biga in a batch of sourdough last night. It was a 1000g batch that I divided in half and placed in two containers and they went into the fridge. One for pizza and the other will be baked Monday or Tuesday as baguettes.
My son took the dough for the pizzas out of the fridge around 1:30 this afternoon so it would have time to warm up and rise and be ready to use by the time I got home.
I baked three pizzas.
Matt's Greek potato pizza
and an Italian Sausage and Mushroom pizza
were both cooked on the stone on the grill.
And the third, a Margherita baked on a stone in an Oster French Door convection oven.
It was baked on the top shelf and finished under the broiler. This is the first time I have baked a pizza in this little oven. I was pleasantly surprised.
I never thought to let dough for pizza rise. Does yours rise before or after shaping?
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5 minutes ago, Kerry Beal said:
Contacting Brunner was a very sensible choice! If you don't get an answer I'll chat with my friends at Walker's chocolate here in Burlington who do a lot of spinner molds and see how much they fill it.
Damn, the name is taken!
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More thoughts on mold filling:
I found something on the Brunner site that I had read before, from the instructions for using spinning molds: "One mould half is completely filled with chocolate." Indeed the production video shows mold cavities being almost completely filled with chocolate. However the figures produced by these molds cover a wide range of sizes. The surface area of a sphere is proportional to the square of the radius, however the volume is proportional to the cube of the radius.
This tells me that as the size of the piece increases, shell thickness will increase. Naively I had thought shell thickness should remain about the same. If I completely fill "one mould half" of my SE-0110-G-L this will require 2,138 ml of molten chocolate. But we know the much larger SE-0166-G-B requires only 2400 g of chocolate. (And if I knew the chocolate density I could at least convert.)
But because I hope to have dinner sometime tonight I gave up and wrote Brunner to ask what weight of chocolate to use.
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45 minutes ago, keychris said:
heh, my technique. Except I don't have the snow 😂
Do you have any problem with the plastic melting?
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41 minutes ago, keychris said:
How are you going to spin it?
I'd like to say on my spinning machine but since I don't have one, standing out in the snow with my two hands.
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Sorry, no secrets intended, at least not from anybody reading here. The mold is a Brunner SE-0110-G-L:
https://www.brunnershop.com/en/Spinning-Moulds/Eggs/Smooth-style/Egg-smooth-style-oxid-33.html
I had purchased Cacao Barry Tanzanie 75% (that I misremembered as 72%) for the application:
https://www.cacao-barry.com/en-US/chocolate-couverture-cocoa/chd-q75taz/tanzanie
But I think at least for my first attempt I'll use Felchlin Maracaibo Creole 49%, of which I have a lot:
https://www.felchlin.com/en/product/cacao-maracaibo
Good news that the mold half exactly fits in my large steel pan, almost if it were made for it. Keeping the mold steady problem solved. No rice harmed in this experiment.
But I'm still not sure how full to fill the mold. Brunner does not say. Although for their part number SE-0166-G-B they specify the chocolate article weight as 2400 g.
https://www.brunnershop.com/en/Spinning-Moulds/Eggs/Smooth-style/Egg-smooth-style-oxid-10.html
The SE-0166-G-B is the same shape as my SE-0110-G-L, and had I not failed geometry I could probably figure this out. But if we assume an ellipsoid (which I know this isn't quite) the ratio of surface areas would be approximately 0.54 (I think). Therefore to achieve the same thickness of chocolate I calculate 2400 g x 0.54, or let's say 1200 g. Does this sound about right?
A small complication is I'm not sure I can properly temper 1200 g at one time. I could try a kg and see what happens. What think you?
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I keep ground nuts in the refrigerator a long time. However once made into pesto I'd expect the mix would go south pretty quickly.
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31 minutes ago, nickrey said:
The Kindle Version of that book is on special this month on the Amazon US store for US$3.99.
Thank you very much!
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1 hour ago, Chocolot said:
How about a pan of rice?
I have bags of Bomba, Basmati, and Bineshii. Not to mention Tamaki, Carnaroli, and Arborio. But not a big enough pan.
No, I take that back! I measured. One pan would just fit the mold by a fraction of an inch! But we're talking about an awful lot of rice. I may try setting the mold in the pan and see how level it works out. But not tonight.
Thanks for the idea!
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Unfortunately I did not come up with a good answer for the density at work. The reason for the question is to calculate how much chocolate I need to melt to fill a mold. The mold is a hollow mold, not solid. I measure the volume of the mold to be 4,276 ml.
Thoughts?
Related to this there is a complication that the mold does sit flat. Not even close. I need to prop up the corners somehow to make it level. I have a ring stand and clamps but given the size of the mold I think I need something more industrial, like tomato cans. Or lower tech like bath towels.
Chocolate making: Things I learned in my early months
in Pastry & Baking
Posted
In seriousness I have I believe the largest KitchenAid and I don't think the KitchenAid is big enough for the application. Though the spinner picture Kerry posted looked like the spinner was homemade. And there probably is some reason for the mat underneath the unit.