JoNorvelleWalker

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,

Too much. Or maybe not enough.

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.

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.

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.

I'm sure it will be fine unless you get it hot.

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/ https://youtu.be/oc-I3UXl-zc

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

These are what I ordered: http://amzn.com/B01KP671UA Should arrive in a few hours.

I never thought to let dough for pizza rise. Does yours rise before or after shaping?

Damn, the name is taken!

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.

Do you have any problem with the plastic melting?

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.

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?

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.

Thank you very much!

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!

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.

I am fond of avocado but I'm pretty sure I never cooked one in my life.

As did I.