Jim D.

I'm really enjoying the new stainless steel model that Kerry described. It cleans off the sides of the bowl to an impressive degree. I have not had one particle splash out of the bowl during use, and the melanger managed to grind up even the sticky hard caramel I was mixing with ground almonds (the stickiness was my fault--since then the very helpful @Alleguede has explained how to make hard-crack caramel the right way). In addition, customer service is great; the tech guy even called a few days later to see how things were going. Those who already own the previous model should bring their willpower to the workshop as I suspect it will be hard to resist this new version.

It is The Shack (it used to look more like its namesake, but they have gussied it up a bit with their ever-increasing fame--the restaurant was reviewed in the Washington Post, which stirred up D.C. visitors). Here's one course from the current menu: yellow tail – grapefruit – rhubarb – camomile. And another: rabbit – morels – ramps – peas. My chocolates almost made it into the adjoining Staunton Grocery, but there was an issue with having chocolates and pickled vegetable in the same refrigerator! I should add that sometimes the restaurant is a bit too adventurous for me!

What a great idea. Bring a cooler! But you already know that. If you're an adventurous eater, I also have a place to recommend. @Kim Shook decided it was a bit too adventurous for her!

I shipped a box to friends in Nova Scotia once. It took a month to get there and cost a lot of money!

Thank you very much. Even though Kim and her husband live on the other side of the state, they have become good customers.

I see that @liuzhou has already provided information on the name. The restaurant's version is that it is the Native American word for "Shenandoah." Staunton (which, by the way, is pronounced "Stanton") is located in the Shenandoah Valley (between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains). And the recipe for their cornbread (which is fantastic reheated for breakfast) was published in the Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/recipe/zynodoas-bruleed-cast-iron-cornbread

Yes, I do have the CakeSafe spray booth, and I have been very pleased with it. With it, very little cocoa butter gets on me (and presumably into my lungs). Almost no c.b. is expelled by the fan into the air of the room, meaning that the various filters are absorbing it. The one factor that I simply had to accept is that the "pre-filter" (the easily replaceable first filter) gets saturated with c.b. rather quickly and must be replaced after a few molds. I bought a roll of filters, cut the material into pieces of the correct size with a paper cutter, and keep a stack near my spray booth. The side panels also get covered with c.b. and require washing, demonstrating how much c.b. they are stopping from getting into the room. The fan is quite powerful and rather noisy, but then so is a compressor or the Fuji turbine.

Great success with the melanger today. I had a large container of plain pistachio paste but wanted to have it "pralined" and have been unable to obtain the Cacao Barry paste. My issue with the previously mentioned almond praline paste was that the caramel bits became gummy and never totally dissolved. Thanks to @Kerry Beal's friend @Alleguede, I have conquered that problem. For hard-crack caramel I have always made a wet caramel, and he immediately diagnosed the water as the problem. He made a suggestion I have never heard anywhere else: Start by bringing some glucose to a boil, then add granulated sugar (so it is mostly a dry caramel), stir until it caramelizes, then pour onto a Silpat and, after it has cooled, grind into powder. So I powered up the melanger, added the already ground (but not by any means smooth) pistachio paste, then the caramel bits gradually, plus sea salt. Within a few hours it had become a completely smooth and deliciously caramelized pistachio paste (I used @Rajala's suggestion of 60% pistachio, 40% sugar). Now I'm searching for what I can grind up next!

But as in the traditional method of tempering chocolate (without seed), if you let the cocoa butter cool down to the point where all the crystals re-form, then reheat it to the point where everything but the Type V melt, couldn't it be used in the EZtemper?

This is exactly the experience I have had with inspection. We fall through the cracks--and that can be a good thing. I tell customers (on an insert and on my website) to keep the chocolates below 68F and state that shelf life is approximately two weeks--unless they get the chocolates (from me) sealed in plastic, in which case they can refrigerate or even freeze them for a very long shelf life. A shop that sells them also keeps some in a case under refrigeration and the rest in a freezer. As discussed on this forum many times, there isn't much you can do once the customer takes the chocolates from your hands. Over the years I find myself (and I think pastrygirl does the same) making more caramels and giandujas, which have a long shelf life. Ganache and pâte de fruit can mold--that's just a fact. If making a fruit-based filling that has some acid, I have recently begun adding a little sorbic acid, which deters mold. I also have found that inspectors are most concerned with ingredient lists, especially their beloved list of allergens (the supervisor said to me, "Yes, I know pinenuts aren't nuts, but you have to list them"). They also care about such things as being able to trace the source of your ingredients (I take photos of the pertinent labels). And each time mine comes, there is a different emphasis. A friend gave up her license when the inspector told her she had to cover her fluorescent lights completely with plastic "in case any of them breaks."

As Kerry said, yes, the gianduja has to be tempered. In my opinion, it's not exactly the same as tempering chocolate. You can't test the temper of gianduja. Why not start with tempered chocolate and melt it carefully so as not to go too much over 93F? When you deal with chocolate already in temper, remember that it's OK for the chocolate to go to a slightly higher temp as long as some of it is still unmelted (that "seed" will temper whatever may have gone higher). Then add the other ingredients (warm but not over the temp of the chocolate) and heat carefully. When everything is melted, keep stirring as the gianduja cools. When it's down to working temp, it should be in temper.

I'm not sure if you are using the term "ganache" as a synonym for "filling," or you want to end up with an actual ganache. If the latter, then you need to add a liquid (ordinarily cream) and mix it with the gianduja. If you want a pipeable gianduja, then you have to experiment with adding more nut paste and/or coconut oil to soften the final product. I'm a bit confused by the ingredient list. Gianduja is a mixture of ground nuts and chocolate. Praliné as Wybauw uses it is a nut paste with ground caramel. In the example of hazelnuts, I make what I call hazelnut praline gianduja by mixing hazelnut praline paste (approx. 50-50 hazelnuts and caramel) with chocolate. I assume the 120g milk chocolate is extra chocolate (beyond what the gianduja already includes). As I wrote in my earlier post to which you referred, it is difficult to predict the texture of a gianduja. The Cacao Barry hazelnut praline paste is quite thick and so doesn't need as much chocolate to make it firm enough. On the other hand, the almond praline paste I made in my new melanger is rather fluid and requires much more chocolate mixed with it. A Canadian professional chocolatier I consulted recently said he has suspicions that some commercial praline pastes contain sugar in some form rather than hard-crack caramel that has been ground up, and that explains their viscosity. The only method I know for predicting the final viscosity of a gianduja is to test it by cooling a bit of it. Then go back and add what you need (more chocolate or more nut paste) and heat it again. As I said previously, gianduja appears to be very forgiving. As for tempering it, if you have or are able to purchase an EZtemper, that is the foolproof way. You add a bit of "silk" (it doesn't take much), then stir. You will notice the gianduja thicken almost immediately. There is no way I have ever heard of to test whether it is in temper. Before I had an EZtemper, I stirred the gianduja over cool water until it began to thicken. The tried-and-true way is to table it, but I have never done that. Chocolate expert Michael Laiskonis writes: "Tempering is still important, and all of the typical methods can be used for traditional gianduja. I also temper the softer spread, typically on marble as indicated, or with 1% stable cocoa butter crystals from our EZ-Temper unit." Since tempering is for the benefit of cacao butter (so to speak), I assume that using tempered chocolate and keeping the gianduja mixture below the melting point of Type V crystals would serve the purpose. If I have misunderstood your question, please clarify.

Kerry's post describes most of what I do, and I have no breakthrough to announce, but wanted to add some notes from my experience. In my dealings with the overtempering problem, adding warm, untempered chocolate is the best solution (however temporary) for overtempered chocolate. Turning up the heat doesn't work as well since the excess Type V crystals don't always melt as expected. Well-tempered chocolate is quite forgiving of warm chocolate being added to it; in other words, it doesn't fall out of temper even if adding quite warm chocolate (35-36C) to it, but its original fluidity does return. I don't have a lot of success using my Mol d'Art to make shells as its temperature changes are rather slow. I use a Chocovision machine, which does tend to make the overtempering issue somewhat worse with its constant movement, but its temperature changes are very quick and register accurately. So if I have a bowl of chocolate at 32C and it becomes overtempered, I can add untempered chocolate at 35.5C, wait a few minutes for the machine to register 32C again, and a temper test will show it still in temper (I have never had the test fail). If using EZtemper silk, the chocolate is even more forgiving of upward temperature shifts. Just yesterday I had a bowl of tempered chocolate, was interrupted by a chef picking up some chocolates for his restaurant, stopped to swap restaurant gossip, then went back to find the chocolate as thick as mud. I heated it to 35.5C and, fearing the worst, tested for temper, and it was fine. @Vojta, I am sure my methods for my relatively small production would not work for your larger quantities, and obviously you have tried all the methods, but I have found that adding untempered chocolate is the way to go.

So you will write: colored cocoa butters (CB, mbpp, red #40, yellow #6, yellow #5, blue #2, blue #1, red #3, titanium dioxide, rice protein) And will you include this text on all labels regardless of whether a colorant is in a particular batch or not? Or will you go to the trouble of checking which are used? I have a bad feeling that it is the second that is acceptable.

Can one get away with just listing them all and saying something like "Depending on assortment, ingredients may include ...."? It all looks quite daunting. But thanks for providing that information. I still say the ingredient list will be very long.

That's (possibly) something of a relief, though my annoyance level continues to rise at bureaucracy run amok. It would mean, for me, going through a bottle of every color in my inventory and making a list of its ingredients. I just checked "Copper," for instance, and it has 6 colorants. If a potential customer is that sensitive, then that person might want to look for a Hershey's bar.

I just counted, and I used 23 separate colors in my Easter chocolates. That's a long ingredient list! If I were looking for a sign that it's time to hang up the chocolate-stained apron and call it quits (and I am), this may be it.

Heart palpitations, indeed. Reminds me of a recent episode: A host told us the almond tart she was serving was gluten-free. A friend, who has a wicked sense of humor and doesn't put up with a lot, said, "Oh, I am so sorry, I didn't know you had been diagnosed with celiac disease." The host responded, "Oh, I haven't been. I just find that when I eat gluten, it causes my dairy intolerance to flare up." I nearly choked on my gluten-free tart as I stifled my laugh. My inspector brought up the need to be able to trace ingredients a few years ago. I thought of the horror of recording all that information by hand, so had the idea of keeping my phone handy and photographing the pertinent information from each bag or box as I went along. He was satisfied, indeed happy, with that idea.

Your homemade melter sounds much more useful than my Mol d'Art. The Mol gets up to temp fairly rapidly, but the wait for chocolate to cool seems interminable. A few days ago I had a tank full of chocolate, melted it overnight, and lucked out with it near the temp when seed should be added. I thought I would be ready to mold in a few minutes, but such was not the case. It was something like an hour before the temp was low enough. A Mol d'Art with circulating water that can be heated or cooled would be great, but I guess that's called a Selmi (or similar tempering machine).

This change in requirements will have a huge impact on chocolatiers who decorate their chocolates. It's not unusual, in a batch of 10 different fillings, to use 20-25 different colors. Listing those individually is completely impractical. In addition, I assume that, for those who use transfer sheets, more colors would have to be listed. Are you required to include an ingredient list for chocolates you sell direct to consumer or just for those sold from other businesses (when you sell the chocolates wholesale to those businesses)? I think of bakeries, which normally don't provide ingredient lists at all--why should we have to do so?

I roast them in my toaster oven (a regular oven works for larger amounts) at 350F. Once they begin to color, frequent stirring keeps them from burning...usually. I don't mind if a few are slightly over-toasted since (as you pointed out) their flavor comes out with toasting. On some occasions I have stopped to remove the toasted ones, then continue with the others, but that is (obviously) very time-consuming. Some people prefer using a nonstick skillet with nearly constant stirring--clearly they are easier to watch in a skillet than in an oven.

I don't think it is possible to add color without having it in cocoa butter. After the chocolate shell is made, the tempered chocolate in the mold contracts as it crystallizes/cools, and the colored cocoa butter beneath it also contracts, so that they become one and come out of the shell together. This is all assuming that cocoa butter and chocolate are in temper--and that the chocolate gods are smiling that day. That contracting process wouldn't work with just food coloring applied to the shell. The coloring agent must be in an oil-based medium (such as cocoa butter), or the chocolate would seize up when it encountered water-based colorant.

I have some foam-tip tools, but they tend to make rather defined areas of color, not the "fluffiness" of this design You second idea is what Monde du Chocolat ordinarily does. Given the quickness with which cocoa butter hardens, it would take incredible speed--and talent.

These beautiful eggs are from Monde du Chocolat. The creator's work is incomparable. I read somewhere that she does many of her designs by blowing dabs of cocoa butter inside each cavity, but this one looks too "composed" for the randomness of an airbrush. How do you think this design was accomplished? Sponges? A fluffy paint brush (it's difficult to keep a brush fluffy after even a small amount of cocoa butter gets in it)? Finger painting (looks too refined for that, but one never knows)?

If the ingredient is just lime juice, I am still puzzled. "Carthage Lime Praline" is not just the title of the recipe, it is also an ingredient, and I don't see how lime juice could qualify as a praline without some added ingredients. Following up on Kerry's comment that Maison Boudina makes pastes with unusual flavors, a search for "Maison Boudina hazelnut" leads to cremedescremes.com, operated by Faten Boudhina, that does have lots of interesting ingredients, but no Carthage lime anywhere. One of the products, "Gianduia with Osmanthe and Piedmont Hazelnuts" lists among the ingredients: "80% Piedmont hazelnuts (Maison Boudina Paris)." But I cannot find a food-oriented website specifically named "Maison Boudina." I think the recipe will remain a mystery unless you manage to find the author and ask that person. Did Journal du Patissier happen to tell you the name of the author? The magazine's response to you doesn't really answer the central question, what is "Carthage lime praline"?