Jim D.

@pastrygirl, those are both very nice decorations. Clean stripes on the first, great splatter on the second, which looks like a real egg.

An interesting question. I have not measured the Aw of a PdF after loosening it with a blender. Actually I have not ever used a blender on it because, with Pomona's pectin, I can just add a tiny amount of liquid and heat it until it's pipeable. I think it was in a previous discussion of pipeable PdF that someone mentioned the blender idea (probably in a discussion of Kate Weiser's chocolates). Another bit of evidence regarding the water content after using a blender: In several of Greweling's recipes he calls for beating a ganache, and in the two that I use regularly, the Aw readings were 0.59 and 0.52--and those readings were taken after beating the ganache.

@GRiker, what I do is make a pâte de fruit with Pomona's pectin (easy to find on Amazon). It allows for much less cooking time (therefore more fresh fruit flavor) and is reversible (you can remelt the PdF and cook it some more or some less, and no harm is done). Controlling the texture is also fairly easy: Test a bit of the finished PdF by placing in the refrigerator for a while and see what its texture is going to be like. Another trick is using an immersion blender to "un-thicken" the PdF to be able to pipe it. Kate Weiser is a chocolatier who uses lots of pipeable PdFs; take a look at her site to see examples (I also bought a box, and they are as good as they look). The Aw issue is one I struggle with. A regular PdF made with "regular" pectin can have a somewhat high Aw, especially if you don't cook off the liquid (because you want the PdF thinner in consistency). All the sugar added to a PdF helps bind some of the water but makes for a very sweet product. With my recipe using Pomona's, I substitute sorbitol for some of the sugar. It provides the binding agent but is much less sweet than sucrose. I don't know whether using the Perfect Purée as is (or even with adding glucose) would work. My guess is that the free water content will be high. Another guess is that glucose does not provide the same ability to bind with water as grains of sucrose (or sorbitol) provide. Wish we were closer so that I could test the Aw of the various permutations you are talking about; testing is the only way to know for sure. My raspberry and strawberry PdFs are higher than other fruits; I think that may be because it is so difficult to reduce those purées (I think I still have burns from violently bubbling raspberry purée). With cherry, apricot, mango, pear, and apple purées, on the other hand, I add some dried fruit and purée it along with the commercial purée--this adds more bulk and reduces the Aw while also adding more flavor. With raspberries, however, you really can't add fruit unless you don't mind the seeds. You are so right about not being able to control the behavior of recipients of your chocolates. There are other threads in which I and others have given specific examples of exasperating customer behavior. They just can't imagine that bonbons can mold (or deteriorate in flavor).

I really like the gold splatter on the turquoise egg. What did you use for the gold?

Thanks for that quite interesting article. I'm not sure I understand exactly what the conclusions were--and I could be wrong about this--but I think the researchers are saying that adding cocoa powder to a center might help with fat migration but, even more, that tempering the filling helps prevent the issues we have all encountered from time to time with fat bloom. I know that in my own case it is easy to take the tempering of a gianduja for granted because it looks so foolproof--just melt some nut paste and chocolate together, pipe the mixture, and it will solidify on its own. For owners of an EZtemper, tempering gianduja becomes quite easy, no messy tabling required. I was impressed by the researchers' description of what tempered chocolate looks like under the microscope: It's those "spatially uniform crystal structures with well defined inter-crystalline connections" that those of us without the scientific equipment have to imagine we have in our bowls!

Indeed there are some errors in the book. What I ended up doing is to start with 220g of orange juice and reduced that by half (I made that change a long time ago and am now guessing that I was trying to reach a compromise between the original conflicting numbers). I have notes that the ganache seems quite fluid when it is done but that it thickens successfully in time. If shelf life is a concern of yours, I tested the free water content of this filling and it was 0.85, which is not astronomical but higher than I like, especially for wholesale sales, where I have little control over what happens. That water comes from using a raspberry coulis and can be reduced if you substitute a raspberry pâte de fruit.

Those are beautiful. Do you mind telling how you achieved the marbled effect?

Grex Airbrush's tech staff recommended 60psi to me. [correction: 30psi was the recommendation, although that is lower than many people use, edited 8/16/20]

@RWood, I'm glad to see that Jackson Pollock is alive and well. I like your techniques. Wasn't it you just a few days ago who posted that you didn't do enough work with chocolate to invest in a serious airbrush + compressor? I think an "au contraire" might be in order. I don't know where you got your transfers, but I recommend those from Chocotransfersheets.com, and they are close enough to your location to make shipping much easier.

I have used this recipe many times and like the taste very much. I always mold it in milk chocolate, but dark would be good as well. I would not use white as it is a very sweet caramel. The recipe has, however, given me lots of trouble. There is a discussion of it elsewhere in a thread on caramel difficulties. It may be my shortcomings, but every time I followed the recipe as written, the pineapple burned. It is very difficult to get the caramel to the prescribed temperature with that issue. It is also a caramel that tends to leak from the shell (not sure of the reason for that). I have tried many approaches. The one that seemed most promising was to make the caramel with cream, then add the hot pineapple near the end. But there is no way to get the pineapple above boiling point, and so it cools down the caramel, and you are faced with cooking to the desired temperature all over again. My latest approach is to make the caramel with cream only, but cook it to the firm ball point (252F or even higher). Meanwhile heat the pineapple and add it at the end. It will thin out the caramel, but the high temp (and thus viscosity) of the caramel counteracts that to some degree. I also add pineapple flavor with some Amoretti pineapple flavoring, which is an all-natural product (really just concentrated pineapple) and some citric acid, which really helps to counteract the sweetness of this filling. This works well. I got some of those Chocolate World molds that look like pineapples and paint some leaves in one end of each cavity with green cocoa butter, then spray the molds with gold or yellow.

I wonder if the dark brown sugar is a solution for the problem of getting this type of caramel dark enough.

Very interesting concept and attractive exterior. Can you tell us more about the various components inside?

@jedovaty, when I am working on a single mold or two and using a small bowl, I don't try to empty the mold over the bowl; a mess can be the only outcome of that. Instead I fill the mold, then invert it, while holding it horizontal, over a piece of parchment. Tap on the sides of the mold to empty it, turn it right side up, scrape it, still over the parchment. In this way all chocolate goes onto the parchment and nothing is wasted. Then let the chocolate shells crystallize at room temperature so that the chocolate turns from shiny to matte, then place in the refrigerator for at least 5-10 minutes, then remove and store in a cool place until you are ready to fill. Doing the whole procedure (including filling and sealing them) at once is really not (in my opinion) a practical option. Most fillings need time to set before the cavities are sealed; otherwise you risk scraping off some of the filling when you are sealing. And one of the most difficult parts of the whole process is getting just enough filling into each cavity--too little and the bonbon bottoms will be too thick, too much and you won't be able to get a good seal. If it were easy to make filled chocolates, every fool in the world would be making them.

On this page you will find some posts from Chocolot and RobertM about this very issue. Somewhere on that thread I also asked about adding baking soda, which darkens the caramel (I never did find out whether it darkens the taste or just the color).

My chocolates have been on the menu at a local restaurant for the past year. It's quite a challenge to package them so that they can withstand the controlled chaos of a restaurant kitchen, but it is going well. Now the publicity person for the establishment had the idea of pairing them with cocktails for the lucrative Valentine's business coming up. So below is the photo they are using. The actual batch will have all three in heart molds. The flavors of the chocolate fillings will be fig with anise & port, hazelnut gianduja & coffee with Kahlúa, and "raspberry rose" (dark chocolate ganache with raspberry purée & rosewater--made from locally grown edible roses, incidentally). To give credit where it's due, the third filling is from Andrew Shotts's book. All are molded in dark chocolate, either Felchlin's Maracaibo 65% or Arriba 72%.

@Bentley, that's exactly what I needed to know. Thanks very much. I saw a reference on Instagram from someone who had tried a recipe from the site for water ganache, and I was intrigued. The video I found was, of course, only an introductory tease that led to signing up for the site.

This ancient thread seems to be an appropriate place to ask about online chocolate learning. I already subscribe to the Savour website and have found it very helpful. Do people have opinions on Callebaut's Chocolate Academy online?

Yes, the blender is used to mix in the butter, making an emulsion. But if you are cooking the caramel to the 275 range, you may need an industrial-strength blender. Regular ones may not be able to cope.

Same for me. Since I began using a blender, I've had no separation of fat. You do have to blend in the butter fairly soon after taking the caramel off the heat or it gets too thick.

With the metallics, I add melted plain cocoa butter, stirring the whole time, until the result has more or less the consistency of the non-metallic colors. For some reason I don't understand, although the metallics are thicker, they seem to come out of the Fuji faster. It takes a lot of gold, for example, to cover molds properly.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. The air control valve (it's not a knob) is attached to the quick connect coupling, so it is essentially part of the flexible hose, not the gun itself. The knob with the numbers (directly above the blue handle) is to control the amount of "paint" going through the gun. When you are spraying you can release the trigger a bit, then tighten that knob, and it will keep you from pulling the trigger all the way back (which would be the natural thing to do) and spraying the paint full-blast. Or at least I think that's what it is for. That's part of my learning quest for the future. I believe we have the same setup if you followed Kerry's advice (it's never wise to ignore Kerry's advice).

The dehydrator I ended it getting is the Avantco CFD10 Dehydrator, which I got from webstaurantstore.com. It's the only one I found that was large enough for my purposes and has stainless steel shelves. The temperature control also goes lower than many others and is reasonably reliable.

I found a fairly large (and surprisingly inexpensive) dehydrator. I put the bottles of cocoa butter in the night before along with the Fuji gun (empty). Then the next morning I temper the color I am using, then take the Fuji out and blow out any color remaining from the previous use. I then fill it with the new color, and it is ready to go. When I finish with that color, I put the Fuji back in the dehydrator (if you followed orders and bought the flexible hose, it's easy to detach the spray gun). Starting from scratch with a cold Fuji does not make for a happy spraying experience!

@BottleRocket, as you are new to eGullet, I can assure you that you will find extremely patient people on this forum who will do all they can to assist you (and learn from you at the same time). As one member of the forum put it, "all the thanks I need is knowing I helped someone! I live for that." To answer your specific question, yes, the Fuji gets hot. I too was alarmed by that, but it's just the way it is. Fuji advises users to turn off the machine whenever not in use. So even during the short time when I am filling the container, I turn off the Fuji. The remote switch makes that easy. As far as starting a new thread, I thought about that a long time, but concluded that there are so few Fuji users on eG that the forum hosts might not think that was a good idea. I have learned that the principal control is the air control at the bottom of the gun. Adjusted properly, it allows you to splatter, and I keep it turned somewhat lower than fully open to control the cocoa butter usage. Too low, however, and you will get the "orange peel" effect. In the beginning I found it useful to spray with just water against a background that will allow me to see what was happening. Using water takes away that urgent thought you get, "You are wasting expensive cocoa butter at a frightening rate." Of course, you have to completely dry out the spray gun after this experimentation. I must confess that although I finally (more or less) mastered splattering (which is achieved solely by adjusting the air flow), the effect differs so much from one cocoa butter color to another (something Chocolot told me about) and tends to be too much splatter for my taste that I have gone back to using a toothbrush against a dough scraper. I decided on this only after I finally found that a toothbrush labeled "firm" is the one that works best. It may sound as if I regret getting the Fuji, but I don't. When I am spraying a large number of molds with a deadline for orders, nothing can compare with the speed of the Fuji--and, maybe most of all, the fact that it can spray for a long, long time before the cocoa butter gets too thick. At those times, I just count the cocoa butter usage as part of "the cost of doing business."

I also have a Fuji with the setup you mention. There is another thread where spraying has been discussed, and in that thread I mentioned how useful it would be to have a place where Fuji owners could discuss issues. We may as well use this thread, which is a more comprehensive spraying discussion. When you write "without wasting half a bottle," that struck a chord. That is my chief complaint about the Fuji. Especially the Chef Rubber Jewel colors come out in huge quantities when using it. For my most recent batch (a smaller one), I went back to my Grex airbrush and was amazed at how little cocoa butter I used. I must say, on the other hand, that the coverage of molds is much better with the Fuji. And its speed cannot be denied. For Christmas production, I would still be spraying if I had used an airbrush. I am also interested in learning more about controlling the spray and what the various knobs do and intend to look for some Fuji videos dealing with that. I can't believe that those who use the Fuji for painting don't have occasion when they need a better-targeted and less-intense spray. I hope to find the answer to these questions.