Jim D.

When a fruit is frozen, it becomes watery when thawed. Obviously it's all juice that was originally inside the fruit, so I misspoke in the previous post. I just meant that making something like a sauce out of thawed raspberries would be rather watery if the berries weren't drained. As I said (and as Greweling usually prescribes), some reduction is usually called for to boost the flavor. With any frozen purées, that's the only option for increasing the flavor, but when I'm using frozen fruit, I have the chance to increase its flavor by draining out some of the juice in the early stages and so avoiding the cooked taste. My mistake with the raspberries in the ganache recipe was that I removed too much water/juice.

Are you tempering the gianduja? There are various ways of doing this: You can use cocoa butter silk if you have access to that. Otherwise "table" it, or put the pot in a larger pot filled with cold water and stir the gianduja. It will thicken as it crystallizes. As I said previously, if it gets too thick, you can always melt it and repeat the process. When you say "hazelnut paste," I assume you are speaking of plain paste (not hazelnut praline paste). If so, then you may need more chocolate.

Probably a mixture of both. But frozen raspberries have to be drained at least to some degree. I dislike recipes that call for reducing purées as they acquire that cooked taste, so whenever possible I use the method I described.

I love the flavor of Andrew Shotts's "Red Rose" ganache. It has a dark chocolate base with the liquefiers being heavy cream and raspberry purée, plus some butter and rosewater at the end. Fairly standard stuff. In the software I use for balancing ganaches (based on the calculations of Melissa Coppel and Jean-PIerre Wybauw), this one has 22% water, 22% cocoa butter, 10% other fat, and the ratio of chocolate to liquefiers is 1.8:1 (a little low for the chocolate, but not a lot). Even though its makeup is not far from the ideal (slightly more water and cocoa butter), it tends to separate. And I don't know why that is. Of course the most recent time it occurred was today, when I am hurrying to finish up some wedding chocolates. I tried all the tricks for separated ganaches: I added more nonfat liquid in the form of raspberry flavoring, raspberry liqueur, then skim milk. It still looked as if it was dying to separate. I had used my light-duty immersion blender, so I brought out the heavy-duty Robo Coupe. Better but still looked "off" (experienced chocolatiers will know what I mean). So I tried the last trick I know of, turning on my heavy-duty Cuisinart processor and dropping the ganache slowly through the feed tube, adding more skim milk. Finally it looked OK. I tested it, and the Aw was fine. I piped it into the molds (hearts, of course) and took a nap. Alas, when I returned, a little rim of fat had appeared around the edge of each cavity. I'm certainly not going to do it over (no one but me will know, and the mouth is a useful disguiser of bonbons that taste great but don't look quite right), but I would love to have some ideas as to what is wrong with the formulation. One clue: I used more of a raspberry coulis than a purée (that is, I drained most of the water from frozen raspberries before sieving them), so it was thicker than purée, but I assumed the extra liquids I added would make it work.

You are adding a substantial mount of hazelnut paste (in the praline, the plain paste, and the gianduja), and hazelnut paste in itself is rather fluid. Are you purchasing the gianduja or making it yourself? If the latter, then you can mix hazelnut praline and chocolate to make gianduja and omit the other additions of paste. In this way you will have more control over the final consistency. Before starting, you can judge the consistency of the paste (which varies quite a lot) and vary the amount of chocolate you add. I take a bit of the finished gianduja and let it set, and if it never gets to the stage of firmness I want, I add more chocolate and melt everything together again. Gianduja is forgiving in that you can melt it over and over (as long as it is eventually tempered). This may be more fuss than you are willing to undertake, but it's a thought.

Here is a link to a discussion about bananas that includes mention of caramel. There are other places this has been discussed. I found that adding bananas near the end of caramel preparation drops the temperature so much that it takes a long time to get the caramel thick enough. I now heat the bananas with the cream to as high a temp as possible before adding it to the caramel. I use Wybauw's recipe, which has passion fruit that adds some acid to the sweetness of the bananas. I also have a recipe that I developed for "bananas Foster" that works quite well.

I'm impressed that the cherry overpowered the chocolate. I can't recall a single situation in which that has happened with a fruit--my problem is just the opposite. In fact I just made a cherry butter ganache to be paired with a layer of almond gianduja, and I had to get really inventive to make the cherry flavor "visible" at all. About grinding: I cut the fruit into small pieces with scissors, then I add it to a purée of the same fruit. I cook the mixture briefly, just enough to soften the dried fruit. My smaller immersion blender comes with a plastic beaker, and I use that to purée the fruit. I don't mind if it isn't perfectly smooth as I like some texture in my PDF or ganache. The fruits where this blend really works are apricot, cherry, apple, pear, and mango.

If it's a small spot, you can temper a little cocoa butter of the same color and use a paintbrush to fix it. In the online course I took with Andrey Dubovik, we had to use a mold similar to yours as a test of our ability to get complete coverage of a mold with multiple angles. I haven't used that mold very often since.

How do these concentrates compare to fruit purées (such as Boiron) in taste and texture? Do you use them in ganaches and PDFs? The raspberry one sounds like a fantastic idea, given the tedious job of removing seeds from frozen raspberries (though I usually drain them first so that the result is more a thick coulis that does not need reducing in something like a ganache).

I use a grocery-store-brand apple juice concentrate. In making apple PDF, I add dried apple slices from Nuts.com--really lowers the Aw. Another option is an apple cider jelly. Woods Cider Mill makes one that has apple cider as its only ingredient. I use it in an apple caramel. It does have a cider taste rather than a pure apple taste, but it works well in caramel (along with some citric acid to cut the sweetness).

This is a really, really difficult calculation, and any figures can be only approximate. Knowing the advertised weight of a cavity is helpful. According to whom you consult, that figure was arrived at by the mold manufacturer by filling it with dark or milk chocolate and weighing it. So you could simply multiply that figure by the number of cavities in a given mold to arrive at the amount of chocolate needed to fill it. But that does not allow for a couple of other issues: If you ladle chocolate onto a mold, there will be chocolate used that does not flow into the cavities but stays on the other areas of the top. And how much you need depends on whether you are pouring the excess onto parchment (thus not reusing it) or back into the bowl (thus reducing the total amount being used because you are reusing it). I arrived at best guesses in the program I use to tell me how much chocolate I need to melt for a given batch. Both examples do not take into account emptying the mold back into the bowl. Best guess #1: For a mold in which each cavity holds 13g of chocolate and there are 18 cavities, I use about 360g of chocolate. Guess #2: For a mold in which each cavity holds 18g of chocolate and there are 28 cavities, I use about 500g of chocolate. So, using example #1, you could fill about 3 of those 18-cavity molds. But it is far more usual to dump back into the bowl, so, using example #1: If you scrape the mold and dump the mold back into the bowl (after the shell has formed), the 360g used to fill the mold would be closer to 250g, and chocolate required would be reduced accordingly, and thus you would get 4 molds worth of shells formed from a kilo.

Not to get too far off your topic, but in the case of mango, I made a PdF using mango purée plus dried mango, and it was quite flavorful. I paired it in a bonbon with a second layer of mango ganache, to which I added a French mango extract that added a bit of punch that, when covered in chocolate, mango needs to be assertive enough. You are undoubtedly correct that freezing fruit powder would help it last better.

Some on this forum praise dried fruit powders, but I have not been pleased with any I have purchased. Even if they are full-flavored when I open them (strawberry comes to mind), the flavor tends to fade rather quickly. I found a tasty raspberry powder once, but quickly realized that it wasn't seedless and so would not be satisfactory in a raspberry filling for a chocolate. Dried fruit is another matter, and I use it frequently. I just made a fig with anise and port filling for a chocolate and used dried California black figs that were delicious. I have been happy with most of the dried fruit I have gotten from nuts.com (the new half-dried apricots, for example, as well as pears and apples--not the blueberries, which tasted like raisins). For lowering free water content of a ganache or pâte de fruit, dried fruit really comes in handy, since much of the water has already been removed.

I do exactly the same.

Definitely. Peter Greweling even calls for using orange juice concentrate (a bit of a cooked taste, but then in some recipes he calls for cooking the unconcentrated juice down). Apple juice concentrate is great. I use it for my PDF.

PDFs have more water content than one would expect (or so I found). I played around with sugars other than sucrose and managed to decrease the Aw reading to an acceptable level (sorbitol was the main part of the solution because it adds a lot of bulk but not so much sweetness). In cases where there is a dried version of the fruit being used, I also added some ground-up dried fruit as part of the quantity of purée called for. And I use Pomona's pectin because it requires much less cooking and therefore produces less flavor loss. Coincidentally just yesterday I made a pineapple PDF (a Kirsten Tibballs recipe) with the traditional method (citrus pectin, all sucrose). I didn't bother measuring the Aw becauseI was dismayed at the dullness in the flavor--had to add some Amoretti natural pineapple flavoring to get that pineapple punch. So I started all over making it with Pomona's pectin. Then I had a side-by-side comparison that @Kerry Bealmight have approved of, and there was no question the second one was much better. I still used the wonderful Amoretti flavoring, but it was the winner even without that. As an aside, Kirsten calls for a little chili (I used habañero), which is a great addition to pineapple.

For the micro-batch accessory for the Premier melanger, the stated minimum is 0.5kg, but I could not find a maximum on the Premier website. I did locate this statement: This new optional economy-size drum and roller stone set are ideal for recipe testing or small batch sampling as yield is only 1.1 pounds/0.5kg. It would seem odd if the maximum and minimum were the same (that is a rather tight specification to work with). Does anyone know what the maximum is?

Just so we don't leave this dilemma unsolved: After colleting every tool I could borrow without success in removing the center post and collecting the names of some local machine shops, I just spoke with Bhavani to see if there were any hints about removing the center post. He acknowledged the difficulty and said sometimes the center post gets "welded" to other steel parts when it is initially screwed in, but he had the ultimate solution: He is sending me the brand-new stainless holders for the micro bowl (I have the plastic ones), so I will not have to remove the center post. I'm a little disappointed because I wanted to see how much force it eventually took to remove it (just kidding).

I know it's a very long thread, but I strongly suggest you read through the eGullet thread on airbrushing, which includes information on selecting an airbrush and/or spray gun and a compressor--and in that thread you will see that people (including this person) change their minds on various subjects as they learn more and more. What in the beginning seemed to me a very loud and strong and scary compressor before long seemed quite pathetic. You may waste money if you don't do the research. If I sound authoritative, there's nothing like making mistakes for learning, and I made plenty. The size of the airbrush needle, for example, is crucial, as is the capacity of the compressor. Many people (again, including me) wasted money on airbrushes with too little cocoa butter capacity, airbrushes with siphon feeds, compressors that can't push sufficient cocoa butter through a hose. Unless you have the patience of Job, you will probably find these issues becoming major irritants in time. You began this thread by stating that you are a hobbyist. I think this is the place where many of us started. So I would recommend that you discover whether you want to be more than that--and if you have success and people like what you make, chances are you will want to become more than a hobbyist. If you make that transition, and depending on where you live, you could look for professional kitchen space (some cities have buildings that have been recycled as startup spaces for new businesses), and then you wouldn't have to worry about accidentally painting your house with colored cocoa butter.

For some reason I don't understand, different colors produce differing amounts of overspray. White is the worst for me, and any color that includes a substantial amount of white (I don't know whether this applies to the new non-titanium dioxide white or not). I would not attempt spraying anywhere that you care about.

The Cakesafe spray booth is what I use. It works very well at containing cocoa butter. @jauhe, I would be glad to tell you all I know about it, and here is a link to the eG thread that includes it. My basement no longer has white/blue/green/red clouds hovering over everything for a day or so (I exaggerate, but not by much). And I no longer have (too many) telltale signs when I blow my nose. But the spray booth is not inexpensive.

Since cocoa butter is hydroscopic, it will absorb moisture from the air immediately. On a humid day I can sometimes see, inside an air-conditioned kitchen, thickening chocolate that is quite difficult to work with. Colored cocoa butter should also be in temper for spraying (to be fair, some people disagree with that statement), which means the temperature outdoors cannot be much above 90F/32C. In my opinion you would have to be incredibly fast to spray and then rush inside to the AC without having a mess. And the problem with decorating molds is that you don't usually know until the absolute end of the whole process whether the spraying of color was successful or not. There are spray booths for indoor spraying, including some homemade devices, that work reasonably well to contain cocoa butter. But what I would do if I were in your situation is to use brushes, sponges, other odds and ends around the house to color the cavities. It's not as finished looking as an airbrush, but at least it would give you an idea whether this is something you want to pursue. I can tell you from sad experience that turning a mold upside down and expecting it to release 21 or so attractive chocolates but instead seeing most of them stuck to the mold is not an activity a sane person would seek out.

Thanks for the information. So how soon can hubby be in Virginia?

I just received a micro-batch accessory kit for the Premier melanger. Providing manuals and keeping instructions up to date are not a strong suit for the company. There was no manual, and so far no one has answered my request for help. I realize that mechanically inclined people would immediately know what to do, but I am not in that category. Companies should realize they need to provide really basic instructions for all their users and make no assumptions. A shorter center spindle was provided with the kit, so I realize that replaces the longer one, but the longer one is, so far, impossible to remove (with pliers or channel-lock wrench). I don't want to do any damage, but does it take a lot of effort to remove it? Next, does the small bowl replace the large bowl or sit inside it (as is the case with many food processors)? Thanks for any help.

@pastrygirl, would you add the coconut powder during the melanging, or is it easy enough to mix in that it could be added at the end?