Jim D.

Melissa, Thanks for those helpful tips on pH paper.

Pastryani, Very nice. MIrror-like finish. Do you mind telling us how you did all this?

I have come across an article by Michael Laiskonis about PDF and its high sugar content: And he provides a very helpful chart of facts about various sweeteners.

From what the person said (in the quote above) the reading should be below 4. As I understand it, the pH strips are fairly accurate up to 4, but of course if my jelly is well above 4, I would need some accuracy in a higher range.

He calls for caramelizing 200g sucrose and 150g glucose, then quenching with 300g cream. Add 65g butter, then 160g pineapple purée and cook to 112C/234F. Note that it's unusual to add the butter so early in the process. And as I stated previously, it seems to me that there is quite a lot of liquid for the amount of sugars.

An interim report on my further efforts to get a pipeable and not-too-sweet PDF: I used Pomona's pectin for the first batch. This pectin requires much less sugar than the traditional method and cooks for only a few minutes. No question, it produces a delicious product--the essence of strawberry in this case. After 10% framboise was added, it was pipeable and still delicious. Here comes the "however" in this experiment: The Aw reading of the PDF (before and after the brandy was added) was 0.95. If we are going for a fairly low Aw, this is not an acceptable reading for a bonbon to be stored for 2-3 weeks. Still, if you are making a dessert and need a PDF to be served soon, I think Pomona's is the way to go. Second I made a traditional PDF with apple pectin, using Ewald Notter's recipe. Even though I cooked it to the recommended temp, it was too firm (I don't have a refractometer), but I added 10% brandy, then used an immersion blender on it. It came out pipeable, and the Aw was 0.67, a big difference from effort #1. But here is the "however" in this experiment: The strawberry taste was muted, the color was a dark red, and the product was very sweet--much like strawberry jelly that is over-sweetened. I do realize this is what PDF traditionally tastes like, but it does not look like the pictures from Kate Weiser, with their vibrant color. Meanwhile I came across an exchange I had on The Chocolate Life about this whole topic. The person responding sounded quite knowledgeable about shelf life issues: I am intrigued by the pH discussion (that in jelly-like substances, it is crucial, more so than water activity). I just checked the Aw reading of a sample of commercial apricot preserves (Bonne Maman brand, to be precise), and it was 0.81--better than my Pomona's effort but not great. I think most purées can take quite a lot of lemon juice/citric acid, so there is a possibility of lowering the pH of the PDF. Meanwhile replacing some of the sucrose with something like dextrose or sorbitol (as suggested by the writer mentioned above) might lower the aW reading. I don't have a pH meter, so I guess that should be the next purchase. From what I have read, they are rather finicky to use. Any suggestions for one?

My purée is chunky--deliberately so since it cooks down quite a bit during the caramelizing process. Compared to cream, it definitely has more mass and that could be a factor. I'm getting more pineapple tomorrow and will try, first, a standard caramel recipe using only pineapple purée, no cream, and second, the same recipe dividing the liquid between cream and pineapple, starting with cream and adding the pineapple toward the end (as Ruth recommended earlier today). I'll see what happens in both cases.

I make my own purée from fresh pineapple. And yes, that is the Wybauw recipe I am using. I agree with the counter-intuitive diagnosis. I am just clutching at straws for an explanation that does not end with "I guess I am just a total idiot."

Good idea. I tried something like that at one point, but the pineapple reduced the temp a lot. Perhaps I should heat the pineapple close to what the temp of the caramel will be when the pineapple is added?

I thought I should post an update on my caramel adventures: I tried Wybauw's pineapple recipe once again. It seemed to take forever to reach the proper temp/thickness. I stirred like mad to prevent scorching, but when it finally got to temp, it had a slight burnt smell and almost no pineapple aroma. As it sat, the fat from the cream (it couldn't have been butter since I had not added that yet) separated as it had previously. I hurriedly consulted my records (a deadline was approaching) and found a passion fruit caramel from Kerry Beal (which incorporates some white chocolate) and used that recipe with pineapple. It worked, and the pineapple flavor was quite pronounced (the whole point of this endeavor). To top it off, at the July 4 party, it received more positive comments than any other of the 9 flavors. Still I wanted to know what happened, and I think I may have found a clue: Kerry's recipe for regular caramel (not using any chocolate) calls for 460g sugar (310 sucrose, 150 glucose) + 250g cream. Ewald Notter's has 350g total sugar + 345g cream. Wybauw's recipe in question contains 350g total sugar + 460g liquid (cream + pineapple purée). It is the only one that has so much liquid and therefore required so long a cooking time. No wonder the pineapple flavor was gone and the sugar scorched--or that's my theory. It is possible the longer cooking time somehow caused the fat to separate, but I don't have the scientific expertise to know why that might have occurred. In any event, I bought more pineapple (I am stubborn at times) and will try a recipe with more traditional proportions of sugar to liquid and see what happens. I would be interested in the thoughts of other caramel-makers on this issue.

Chocolatspassion, Those are quite elegant. On the subject of striping, I am still waiting for Dallas to let us all know about the tape labeled as food-safe that he found. I PM'd him but have heard nothing.

It's in Greweling's "at home" book, page 179.

Bentley, Sorry about your food processor. Maybe you could use liquor (as recommended by gap) to thin the PDF. So how does the finished product taste? How is the sweetness level (I would assume the PDF part is on the rather sweet side since you added corn syrup)? I like your shell decoration. Do you mind telling how you did it? And what sort of brush did you use for the white dots and the yellow streaks?

Bentley, Thanks for those enlightening photos. The texture she has achieved is just what I am looking for. Now if only she would reveal her secrets. Gap, Thanks for that technique. Adding fruit purée would be nice, but alcohol sounds like a great solution, and as you say, would not affect shelf life. I suppose that if no alcohol exists that works with a particular PDF, vodka could always be used. One question: Do you cook the PDF to the usual temp or take it off sooner? If the latter, do you think this affects shelf life? It would seem that as long as the full amount of sugar is used, all would be well, but I'm not sure about that. I'm going to do some experimentation in the next couple of months and see what I can come up with, measuring the Aw each time. Now if I can just find an inexpensive purée to use. The following observation is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, but I was intrigued that Kate does not clean the colored cocoa butter from her molds, at least not before those photos were taken. I am always reluctant to get the colors in the melted chocolate as one scrapes the molds. I guess if you are rich and famous, you don't have those concerns--there's always more chocolate!

Bentley, I am very interested in what Kate Weiser might have done. Have you seen any other information on this? I was confused by earlier discussion in this thread about when to "blitz" the PDF, whether straight from the pot or after it has set (I have never tried the latter so don't know if it would come out as a smooth product). Kate Weiser's is certainly smooth-looking, but it seems to me that adding fruit purée after everything is done would dramatically decrease the shelf life. I am thinking that cooking to a lower temp, then blitzing might get a texture that can be piped. Like you, I hate the extreme sweetness of many PDFs, but there does not seem to be a way around adding all the sugar and still getting a decent shelf life.

Well, it happened again. I made Wybauw's caramelized pineapple. All was well, but as it cooled, the fat from the cream (I assume) formed a pool in the pan (no butter had been added at this point). I have made this recipe 3-4 times without incident. With an immersion blender I added the butter and some additional pineapple. Again all looked well, but I came back later to find it separated once more. In desperation (what did I have to lose?) I put the solid part of the caramel in the food processor. I added the fat little by little; it mixed in a bit but not enough. I then added skim milk (the trick I have used for fixing ganache) and processed some more. A very nice caramel formed--and stayed formed. The problem, however, was that the skim milk had made the caramel too loose. At that point I was afraid of heating it again (which would have been the obvious thing to do), so added some cocoa butter (from the Eztemper machine). It thickened enough to give me some hope, but it was very soft. I put a little in the freezer to see what would happen, and it did get reasonably thick. So I went ahead and piped the stuff into shells. I will probably refrigerate it for a while to see if that helps. The only consolation is that the caramel tastes delicious, but overall not a happy day in the caramel factory.

I don't think of my butterscotch recipe as containing an unusually high amount of fat. It has 150g cream, 100g butter, 200g brown sugar, 50g glucose. The orange caramel recipe to which I referred earlier has 200g liquid (cream + orange juice), 200g butter, 380g sugar, 40g glucose.

Gap, Thanks for providing that list. But I had to suppress a laugh at all the possibilities. The list is a bit like people who, when faced with questions about why chocolates don't always drop out of the mold, say "it might have been the humidity, the room might have been too cold (or too warm), your hands might be too warm, your chocolate might be old, your thermometer might be broken." In the case of the butterscotch I was working on (in the other thread), I have abandoned the recipe and will work on an alternative still using brown sugar but giving up on the browned butter, which may or may not have been the culprit. So you have never had this separation happen? Must be the climate in Australia.

I have exactly this same issue, as discussed in this thread: After taking pastrygirl's advice not to stir the caramel as it cools, I had success. But last week the separation happened again--this time after I had piped the caramel into molds. All could do at that point was take corners of paper towels and soak up the butter. It worked, and you couldn't tell once the bonbon was sealed, but this is no way to make caramel/butterscotch with confidence. I have yet to see a definitive explanation--aside from pastrygirl's "sugar is a fickle mistress" diagnosis. As I said in the other thread, changing the time when you add the butter does not seem to make a difference: most recipes say to wait until the caramel has cooled a bit, but William Curley's orange balsamic caramel calls for adding it immediately after the caramel is removed from the stove--and it works without a hitch. Sometimes I have had luck with the advice pastrygirl gave above (reheating, reblending carefully). But we need some science here. Peter Greweling doesn't even mention the separation of butter in his chart of "Defects in Noncrystalline Confections."

First, congratulations on your prize. In my experience, you can't go wrong using the icecreamscience.com recipes. This is a bit off-topic, but I am intrigued by the still-crispy pistachios, even in cream. This is an ongoing issue with adding nuts to a cream ganache when making chocolate fillings. A few weeks back I added toasted pistachios to such a ganache, and they stayed crispy (or as crispy as pistachios ever are) for a while, but eventually succumbed to sogginess. Could you give a little more detail? Are the egg whites unbeaten? Do you just add enough of them to cover the nuts? 30 minutes seems a long time for toasting--is the temp very low? Thanks for any help.

Auro, Please ask your wife how she made such a large roll without having it crack as she rolled it up. Did she roll it in a damp towel? Did she use extra egg yolks? Some other secret? Thanks.

Thanks for the video. After watching a couple of times, I still can't figure out why the raplette works so well, whereas a spatula turned on its edge does not.

I must confess I had to look up "raplette." A Google search calls up one for sale by J.B. Prince, for $139.

I will also try the zigzag technique. I had to go ahead and do a couple of slabs before your replies came. The dark chocolate butter ganache didn't go well. It's difficult to follow the advice not to "mess with it too much" when you see that it has peaks and valleys. Fortunately there was a second layer, so they sort of even themselves out--as long as people don't bite into two pieces and see the differences. The second slab, a lemon-mint ganache, went much better--not sure why (maybe the shiny dark chocolate in the first slab shows too many imperfections). Who was it who used a roller? I'm thinking it was Kerry (is there any gadget she doesn't have?), but can't remember the post.

I am looking for assistance in successfully leveling ganache in a confectionery frame. I use the method I have seen in many videos of sweeping a long spatula across the slab, wiping it off, then repeating. This technique works fairly well when the ganache is almost totally liquid, but not at all when (as is more often the case) the ganache has thickened somewhat. Even when I rest the spatula directly on the bars of the frame, the sweeping action pulls some of the ganache along with it, resulting in an uneven slab. I think I have seen images of people (probably on eGullet) using a roller of some sort. Anyone have a method that works reliably? Thanks.