Jim D.

Ruben, I just finished churning the salted caramel ice cream. It has a wonderful flavor. I did have to make a last-minute adjustment: I was so conscious of getting the caramel dark enough that I went just a second or two beyond the correct point. After I had heated the mix and then chilled it, I did a taste test, and the flavor was definitely too far on the burnt side (though not by a huge amount). So I heated a small amount of cream and dissolved some brown sugar in it, cooled that, then added it to the caramel mix. I know that I was throwing off the fat content and the proportions of the recipe a bit, but I thought it was better to take that chance rather than have ice cream that people would not like. After churning, it appears that the added sweetness of the brown sugar and the slight diluting of the caramel taste with the added cream worked. I'll be more restrained in caramelizing the sugar next time. I should add that there is a wonderful ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Toscanini's), that sells "burnt caramel" ice cream (delicious with an apple dessert), and their flavor is so far on the burnt side that they would probably have found my final product quite bland, but I know my audience for the ice cream I made. The heating/evaporation process took a long time. I must find a 9" pot in which to do the heating (mine is 8"). Jim

Thanks, Ruben. I was beginning to think I had lost my mind--not finding the caramel recipe that I knew I had seen. You have now made a major contribution to my Christmas dinner. Jim

There have been a few mentions of salted and/or burnt caramel ice cream in this thread, but no actual details on how to make it. I want to use Ruben Porto's basic recipe and method. I assume the amount of sugar would have to be adjusted downward, as would the amount of liquid, but I don't know how to go about this. David Lebovitz has a recipe that he says is great, but fitting his method and ingredients into Ruben's is the issue. I think I would start by substituting the (liquid) caramel for some of the sugar in the recipe (though "burnt" caramel would not be as sweet as ordinary sugar). And because there is still some water left in caramel, substitute the caramel for some of the nonfat milk (which is mostly water)? You can see the dilemma. Any help would be appreciated.

I am not an expert, but I have had experience with ganaches based on white chocolate. The usual procedure is to let the ganache cool to around 80F (Greweling says 77F), then put it in a piping bag and use it (no delay--since the longer you delay, the firmer it gets and the more difficult it is to fill a mold and have the ganache be level). Once it firms up in a bag, you are going to have all sorts of problems, problems that are unnecessary if you time things so that you go from making the ganache to piping it. At one point in my learning curve I thought I had found the holy grail--making ganaches in advance, vacuum-packing and freezing them, then bringing them back when needed. That works with dark- or milk-based ganaches, but not so well with white, and I have mostly given up the practice. Today in fact I reheated some leftover coconut ganache and was very careful not to let it get much above 80F. It had been frozen in its pastry bag, but I cut it out of the bag, cut it in small pieces, and melted it, using an immersion blender to get it smooth. The blender was necessary because there will be small lumps of white chocolate that don't melt uniformly. White chocolate will separate on you if you give it the slightest chance. A little skim milk or appropriate liquor and an immersion blender will usually resurrect a split white ganache. What brand of white are you using? Some are more temperamental than others. I second the recommendation from Curls that you take a look at Greweling (or Ewald Notter, who has most of the same information). They will give you the proportions (though I must add that not all of their recipes actually follow the proportions they recommend). Also remember that all liquids count as "liquefiers," including the "flavored water" you said you used. I also recommend that if you don't have an immersion blender, you get one before making any more ganaches. I couldn't live without one.

I have used Mycryo quite often and found dissolving it rather difficult at times. An immersion blender comes in handy, but Edward J's point about losing some chocolate is certainly true. I would add that washing the blender is a bit of a pain. And no matter how hard one tries to avoid it, the blender introduces bubbles into the chocolate or ganache. Eddy Van Damme suggests microplaning a block of cocoa butter, producing a finer-grained product (and less money spent for Mycryo). The following is not an advertisement, but I recently acquired Kerry Beal's Eztemper machine that produces cocoa butter with exactly the right texture to mix in instantly with either melted chocolate or ganache. It has an additional advantage that it can be added at a wider range of temperatures than those specified for Mycryo. It also allows for using tempered chocolate at a higher temp, something that really helps when chocolate is becoming over-crystallized. A few minutes ago I finished some pumpkin ganache. In the past it has taken overnight to crystallize sufficiently; today it was ready within a few minutes of piping it into shells. Yesterday I was working with Opalys white chocolate, and as usual, it thickened to the point that it was almost unworkable. Having added the Eztemper cocoa butter "silk" to the bowl (just 0.5%), I was able to raise the working temp near 90F/32C and finished lining the molds (that temperature is well above what Valrhona recommends). The machine is not inexpensive, but it improves the process of making chocolates to a remarkable degree.

Once again you appear to be correct. I did a small batch yesterday and did not touch it as it cooled. It is fine, with no butter separation. I don't understand the principle involved (since I have stirred many a caramel in the past), but I'll just accept it. Perhaps something to do with cooking the butter first. Thanks for the advice.

Kris, Thanks for that information. How do you keep the various chocolates in temper as do the layering? It would seem the process takes quite a bit of time during which the temperature is dropping. After stirring with the spatula, do you then pour the contents into a mold?

Andrea, Opalys is so expensive (and a kilo is the smallest amount for sale) that I can send you a sample of it if you want. Just PM me your address. Jim

I too am a great fan of Felchlin and use their Maracaibo dark and Maracaibo Criolait milk--though Felchlin does not make the easiest chocolate to deal with (for me at least, it over-crystallizes too quickly). And I have tried Edelweiss in the hope that it would taste as good as Valrhona's Opalys white and be easier to deal with. In seeking such a chocolate, I also tried Soie Blanche. To refresh my memory, I just went to my stash and ate a piece of Edelweiss. My goal in selecting a white chocolate is locating one that does not taste too much of cocoa butter (which I think by itself has a very unpleasant taste). Many people say they look for a white that is not too sweet, but in my opinion, that is a hopeless search--they are all sweet. Of the three whites mentioned, I must say (I hope this does not offend you) I did not care for Soie Blanche; to my taste, it is too close to plain cocoa butter. Edelweiss is the second best I have tried, and it is much easier than Opalys to work with--it does not over-crystallize easily--in fact, it is almost too thin and I have had to pour some shells twice to get satisfactory coverage. However, I think taste is primary, and--again, this is just my opinion--Opalys is by far the best-tasting white I have had. Edelweiss still tastes too much of cocoa butter, but in Opalys there is very little of that (I can almost taste a little citrus in it, but am not really sure what the flavor comes from). Probably more information than you wanted, but so many people hate white chocolate that I have spent some time reading others' opinions and tasting as many as I was able to get. I have tried to talk one well-known online chocolate supplier into putting together packages of samples for potential customers to taste (a half-dozen whites, for example), but so far without success.

Thanks for that suggestion. In your first coating, is the filling completely covered in chocolate or does it show through in spots?

I have a somewhat specialized question on dipping chocolates. In dipping truffles, I first pre-coat the ganache by rolling it in chocolate in a gloved hand. When I place it on parchment, it develops a flat side where it sits. When I do the second dipping, I have learned that I have to track where that flat side is so that I place the completed truffle on the bottom it developed earlier or it ends up with another bottom plus one side that is now "tell-tale" flat. It is quite difficult to watch where the initial flat side is as the truffle tumbles in the chocolate. This is a relatively minor matter, but it would be nice to have truffles that have only one bottom--the one that develops from their final resting place. The last time I tried rolling the truffle on the parchment after the first coating so that the bottom would not be so obvious. This helped in a few cases, but most often it merely made a mess of the first coating. With only one set of hands, it is quite difficult to keep rolling the truffles on the parchment and, at the same time, continue coating more in my hand. Is there a technique I have not heard about for avoiding the "two flat sides" issue with truffles? Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks for that suggestion. I could use a Thermapen to check the temp without stirring. Another interesting development: As I was cleaning the pot from the separated batch, I saw the butter now solidified. I mixed it into the remaining butterscotch, and it mixed quite well. So I will try browning the butter, letting it solidify, then adding it after the caramel has been totally cooked. I hate to abandon that wonderful taste/smell of browned butter.

I will chime in with my support for using parchment. One pizza disaster led me to convert: One New Year's Eve I let people put on their own toppings, and of course they overdid it. The weight of the toppings and the time it had taken to load up the pie meant the pizza would no longer slide off the peel (even though it had lots of cornmeal). I had to cut it in half and get the halves on a cookie sheet. It was a total mess--and with all the guests standing around waiting expectantly for their pizza. (Some time later I learned that I could have folded the pizza in half and called it a calzone.) Ever since I have done what Weinoo recommends. After 4-5 minutes the crust has set enough, and I yank the parchment out of the oven. You do lose some oven heat, but the crust still gets crispy and browns nicely--and the stress factor is nearly gone.

I have used the above description to attempt a butterscotch filling for chocolates. Once it has succeeded, but twice the butter has separated from the caramel, and I would be grateful for any advice on conquering this problem. The overall goal is to make a caramel that is lighter in color than the ones I usually make and that has a pronounced butter flavor. This is the recipe I am using (it is based also on the quantities in the recipe from Lebowits, above in this thread): Combine 90g of cream and a scraped vanilla bean in a small pot and heat. In a larger pot, heat 60g of butter until it just begins to brown. Then add 120g of light brown sugar, 30g of glucose, and 2 tsp. of lemon juice. Cook until the sugar is completely dissolved and the mixture has an intense aroma (as described in the quote above). Strain out the vanilla bean, then carefully add the hot cream to the mixture. Cook to about 235F/113C (I aim for slightly beyond the soft ball stage). Cool and then pipe into molds. On two occasions, as the mixture cools (I stir it occasionally in order to obtain an accurate temperature reading), the butter has slowly but surely separated into a little pool in the pot. Stirring has not brought it back, nor has use of an immersion blender (which gets more difficult to use as the caramel firms up). In a production situation, where I was somewhat desperate, I put the caramel in a sieve and let the butter drain off and was able to use the mixture without further problems (no separation of butter once the butterscotch was in the mold). I really like this filling, especially in combination with another layer of pecan gianduja and crushed feuilletine, and don't want to abandon it, but I can't have a filling that is unreliable. I can't believe the problem is too much butter. William Curley's recipe for orange balsamic caramel, using roughly equivalent amounts, calls for 100g of butter (added after the caramel has been taken off the heat), and I have never had separation problems with it. The only unusual thing I do differently from a regular caramel is to cook the butter first. Any advice would be appreciated.

I have always thought he means a commercially made product. In the books I have I don't think he provides a recipe. Some recipes (Andrew Shotts has one) do call for making hazelnut praline paste at home, but most experts say that, at least with hazelnuts, it is impossible to make a really smooth praline at home. I should add "unless you have a stone-type grinder," as I believe Kerry Beal has. L'Epicérie in New York carries two kinds of praline, one that is more coarse (with bits of hazelnut in it) and another (from Cacao Barry) that is perfectly smooth.

Although I am sure you are correct about hazelnuts and gianduja from a traditional point of view, Peter Greweling (in Chocolates and Confections) refers to gianduja made with almonds as well as the version with hazelnuts and writes of it being commercially made with both nuts (though I have never seen almond gianduja for sale). He has a recipe called "Trifection" that has one layer of white chocolate almond gianduja, another of milk chocolate almond gianduja, and the third of dark chocolate hazelnut gianduja.

As I said before, every recipe I have seen that calls for added cocoa butter says to melt it separately and add it after the cream+chocolate emulsion has been formed. Actually most of the recipes that do have added cocoa butter are ones that are fruit-flavored and use white chocolate. I have always assumed the reason was that the cocoa butter gives more "body" to the ganache without adding more chocolate so as to let the fruit flavor shine through. You could try leaving it out of your recipe and increase the amount of chocolate accordingly. Another idea: Grainy ganache can result from having the liquid significantly cooler than the chocolate (so that the latter does not get melted properly). I have just about given up on the "pour hot liquid over solid chocolate and stir like mad" method, and instead I melt the chocolate (at least partially) and get it and the liquid at more or less the same temp before mixing them, but you don't want the liquid cooler. Even so, I would think that heating up the ganache gently would take care of the graininess. I would also get a properly sized container and make enough ganache so that an immersion blender can be used successfully. It is your friend. Just some thoughts on the mysteries of ganache.

I don't think this could be the problem, but I have never seen a ganache recipe call for heating cocoa butter with the cream. You may be getting the cocoa butter too warm at that early stage, and then you are mixing that (perhaps unemulsified) mixture into chocolate (more fat, needing more emulsification). All recipes I have seen that call for adding cocoa butter say to add it after you have formed the emulsion with cream and chocolate; if that initial emulsion has formed successfully, adding some more fat should not be a problem. If you are getting separation of the fat, you could try adding drops of skim milk with an immersion blender to bring the emulsion back (to give credit where it's due, I think I got that idea from Kerry Beal). I don't want to jinx my future efforts, but I will say that I have never had this method fail--even with Valrhona's temperamental Opalys white chocolate.

From Food Network here is a Tennessee Banana-Black Walnut Cake with Caramel Frosting that looks good, and for those who hate black walnuts, the banana should divert some attention away from the strong taste a bit. Once in my workplace I had a very disturbed fellow worker come in after Christmas carrying an opened package of black walnuts. "We ruined our dinner with these rancid, moldy nuts; the cake was a disaster." I took a small taste and informed him, "That's the way they are supposed to taste." As I assume you know, cracking them and picking out the nuts, while avoiding the inclusion of pieces of the shell, is a daunting job, not for the faint of heart.

gfron1, So what's under those beautiful domes?

Kerry, Thanks for that advice. I should add that by today (one day after making the meltaways) the texture in the piping bag is fine. I'll try the ice water along with more patience--and the next time I will be able to use the EZTemper, which I saw (from the 2015 conference) makes a difference.

I finally got around to trying meltaways. I followed Greweling's instructions but was puzzled at the results. After mixing the coconut oil and the melted chocolate, I expected some thickening, but there was absolutely none. I tempered by stirring for a long time (there was no way I could keep the stuff on a marble slab), still no thickening. So I heated it back up to an appropriate temperature and added 1% of Mycryo, stirred like mad, still only slight thickening. The plan was to pipe this into shells, but I need to put "pipe" in quotation marks since I could have just poured it. I refrigerated the mold, and after several hours, the meltaways looked better, and they came out of the mold (well, most of them). But the mix left in the piping bag was still completely liquid. I must have done something wrong--it's not a good sign when the only way a ganache is satisfactory is when it is refrigerated. The taste and texture of the meltaways is good enough to make it worth pursuing to get this right. Since then, I have done some more reading on eGullet and see that the initial very liquid state is not unusual, but other people seem to have success getting it to crystallize enough to cut on a guitar. I should add that when I made the meltaways, I had not yet received my EZTemper machine, so that was not an option. I would appreciate any guidance on where I went astray--or was it simply that I did not give the crystallizing enough time?

About freezing ganache leftovers: If you wrap it really well, it will be fine for weeks. Greweling points out that the "shelf-life clock effectively stops when the confections are frozen" (he is speaking of completely made chocolates, not just ganache, but his statement should apply to ganaches as well). If you take the extra step of vacuum-sealing it first, it will last even longer. I do this all the time. It's good to have a decent vacuum sealer in any case, and when things are vacuum-sealed, they don't pick up odors from other frozen items or acquire that freezer taste. I would not use the microwave to soften ganache--too much danger of overdoing it. I move mine from freezer to fridge a day ahead (it's been frozen still in its piping bag), then bring it to room temp, remove it from the bag, cut it into chunks, put them in a bowl over warm water, stirring frequently until it melts (to prevent separation) and using an immersion blender if it isn't entirely smooth. After that, it's as good as new. It's great to have around if, for example, you get a surprise dinner invitation--nothing like lining a few cavities with chocolate and filling with leftover mint ganache as a last-minute gift of after-dinner mints. One time I was making chocolates for serving at a benefit dinner, and I used up all the leftover ganaches in the freezer. If you weigh the ganache and compare the figure to the weight of the original amount you made, you can get a feel for approximately how many cavities it will fill. In the case of the benefit, it didn't matter how many pieces of each flavor I had as they were all put on plates and passed around. People loved the variety.

I too have had occasional troubles with caramel breaking, but I am speaking of caramel without chocolate. Last time I tried every trick in the book, and finally gave up and put it all in a sieve. The separated butter dripped out, and the caramel was completely usable. There's no ready explanation. William Curley's wonderful orange balsamic caramel calls for a huge amount of butter at the end, and I have never had it break. With the batch described earlier, there was relatively little butter. But since you are making a caramel with chocolate, there is always the increased danger of having it separate. My experience follows what Chocolot said, "too much fat." You could try the trick of slowly mixing in (with immersion blender) some skim milk or even water to bring back the emulsion. You might also try not using the "pour hot caramel over chocolate" method but instead melting the chocolate and getting it and the caramel to approximately the same temperature, then mixing them with an immersion blender. This avoids the shock to the chocolate, and it's what I do with any ganache involving white chocolate, which seems easily "shockable."

As I am about to join the ranks of EZTemper folks, I need to ask what percentage of silk you add (above, Kerry suggested 0.5%, but I had thought 1% was the norm, as it is with Mycryo). I have a Chocovision Delta (and a Rev2 for small batches). From the EZ instructions, I will need to reprogram the Delta to account for adding the silk at a somewhat higher temp than when using already-tempered choc. as seed. Chocovision says to add the seed when the choc. has just melted, then let the seed melt as the choc. cools down to the temper point. This will require some adjustment (I have become convinced that leaving the seed in all that time helps create over-tempered choc. and have started waiting for the temp to drop to around 95F/35C before I drop in the seed).