tammylc

I baked them last night, and crushed them up into nibs. They really must have been somehow pre-peeled as the bag said, because there wasn't any kind of papery husk when I crushed them. So now I have a tupperware container of crushed nibs. I'd really like to experiment with some kind of chocolate making, so I might borrow a Vitamix just to see what I can get!

I think you make a good point - I would tend to agree that the differences between whites are not as commensurate with price points as with darks.

I buy in bulk directly from the company. But Chocosphere has it: http://chocosphere.com/cgi-bin/webstore/web_store.cgi

I use (and like) Michel Cluizel's white chocolate. But I can't claim to have done any sort of cross-chocolate tasting or testing - since I use the rest of the Cluizel line, it only makes sense to get my white from them too. But I do quite like it. It's tricky to use for molding and even worse for dipping, however, because it's a very viscous chocolate. You definitely want to add cocoa butter for those applications. But I expect it would perform quite well in baking applications, etc.

Do you have a link anywhere to the 5 lb boxes? i'm always contemplating storage!

Can you tell us more about what you took to sell? What/how many were in the pre-pack boxes, or were you packing everything to order? And what were you selling the boxes for?

Gorgeous displays! Gorgeous chocolates (as usual, of course). Congratulations on a successful event. And congratulations on the expecting - birthing a business and a baby at the same time is going to be a challenge, but I'm sure you're up to it!

Kerry - thanks for the note on the Sumeet spice grinder. I don't have one of those either.

My beans do look like the ones in the picture, so it would seem they haven't been shelled? They are on clearance because they are just a few days from their best-before date. So i'm not necessarily expecting the most from them! i'll try roasting them up and see what they're like after that. Thanks!

Jay, can you tell me anything more about using the Vita-Mix? I have access to one of those, but not a Champion Juicer. I've read the basic outline on Chocolate Alchemy - do i need strain the mixture some how afterwards? My beans claim to be already peeled. So does that mean there's no shell and it's all nib?

Thanks, Rob. Unfortunately that thread is a real mix, since it talks about both whole beans and already crushed nibs. But I got a few ideas and links to work from. If I can find a Champion Juicer I'll probably try making some chocolate liqueur and then mixing it with sugar to make an Italian style crunchy chocolate - I don't have any refining equipment at home and don't plan on investing in any! Anybody else have any ideas?

I was in my local natural foods market this afternoon, and back in the clearance section they had bags of whole raw peeled organic cacao beans. I decided I had to buy some, so I now have .61 lbs of beans. What can I do with them? I assume I could make some sort of primitive chocolate by roasting them then grinding them with some sugar? Any thoughts along that line or otherwise?

Whereas my experience there was great, so I've been rooting for Richard from the beginning!

Great experiment, David! Looks delicious. Here's my Mother's Day collection. The theme was "A Box of Flowers" - can't decide whether to get Mom a bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates? - now you don't have to! I got a new wholesale customer and wanted to give them two full weekends to sell chocolates, so I made up a batch last weekend, and this weekend i'm working on the ones for my direct retail customers. The purple ones are lavender caramel, and the pink one is pomegranate-rose, the brown/yellow one is honey-vanilla (milk chocolate), and the bronze stripe is jasmine tea. For the honey-vanilla, i made a vanilla infused milk chocolate ganache, and substituted honey for glucose in the recipe. And I drizzled a little bit of honey in the top of each shell before filling with the ganache. The pomegranate-rose are a variation on my passion fruit filling - butter ganache sweetened with honey and flavored with pomegranate juice concentrate and a few drops of rose oil. The lavender caramel is my standard fleur-de-sel caramel, with the salt toned down and the cream infused with lavender. The jasmine is just a straight up infused cream ganache.

As recommended somewhere in this very long thread, I use half confectioners sugar and half potato starch. The potato starch is very neutral and cuts the heaviness of the corn starch and sugar. Can you post the Splenda recipe?

Kerry, what size do you do your chocolate test batches at usually? With some formulas that have really small quantities of things, it seems difficult to scale down too far. I usually make 100g test batches (makes measuring easy, I can just use the percentages) but that sometimes seems like a waste!

I was thinking that too. Thanks for confirming. Next time I'll make it a two-day process (sigh). You don't even necessarily need to do two days, especially since you've only got two molds. That ganache sets up pretty quickly. Just give it an hour or two before backing off.

Of course, I had to do it all in one day. I made the ganache, and while that was cooling to room temp, I tempered the chocolate and made the shells. then filled the molds and backed them off with piped chocolate. I'm working with a microwave to temper my chocolate and still quite new to tempering. It's probably not as big a deal as I think it is, but I don't want to do it multiple times for a single recipe. The "sinking" problem you describe with the backs may well be because you didn't let your ganache set up enough before backing off. Just an FYI. I used to use a two day process - make shells, fill molds, let set overnight, then back off the next morning. Now I'm more likely to do it all in one day for smallish quantities, but I still try to let my ganache set up for at least an hour before I back off. Tempering is a PITA, it's true. But the best way to get more comfortable with it is just to do it over and over...

It's amazing. I didn't use the mint for it, just lime, and it's been one of my most popular flavors. But mint would be good too - add some rum and you'd have a white chocolate mojito...

Looks good! Nice thin shells, and no air bubbles - great work. You should get at least 3 weeks at room temperature from that recipe, it keeps quite well. It's my go-to white chocolate citrus recipe - I've never made it as written, but I made a lemon-rosemary variation that was good, and it's really amazing with lime juice. And yes, having enough molds is key to making the work flow well with molding.

So, would you recommend modifying the recipes to get a thinner ganache? ← I usually fill my shells when my ganache has cooled to 85 degrees, and even ganaches that get quite stiff later are pretty fluid then. So just ignore the instructions in the truffle recipes re cooling and tabling.

Shells can support a looser ganache than you need for hand dipping. But they don't *have* to have one. I tend to use a fairly stiff ganache in my molded chocolates, for personal preference and shelf life consideration. i use the recipes as written pretty much interchangeably.

If your caramels are fairly soft I've found it leads to more leaks, as the caramel continues to spread after it's dipped but before the chocolate sets, leading to a thinner coating that's more likely to crack. So cooking the caramel to a slightly higher temperature might be helpful as well. I know that the presence of salt can invert some sugar, and that can lead to a softer caramel, so it's possible adding salt had some impact. (But salty caramel is the best!)

Thanks, Lana - sorry I didn't get back to you - I've been crazy busy lately. Glad to hear the order is going forward, and feel free to pass my info on to others.

Great deal on a 12 kilo melter on eBay right now. Buy it now price $699, plus $15 for shipping. I'd snatch it up, but I really don't need a 12 kilo, just a 6. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...ME:B:SS:US:1123