tammylc

North, northwest? Royal Oak, Birmingham, Troy, Rochester Hills, West Bloomfield? I'm flexible. Anything up there is going to be more accessible to Metro Detroiters than coming to Ann Arbor to get wine. As it turns out they decided to not do a wine tasting at all, so I don't need the list right away, but I'd still love to collect people's opinions, as this isn't the first time I've had the need.

I've just submitted a bid to do a wine tasting event in the Detroit area. I have a local Ann Arbor wine seller that I can work with on events, but I'd like to have someone in the Detroit area instead, so that it will be easier for attendees to buy the wines that are tasted. Anyone have any favorite wine merchants in the suburbs? Thanks!

Well, I went ahead and grabbed the 1000 pt 7:00 pm reservation at one sixtyblue, but I'm willing to be swayed and book elsewhere if anyone has compelling arguments on any of my other choices. So many restaurants, so little time...

Mmmm... Boka looks good. I don't think I've heard about it before. Tell me more?

Tagging myself onto this thread. I've got one night in Chicago, but it's this upcoming Monday, so many of my top choices aren't available. I've narrowed it down to this list - please help me decide! Naha NoMI Aigre Doux Green Zebra one sixtyblue Vermillion

Bourbon Steak and Saltwater are both on my list, but I haven't been yet. Maybe next weekend, although i'd probably choose Saltwater over Bourbon Steak.

You can get Cluizel direct from the distributor for under $10/lb for relatively small bulk quantities. I bought 88 lbs and including warm weather shipping it cost me $8.75/lb. And you could probably get near that price at 44 lbs. http://uk.cluizel.com/chocolatier/Retailers/48.html

That's the one I've seen, although I haven't actually used it yet. If you want fewer than 4 bottles (as sold on Amazon) You can probably get it at Whole Foods or other natural foods kind of store - that's where I've seen it.

Aria, can you describe what you mean by "seized" in the context of ganache? What's the textural change, and how is it different from what you've done before? Did you change anything, like the chocolate you're using?

Certainly something like natural oils would allow you consistency from batch to batch. For infusions, I get variation across batches, but consider that part of the charm of all natural small batch production. :-) I'd be more concerned about consistency if I had a bigger operation.

I *knew* this topic already existed! I even did a title search for Monday, and it didn't come up. Thanks for the pointer, nsxtasy.

Looking for suggestions for a good place to go for a Monday night dinner downtown? I'm looking for a nice and fun meal out, not great ethnic eats this time. Looking quickly through OpenTable, I see Naha, Custom House, Green Zebra - who else should I be paying attention to?

If you want to flavor straight chocolate, flavoring oils are pretty much your only option - you can't use liquid flavorings because your chocolate would seize, and you don't have any other ingredients to put the flavor into - like cream for a ganache. And there are some natural flavoring oils - the citrus oils and mint oils are generally natural, and some spices like cinnamon.

I'm a twister. At least, I have been up until now. But I'm including a wrapped butter nut caramel in my Christmas box, and I'll have to do a package fold if it's going to fit in my trays. We'll see how that goes...

I try to keep things as natural and non-artificial as possible, so I avoid extracts and artificial flavors, preferring to get flavor from real food!

I get flavor into my chocolates in lots of different ways, depending on what flavor I'm looking for. I do a lot of cream infusions - like coffee and various herbs. I add liquid flavorings like alcohol, liqueurs and concentrated fruit juices. I use reduced fruit purees. I use natural flavoring oils as well (citrus, mint). I almost never use artificial flavors - the only time I've done that is for coconut, when I couldn't find a natural coconut flavor (I have since found one, though). There are lots of options because there is no one right answer - some things are appropriate for one flavor and not another. And sometimes you'll use multiple techniques in the same piece - my "Intense Orange" flavor uses finely grated orange zest infused in cream and also Grand Marnier added to the ganache when it's finished, for example.

Check out Mighty Good Coffee in Ann Arbor - I'm not a coffee drinker, but my husband likes their coffee a lot, and I just partnered with them to produce a coffee truffle for my business. I think they deliver to Detroit.

Have you tried adding cocoa butter to thin out your dipping chocolate? ← I'll try that if I ever need it. But since I'm really not so fond of dipping, I'll probably just stick with molded pieces for white chocolate.

I found the white not too bad for molding, so i'm going to stick to that for white chocolate pieces. But my one attempt at dipping was not happy!

That's been my experience as well. The Cluizel milk chocolate is pretty viscous at working temperature, and the white chocolate is even worse.

Oh, I hear you on that one!

Damn... that's some mighty fine food porn. Thanks Nancy!

Grewling recommends against ever refrigerating a ganache and says (IIRC) that it causes large crystals to grow - that would account for the graininess you describe. i always let my ganache set at room temperature.

Your ultra soft texture is because of the ratio you're using. 12 oz chocolate to 8 oz cream will result in a soft but workable ganache for *dark* chocolate - it would be really difficult to work in milk. Try 2:1 or 2.5:1 for a more manageable consistency. And you really shouldn't need to mix all that long to get the ganache to come together. You just want to stir until it emulsifies, then stop. You'll know it's ready when it looks glossy, kind of like mayonnaise. Then add in your very soft butter. Was the temperature of your butter the same both times? Maybe it was cooler one time and you got lumps, and that's why it tasted more buttery?

I've not used Callebaut milk a lot, but I know it is pretty sweet, and relatively low in cocoa solids compared to the ones I mentioned. This was the first time I really felt I needed to experiment a lot. I'm still a pretty new chocolatier, so I've been keeping it simple up until now. This weekend I started off thinking I just needed to figure out if wanted to dip it in my standard milk or my standard dark, but then I realized that "neither" was the right answer and I needed to do more work to figure it out. I think the best chocolatiers pay a lot of attention to choosing the right chocolate for each flavor - I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it. Chocosphere has a huge range of chocolates, you could order small amounts from them to try.