Bentley

At home, I always use a homemade spray booth - a large cardboard box with a hole cut in the top, an AC filter covering it and a box fan on top of it pulling air out. It has always worked great for me. I don't even use a mask now when I spray. Just remember to change the filter every so often as it gets clogged up with cocoa butter.

With New Year's upon us, I am always on the lookout for a good champagne truffle recipe that I can include in my holiday collection...Anyone have a favorite recipe they'd like to share? Something with a decent shelf life would be ideal.

All molds have been sold. Thanks!

All still for sale - $10 a piece plus shipping.

Sorry I didn't see this question. Yes it worked very well. Nice crisp images.

I have some gently used polycarbonate chocolate molds that I would like to rehome. I am asking $13 $10 each (plus shipping in the US). If anyone wants the whole lot (15 molds), $200 $165 shipped in the US (shipping elsewhere will be based on cost). All molds will arrive clean and polished ready for use. 1. Pavoni PC112 square - 21 cavities, 10gr ea. - Qty: 2 2. Pavoni PC113 round - 21 cavities, 10gr. ea - Qty: 1 3. Chocolate World 1345 lined Rectangle - 27 cavities, 14gr. ea.: Qty: 5 4. Chocolate World 2116 Dome - 32 Cavities, 14gr ea., Qty: 2 5. Chocolate World 1143 Round - 21 Cavities, 14gr. ea. Qty 2 6. BakeDeco Fluted Cup, 30mm diameter x 35mm high, 35 cavities, Qty: 1 7. Fat Daddio Heart Magnetic Mold, 18 cavities, Qty 1 8. Fat Daddio Indented Corners Magnetic Mold, 15 Cavities, Qty: 1

I've done something like that before with stamps I bought at Hobby Lobby. I used gold cocoa butter and stamped onto the finished and unmolded bonbon.

A good option for a home chef is the Martellato mini-guitar cutter. It will allow you to cut slabbed ganaches (or other centers) that are 250x250mm (vs i think 350x350 for a regular guitar cutter). I use one and it is just wonderful and satisfying. Very high quality, just like the professional versions. It' snot cheap for what it is, but it is much cheaper than the full size cutter. Fewer options for sizing, but enough for the home chef. I just use a 22 mm frame and can get 64 perfect centers from a slab (49 if I use the Martellato frame system, which for some reason is 240x240 - I'd recommend making your own frames from plastic sheets). Also, you'll still have issues with centers that have nuts, but that will be true with any guitar cutter.

A $20 Badger 250 siphon feed airbrush with the large nozzle will be just fine for doing molded bonbons. Norman Love puts out close to 15 million pieces a year using one. It's a very inexpensive way to get started. Just get a few extra jars and siphon tubes so you don't have to clean them between each color.

I used a 10gr chocolate bonbon mold to make some cocoa butter tablets and they did not crystallize very well. I tempered the cocoa butter and tested the temper. As shown in the photo, the top of the tablet (the bottom of the mold cavity) came out looking nice - smooth and glossy - but the bottom half is dull and grainy. My guess is that the heat from the crystallization was rising and took the cocoa butter at the top of the mold out of temper? What is the best way to crystallize a solid piece of chocolate or cocoa butter like this?

Andy doesn't want to reveal how he does this one, but I figured out one way to do it, and I have a feeling the group can figure it out as well (not to copy his design for any commercial reason but all in good fun and because flexing our creativity makes us better). https://www.instagram.com/p/CNAxNMghh1k/

Valrhona US is in Brooklyn.

My chocolate has always shipped free from Pastry Depot. Still, it probably will save more to use the 30% code instead of the free shipping code.

I use the Melissa Coppel method of CCB tempering. I melt it to 45C then swirl the bottle in cold water to bring the temp down to 28C then spray. If I'm doing a larger quantity, I'll temper the cocoa butter with EZTemper silk.

I had gone pretty far down the path of opening a shop...but I ultimately couldn't make the economics work. I'm in SW FL and Real estate is too expensive in my town, it's very hot year round here and shipping to most of the country is very expensive. And I'd be competing directly with Norman Love locally. To do what I was hoping to accomplish would require ideally locating in the midwest where I could ship to 80% of the country in 1 day for less than $10. In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't open up - probably would have lost a lot with the pandemic. Thanks for the info on prices. I would have expected a bigger difference. I wonder if the big guys like Chris Elbow or Kate Weiser are getting even bigger discounts for volume. I get most of my retail chocolate from Pastry Depot. They have a somewhat limited selection of chocolates, but enough for me and Atlanta is close enough so that I can use their free shipping option and still receive my package in a couple of days. Valrhona is on sale now there- 10 to 20% off.

I'm just an amateur working out of my home for fun. I buy chocolate one bag at a time as I need it from a couple of different online sources. I pay about $90 for a 6.6lb of Valrhona Jivara, $80 for a 6.6lb bag of Valrhona Opalys, $105 for an 11lb bag of Cocoa Barry Ocoa. I'm curious what kind of pricing professional chocolatiers can get.

@MuscadelleSince you seem to have some experience with Roxy and Rich colors, do they have a color wheel or similar guide for mixing different shades using the various color powders they have? Or is it just experimentation?

That actually makes a lot of sense.

A couple of thoughts....120 is too high for a piped caramel. That in the range of a typical cut caramel. Also, it doesn't sound like your syrup is caramelized, so there won't be much caramel flavor. It will just be very sweet. I would experiment with caramelizing the syrup to the amber color of your preference, then deglazing with cream and butter and cooking to around 104 for a runny caramel up to 106 for a piped caramel that oozes like lava to 108 for a caramel that can be piped but doesn't move much.

Is there an easy way to make large quantities of chocolate non-pareils that are uniform in size and nicely round without factory depositors? Or is it just a matter of practicing with a piping bag?

I had some correspondence with this chocolatier, and his technique involves temperature differentials. He splatters white and then does the color swirl (A color lightly mixed with white), let's it crystalize then puts it in the cooler. Then he sprays the cold mold with white and the temperature difference between the mold and the spray makes the spray contract from around the cold splatters. Then when filled with chocolate (dark or milk), you get the dark circles around the splatters.

Can you provide your recipe and technique - then it may be possible to see what is not working properly.

Making purees is more complicated than it sounds. You need to adjust for the sugar and water content of each batch of fruit in order to get a consistent product. If it is something you plan to do on a regular basis, you should invest in a quality refractometer and a pH-meter. The basics involve adjusting your purees to a brix of around 18-22, with a pH no lower than 4. You can adjust the values by mixing fruit from different orchards and adding sugar, invert sugar or glucose (depending on the desired sweetness and the tartness of the fruit). For some tart fruits like passion fruit, citrus, etc, you can mix in quantities of a neutral fruit like pear (also lowers overall food costs). Once your number are in range, you then need to adjust for taste/flavor. You can use flavor extracts or compounds here, fruit reductions, etc. It's very much a combination of science and art.

Not sure that they have an 11kg. The T10 is 13kg and I believe is around $12K list price.. It is not a table top unit like the T5. It is a unit similar to the Selmi in size. But if I were going for one of the larger units (meaning not the tabletop 5kg unit), I would go with FBM or Chocolate world over Pomati. Service will be much easier if needed. ** I just realized you were probably referring to the ICB 11kg machine. TCF has that on their website for $8215

I had the pleasure of tasting @Pastrypastmidnight caramels (sold under the Bliss Chocolatier label now). They were outstanding and I believe she uses the maillard method where everything but the butter is added to the pot and cooked once to temp, then finished with butter. Kriss Harvey does it the same way. He has videos about it on his IG page, but not a recipe. Chef Nicolas Botomisy is doing a live Zoom class on Sept. 1 on caramels and included in the course are passionfruit-mango caramels and raspberry caramels. I believe he uses the double cook method but I can't swear to it. https://www.nicolasbotomisy.com/product-page/online-live-class-caramel-1-st-of-september