beesknees

I think I saw Chocolove or another big brand doing that recently. Wonder how they do it. I've tried browning butter and straining out the bits to add those into filling for the crunch and nuttiness. Kinda mixed results.

Adding some more recent data here. Have to be careful with putting info out on pricing, but when ordering at very large volumes you can indeed get good discounts. We are geographically isolated so can't get a lot of what we prefer through our regular channels. But for example, we can get Jivara for $103/bag arriving with our food shipments a few times a week, or we can source for $55/bag but have to order many many many many cases and then pay for shipping and wait awhile. Last shipment was 500+kg and shipping cost was $2200+ for one pallet (and wasn't a full pallet). The shipping alone was roughly $13/bag or $4.3/kg. These are obviously inflated greatly from where shipping was pre or even mid-pandemic (paid $600 for that same pallet in late-2020).

Saw some notes above about caramelized milk powder. We haven't found a good source for full fat milk powder so we use regular milk powder and caramelize it pretty deeply in the oven over the course of about an hour. I really enjoy the flavor, adds some depth. Also just experimented with using malted milk powder to make a 60% malted milk chocolate. Oddly stayed slightly grainy even after processing in the melanger for an extra 24 hours but we'll see how it behaves when we mold into bars. Probably should have dissolved into hot cocoa butter then strained into the melanger. Next time!

Just seeing this. Did we chat on reddit also? If not I can elucidate a bit but don't want to bore you with repetition. I just pulled a couple trays of tater tots out of the Doyon and they're perfect (lol)

Looking to make larger scale individual tart production easier/more consistent. Interested in the tart shell machine that Pavoni offers, but haven't found many opinions on the resulting product. Hoping someone here has used one and could educate me a bit. Thanks in advance!

We will wipe out with white vinegar and cotton balls then use scrap choc to pour a round of shells to “season” the molds. Seems to work well.

Yes that’s correct. The go-to countertop unit from DCM has a 4kg capacity I believe but I personally keep it to 3.5kg or lower. Depending on a lot of things I’d say 18-36hrs for a perfectly smooth product. When I made dark matter I ground the coffee first, heated everything up to about 120F and I don’t think I ground it for more than 24 hours. As pastrygirl said, it is VERY intense. Most staff wasn’t a fan as it made them quite jittery despite having the same or less caffeine content according to our coffee roaster nerd friends. We eventually settled on 7% max coffee grounds for a dark choc bar. Still divisive but IMO quite tasty.

We use Doyon ovens. We have a double and a proofer/oven combo as well. Depending on the item we will sometimes rotate trays but most of the time we don’t. Specifically we do not rotate macarons as we found it doesn’t help/hurt to leave them be. As I sit here and think about it it feels like we only rotate higher temp items like baguettes. We don’t use nearly any of the programming etc so I’m sure we could get more out of them. We will change fan speed and temp but that’s about it. Temp range is nice, from 75F to 500F. We use them as warming boxes even, to clean up choc molds and other odd tasks. They are not cheap of course but nothing nice is.

Marquette MI, in the Upper Peninsula

Thanks Kerry, that's high praise coming from you! I was amazed at how shiny the first batch came out on the first try. We couldn't get our dark choc into temper for some reason so switched to our darkest and nailed it. Then went back to the failed batch and got it into temper no problem after re-seeding. Had some thin shells and leaks in some bases but were also using some random fillings we had on hand that were too viscous, nothing use-specific which would have helped. Looking forward to more testing on Friday. We are opening a patisserie in northern MI late this spring and having fun trying new things while doing some production for wholesale baked goods orders. Working on perfecting our croissants right now and doing some bonbons for V-day. I have no formal training (I'm more FOH and #s guy) but my two colleagues have a little and we have a very talented remote chef at our disposal as we troubleshoot and develop/adapt recipes. I've been picking up skills as we go and enjoying it immensely.

Been lurking here for some time trying to soak up all the knowledge. Attempted bonbons for the first time today and have to say we were pleased with the results. Of course the first mold was the best, then had some issues, but think we know what we did wrong on most. Specifically some of the bonbons had dull spots on the tops (so the bottom of molds), so I'm assuming I touched them with the my hands. I have very hot hands (running joke it if something needs to be heated up just hand it to me) so I may just do the tempering and let my colleagues to do the molding. Open to critique of course. Don't have our airbrush yet, so the color work was just for S&Gs.