Vojta

Thank you for sharing with us!

Here is what I am thinking about and their pros and cons. I believe that I should have everything in one place. To better blend multiple recipes into one dish and not to forget something in generall. Ring binder an emotional connection exists and writing by hand is more pleasant and improves my memory and sparks my creativity. That's a key, isn't it? better for doing math e.g. fractions (I do confectionery, so I am often calculating % etc.) much better for sketches Note taking app (Evernote, Google keep) has search, tags, #s, structure better overwriting and working with online resources can add pictures you can't lose it

Whats the best way to manage recipes? What an ideal notebook would need to have and be capable of? I have tons of marked web sites, playlists on YouTube, printscreens on my phone, bookmarks in paper books, my notebook... I would like to know how you professionals do it.

New beautiful chocolate business? Maybe an interesting story to share? I would love to read it. Congrats

We know that chocolate contracts while its setting up, thus I can imagine it would not help. But I am inclined to believe it would help. Will try again Gorgeous. I wish my first set would look so good too.

I think it's the opposite way! I might be wrong, but I had optics the previous semester. For larger distance between grating elements we have smaller difraction angle. Thus we can observe more diffracted waves. Thus we see "more" light and colours. Now when dealing with chocolate it makes sense to use a grating with smaller period too. Because it's easier for low fluidity liquid (chocolate) to fill in smaller amount of super tiny holes. My experiment proves that too (below) Let me know how are your experiments going! I tried 500 lines / mm and 1000 lines / mm and I the 500l/mm was better. My enthusiasm went off though... after one week the intensity was at ~10 %. Like if I didnt know I have to search for a rainbow on my chocolate I wouldnt even notice! After that 'failure' I didnt try again and claimed its not a stable technique. My explanation would be that chocolate changes its structure on microscale, which we do not observe, however its certainly enough to destroy the microscopic structure of moulded grating. Maybe if I had a super stable enviroment, It would've last. Who knows. Let me know your results please Your own ideas? I'd love to try the tea orange caramel! Sounds amazing.

Just browse through his instagram, its there

Tried again with the exact same cocoa butter coloured black, this time super shiny. Really difficult to remove from the mould, but the reflection was from another world :3 So it works! Still dont know how to paint with cocoa butter. Its too liquid, sliding off sides and translucent. Even with 3-4 coatings I can not get perfectly uniform colour, leaving the bonbon with stains or strokes. I dont have an airbrush, is it the only way? Thickening my cocoa buter with white chocolate (1/3 of the cocoa butter mass) solves the problem. But I lose the transparency I sometimes want. And maybe I am sacrificing some shine. Is it bcs of 22-25 °C room temp? The proper one is 20 °C, those 2 degrees doesnt seem so much. Or is there mistake somewhere else?

Joining the debate late. But I have to ask how do you make silk? Everyone here loves EZ temper, I need to try it by myself. I reckon its cocoa butter tempered or heated to specific temperature. About gelatin moulds: How? Gelatine starts to melt at 28 °C and working temp of chocolate is (30 - 32) °C.

Haha, same seems like I am on the right path then

To sum everything up: there is little to no way how to make pralines effectively unless you start a regular chocolate production, buy the equipment and produce larger quantities. I do ~100 pralines/ month for friends of friends in my homekitchen without melting tank or anything. Just a microwave I opened this topic bcs I was thinking about starting a regular custom production from my home. Now I see there is no middle between 'for fun' – doing it professionally and/or effectively. Thank you everyone!

Guys thank you very much, some of the advice is yey opening! Just to be clear: I will temper 500 g of chocolate. I will do my shells with 400 g then put away (I can not use it again unless I temper it again). And I will keep remaining 100 g warm until my fillings are done and I am ready to cap. Thus skipping one step of tempering tempered only gianduja. Wow, I've never thought I should temper caramel or cream based filling where's just few grams of chocolate. What I did was: I piped them below suggested temp of 29 °C. Which ment they were basically set already , but required a lot of work with a toothpick to distribute them After quick googling: EZ temper will reduce the process of tempering from heating -> cooling -> heating to heating -> adding seed. Which I find not that big of a difference for chocolate. But when I consider I can temper fillings the same way, I see the potential! 1000 $ for a miniature oven is unreasonably lot. Maybe I will try to make it by myself. You are right! I am too enthusiastic. It was an experiment, I dont work in culinary industry or anything. I will re-think everything.

Thank you for your reply. Well I tried tempering twice 2nd time the next day), twice this ugly result. At the same time I was tempering other batches the same way and they came up beautifuly. I think it was the overheating on the other hand I can not understan why exceeding 70 °C matters.

Dear people, could I ask some question please? a) How can you apply cocoa butter at 30 °C? I used oil-soluable coloring with cocoa butter, tempered it to 27, then heated to 30 as advised. When I applied a stroke with a brush it was too liquidy. Instantly sliding off the side making a drop at the bottom of my mould. I cooled it down to 27 and faced the same problem. I managed to "properly" paint at about 25 °C of cocoa butter and/ or when I put my mould into 7 °C fridge for 60-120 seconds... Room temperature was below 25 °C. What did I do wrong please? b) My homemade black cocoa butter was matt, not shiny. Is it because of the color I used or because wrong tempering? Or it can not be said? (differnt batch from c)) c) Some of my bonbons were matt not shiny and it took ages (2 hours +) for my cocoa butter to set and when it set it looked like this: (pictures exceed 1 Mb limit) https://drive.google.com/open?id=1b1RDubD7FGPPG7opHIwmsMgNz5rn1YkJ I tempered all the colors in the picture. The first melting was done in a sauce pan over the lowest fire. The cocoa butter reached 70 or more °C. But there was no smell, burning, bubbling or anything. Did I destroyed the cocoa butter that way?

Hello lovely people, for the first time I prepared a larger amount of pralines (~270). It took me an ENORMOUS amount of time, so I'd like to ask what I did wrond or where I can tweak my procedure... I have 3 molds only. I used each twice for one design and twice again for second one => I made 6 designs with 6 flavours. It took me 30+ hours (which puts the price of a praline to skies or makes me work for free). Below is what I did. I tried to work with my 3 molds simultaneously. Between each steps is waiting time (allowing the chocolate to set). Steps 1 and 2 was repeated many times because I used more than one color for a design and was doing 3 designs at time. Also I used dark and white chocolate... basically doubling the steps. I repeated this cyclus 4 times. temper cocoa butter (heat -> cool -> heat) paint design temper chocolate (heat -> cool -> heat) make shells fill with filling temper chocolate again make caps My ideas: Work with only one type of chocolate for sealing. Buy more molds, so that I dont have to repeat steps 1.-7. 4 times, but only 2 times for 6 molds or only once for 12 molds... Which is something I dont want to do as just a home experimentator. Somehow manage to have acces to tempered chocolate. I hope you have some tricks apart from magic btw is it a mold or mould?

Vacuuming Unless you use a scientific vacuum machine both solids and liquids should not crack. The only problem is air, which expands. If you use vacuum machine on your ganache to suck the air out, before filling the bombons. Then vacuuming them should be ok. Keeping frozen product I agree with Teo. From what I know ganache is OK for ~3 months. I can not imagine how frozen ganache could last only one month more. In the freezer there is no enviroment for an organism to survive, thus no risk of spoilage. As for the quality of a product, if you prevent the frost bite there is no way how staying in a freezer could affect quality. Only frosting and defrosting is causing the problems, usually there's a way how to do them properly. Saying that I think your truffles are OK even after 1 year. Correct me if I am wrong please. Btw where could I learn more about aW?

I had the Pralinarium book for a while, feel free to ask anything Well I understand the oppsite point of view, where stating exact grams is useless unless you use the exact same coloring.

If any part of the workshop was online, I would be happy to follow that way

From what I know sorbitol is used to lower the glycemic index (and potentionally make it more diabetes people friendly). Sorbitol is also used when you aim for superfine texture. But note that I am just a happy learner not a professional. Btw anyone willing to share the beer ganache recipe? People in my country would love that Btw2 500 $ for a book excluding shipping is wow...

Hello, lovely people, so I am at my 3rd year of my applied physics university studies. Thus I need to write my bachelor's thesis. Well I loved and hated what I study many times and escaped to confectionary art many times. And I want to connect these two fields! However I am without ideas of what such a topic for my thesis could be. Feel free to brainstorm and write everything that comes to your mind when connecting food and science. Physics research, development or problem solving in culinary field. I dont have much experience thus I dont know if there are some problems relating to chocolate fluidity, amorphous properties of cocoa butter, detection or control of something for example. Or if food 3D printing is still a topic. etc. If you can share my 'problem' to people that could know about some topic I would be greatful. Or if you have contact information to some food labs I would be happy to collab with them (for free ofc). Btw: My field of study is theoretical and research focused. It's not an engineering field. So the topic should be focused this way. However dont limit your ideas please.

Thank you for the edit addig the example with 100% chocolate bar. I think we can close it here. But if you have time I feel like I dont get it... I have two problems. Fig 1: Printscreen from the webpage, photo of packaging top, composition bottom What I know harvest cacao pods → remove beans with pulp → fermentation → drying → remove shell from each bean = extract nib → grind nibs to paste called chocolate liquor → separate into two parts by pressing: cocoa solids and cocoa butter → cocoa solids are grinded into powder calle cocoa powder we bake with Cocoa solids has to be brown and cocoa butter is yellow-ish. Problems I see 1) On the packaging there is '33,1 % min cocoa solids'. Which has to result in brown chocolate. Solution: Callebaut has misleading information on labeling or cacao solids are not brown. Both is unlikely since Callebaut is huge company and I know a cocoa powder I bake with is brown. 2) @Kerry Beal said: cocoa = cocoa butter + cocoa mass. I understand cocoa mass as cocoa solids. Thus we have an equation: cocoa = cocoa butter + cocoa solids In the Fig 1 they state '33,1 % min. cocoa' under that there is '34.6 % cocoa butter'. cocoa = cocoa butter + cocoa solids 33,1 % = 34,6 % + cocoa solids In order this equation holds true: 33,1 % = 34,6 % - 1,5 % Which is absolutely nonsense to have negative amount of an ingredient. And I have no idea whats wrong. I am sorry it propably seems like a small thing but its my nature, I want to understand the world clearly.

Exactly! And this chocolate has 33 % of cocoa and 34 % of cocoa butter thats ~equal portions of both but 1 part brown + 1 part yellow ≠ ivory white colour

Hi there Since this thread is talking about white chocolate and the cocoa butter percentage is mentioned a lot I think this is a good place to place my question – basically I puzzled myself: How can white chocolate contain cocoa? Callebaut Velvet white chocolate (link) contains: 33.1% cocoa 34.6% cocoa butter 21.9% milk thus (100 - 33.1 - 34.6 - 21.9 😃 10.4% is made with lecithin and others... Everything says that white chocolate is "chocolate" type that contains zero cocoa, only cocoa butter. So how is it? 😯 This Velvet contains 33% cocoa - does the term cocoa means something else here? Or is everybody wrong with definition of white chocolate? If so how they can make something with 30% of deep brown ingredient white??

Awesome! Truly appreciated <3 PS: The boat looks delicious.

Beautiful! Thank you very much! What should I do in order to be capable of inventing such a recipes? I feel like theres no way of me thinking up 30g of invert and 50g for glucose for a bonbon. Is it years of experience, chemistry + math or trial and error?