Dried Fruits

[pastrygirl]

1 hour ago, Jim D. said:

The photo of the apple pieces showed them as fairly large, so I thought I could cut the skin off (I'm not using a huge amount).

 

Sounds tedious, but possible. Oh, the struggles we endure for our art! 😂

Edited February 16, 2019 by pastrygirl (log)

[teonzo]

7 hours ago, Jim D. said:

I will definitely give the ganache a try, though I expect the chocolate taste will muddy the apple flavor.

 

Dark chocolate and milk chocolate will tend to overwhelm the apple flavour, that's for sure. White chocolate will tend to mute it. Caramelized white chocolate has the same problem of white chocolate (it will mute the apple), plus it adds the caramel flavour. There's no clear winner, on the contrary. This is just a case where you make the "less bad" choice. To me it seems to be milk chocolate (something mild and basic, like Equatorial by Valrhona), but I can't swear I'm correct. But I wouldn't count on being able to get an apple ganache that has a defined apple taste, the apple taste would be very subtle (that's why the only way to go is with pate de fruits or candied fruit, see below about candied fruit). Since there is a chance to add a bit of apple flavour then better use it, it won't make a huge difference, but a 10% more apple flavour should be really welcome in this case.

 

My reasoning is this: to get a noticeable apple flavour you are forced to use pate de fruits or candied fruit, especially if you want to resemble apple pie.

This raises the sweetness problem, so white chocolate would be best avoided unless there are bigger problems (aka it's impossible to get a decent apple taste with milk or dark chocolate).

Between dark and milk chocolate, I would definetely go for milk chocolate. But I would try to limit its quantity as much as possible.

If I want to resemble apple pie, then I would try to get some "cooked apple pieces" in the bonbon, you can't achieve this effect with pate de fruits, but you can with candied fruit.

The most effective way to maximize the % weight of candied fruit in the filling and minimize the % weight of ganache is the one I described in my previous post (at least in my imagination, hahhaha).

I would put the spices in the ganache and not in the candied fruit, it's much easier to manage.

Since there's a way to add some apple taste to the ganache (subbing the cream with apple juice and oil) then I would definetely follow that road, there's absolutely no risk to make an apple pie bonbon with people saying "the apple taste is too strong".

Since it's possible to add dried apple bits to the crunchy base then I would follow that road too, it gives a bit more apple flavour and some more texture.

This is how I would think if I had to try making an apple pie bonbon. Hard to think I will ever be in this position, since there aren't this kind of requests here.

 

 

 

7 hours ago, Jim D. said:

Can you explain what you mean by "candied apples"?

 

Sorry, I always forget about the problems with the use of the "candied" word when talking pastry in English language, more than all I always forget about candy apples (I know they exist and nothing more, never seen them here).

With "candied fruit" I'm meaning fruit that is cooked in a sugar syrup until it reaches around 68-70° brix, making it shelf stable. Similar process for candied orange peel, candied cherries and so on (all the fruit you add in fruit cakes or pound cakes). For apples you just need to peel and core them, cut in slices, then cook them in the syrup. Don't know if you can find them ready made in the USA. If you are going to give a try and make them by yourself, then I would suggest cutting the apple brunoise from the raw apple (before candying it) and not from the candied apple (after candying it), much less hassle (candied fruit stick to your knives).

 

 

 

8 hours ago, Jim D. said:

I'm considering adding some apple brandy/calvados, but don't have any on hand to try at the moment (sometimes I find that fruit brandies don't help with flavor, meaning their flavor is far from the fruit itself--I think this is true of framboise, for example).

 

As far as my experience go, I would suggest to avoid using calvados for this project. Unless you add only some drops (which would have not much sense) then it would be really easy to detect it, going too much farther from the apple pie effect. Same thing for pear, when I tried to add a bit of pear eau de vie to a pear ganache it just killed it (meaning all people thought it was a booze ganache and not a fruit ganache).

 

 

 

Teo

 

[Jim D.]

2 hours ago, teonzo said:

This is how I would think if I had to try making an apple pie bonbon. Hard to think I will ever be in this position, since there aren't this kind of requests here.

So crostata di mele doesn't qualify? I guess you meant no Italian chocolatier would think of putting such odd things in a bonbon. But one does need to move beyond gianduja occasionally.

 

Thanks for all the ideas for my (very American) project. And I agree about poire eau de vie--it tastes like pear only if you are thinking hard about pears when you drink it. Similarly for calvados.

[Vanillalover1]

Ever had dried mangoes? that's a Filipino classic.

[Jim D.]

29 minutes ago, Vanillalover1 said:

Ever had dried mangoes? that's a Filipino classic.

Yes, I use them in my mango pâte de fruit and mango ganache.

[Vanillalover1]

16 hours ago, Jim D. said:

Yes, I use them in my mango pâte de fruit and mango ganache.

I honestly just eat them right off the bat, never thought about using them in making desserts. 

[teonzo]

19 hours ago, Jim D. said:

So crostata di mele doesn't qualify? I guess you meant no Italian chocolatier would think of putting such odd things in a bonbon. But one does need to move beyond gianduja occasionally.

 

The market for chocolate bonbons is not encouraging here. Sales are low, there are few pastry shops that make their own chocolate bonbons, you can count on few hands the chocolatiers (shops dedicated mainly to chocolate). Chocolate bonbons are caught in the middle between tradition and modernity. They are seen as too expensive, it's a cultural heritage since they've been on the market forever (since every living Italian was born) but were considered too expensive by the average customer. In the past years there's been the "food explosion" on the media, so modern pastry is considered cool and people are willing to spend good money for it. But in the customers' eyes chocolate bonbons are not seen as modern, so they are not cool. People are crazy for macarons, which are sold about the same price per kg as chocolate bonbons. I would feel dumb to pay the same price for macarons and chocolate bonbons, since macarons are about 50% sugar while chocolate bonbons are more than 50% chocolate, there is just a HUGE price difference ingredient wise. You can sell creative flavours for macarons, but that does not happen with chocolate bonbons. If you put out an earl grey macaron then you get good sales, if you put out an earl grey chocolate bonbon (which I would say is a modern classic, nothing weird) then you loose money. The market for chocolate bonbons is mainly for the classics: hazelnut, pistachio, almond, coffee, caramel... Volume sales for chocolate bonbons are pretty low if compared to other countries.

A friend of mine, who is one of the few chocolatiers in Italy, made some top class creative bonbons but with no sales, so a couple of years ago he decided to stop being creative and just stay classic, to the point thay he has something like 4 different hazelnut bonbons and the weirdest flavour is raspberry (only raspberry ganache). He said me something like "I'm not happy to make only classic flavors since it's boring and I feel braindead and downgraded, but I'm much less happy to continue loosing money just for passion".

If I made a crostata di mele bonbon then I'm pretty sure I would end up throwing away most of them and a good chunk of customers would think I'm crazy trying such a thing. Some people started making bonbons "US style" (molded bonbons with lots of colors) which is a novelty here (we are used to the Belgian classic aesthetic of no colors, just chocolate), we'll see if this will change something.

 

 

 

Teo

 

[Jim D.]

18 minutes ago, teonzo said:

The market for chocolate bonbons is mainly for the classics: hazelnut, pistachio, almond, coffee, caramel... Volume sales for chocolate bonbons are pretty low if compared to other countries.

A friend of mine, who is one of the few chocolatiers in Italy, made some top class creative bonbons but with no sales, so a couple of years ago he decided to stop being creative and just stay classic, to the point thay he has something like 4 different hazelnut bonbons and the weirdest flavour is raspberry (only raspberry ganache). He said me something like "I'm not happy to make only classic flavors since it's boring and I feel braindead and downgraded, but I'm much less happy to continue loosing money just for passion".

 

Some interesting ideas there, and they confirmed my impressions of European chocolates in general (and of chocolates made by European pastry chefs in the U.S. as well). When my sister returns from her European jaunts, she brings chocolates, and so far the most daring decoration has been a toasted hazelnut or the occasional wave made on the top with a dipping fork! Decorating chocolates in the contemporary style so popular in the U.S. is time-consuming, expensive, and stressful, but once customers experience it, they want it all the time. "Too pretty to eat" is the most common first response. If one is clever enough or lucky enough to be working outside the large urban areas of the U.S., customers are usually wowed by seeing something they did not know existed or experience only when traveling to a large city. The downside for the chocolatier is that there is constant pressure to do more--more inventive fillings, more dazzling decor. I must confess that having customers open to novelty (such as an apple pie bonbon) is what makes it interesting for me. It sounds as if in Italy a chocolatier who wanted to do all this would need to be an independently wealthy person who did not need the income and could attempt to introduce customers gradually to new chocolate experiences. Isn't highly decorated marzipan an Italian tradition? I would think there would be a market,  especially in a place like Venice where art of various kinds is so important. Certainly Italy has no shortage of producers of excellent couverture to work with (Amedei and Domori come to mind). Or the chocolatier could move to the U.S., where it seems a new chocolate shop or website opens every few weeks and where people pay up to $4 for a single bonbon.

[teonzo]

About chocolate, Italy is a totally different market than the other traditional top pastry countries (meaning the ones with the highly considered traditions), like France, Belgium or Switzerland. For a Belgian it's totally normal to go to a chocolatier and buy some bonbons as a gift. They are seen as an affordable luxury, people don't eat them every day, but it's expected that most people buy them on various occasions during the year. Spending that amount of money is seen as totally acceptable, if not mandatory. I suppose those countries (Belgium and France more than all) will have a huge cultural barrier before moving to what you post in the chocolates showroom thread.

 

Italy is a totally different case. Central and southern Italy had almost zero chocolate tradition up to few years ago. Top quality chocolate was limited to northern Italy. Turin was one of the chocolate capitals in the world before the advent of the chocolate industries (it's not a coincidence that Ferrero came from near Turin). Venice has a strong tradition for chocolate and coffee, but only the drinks, there was no chocolate (solid chocolate like bars or bonbons) productions in the big hotels. As far as I know the first one to produce artisan chocolate bonbons in the Venice area has been Dino Pettenò around 30 years ago, just because he had some relatives that lived in Belgium, he went there to visit them and managed to find a shop where to learn working chocolate. Chocolate tradition was localized mostly in Piedmont and they had HIGH prices: only rich people could afford chocolate, it was out of range for normal people. Then came Ferrero, who made chocolate available for normal wallets. So, up to 20 years ago, the average Italian knew this about chocolate bonbons: everyone knew there was plenty of choice for industrial chocolates in the supermarkets and they were cheap; a fraction of people knew that there were some artisans making chocolate bonbons but never tried them due to the price (thus they considered artisan chocolate to be outrageously expensive); a fraction of this fraction actually tasted artisan chocolate and knew the difference in price was justified by the difference in quality. So we have 2 obstacles to overcome: artisan chocolates are not considered an acceptable and diffused luxury but as an absurdly expensive and unjustified vice (same image as white truffles); when someone goes to a pastry shop and sees the price for chocolate bonbons then he compares it with the industrial ones and thinks that the difference is ridiculous ("they must be joking", "they are stealing my money"). If you succeed, there's the other barrier on tastes: if you stray from the classics then you are doomed. For example the chocolatier friend (the one I wrote above in my previous post) made a "aglio olio peperoncino" bonbon ("garlic oil chili", it's a traditional condiment for pasta, as ubiquitous as tomato sauce), he received only insults: "are out of your mind?", "this must suck, chocolate is not pasta".

The reaction to new trends is totally different. Nobody knew what a macaron was until 10 years ago. They were introduced as a trendy thing and people started buying them without troubles, cost varies from 1.20 to 1.50 euro per piece (60-75 euro per kg, on average the same price for chocolate bonbons), just because they were new and trendy. Artisan panettone has been made trendy by television in the past 5 years, so we passed from 5 euro/kg for the industrial ones to 30 euro/kg for the artisan ones. We just need to hope that mass media will succeed in making chocolate trendy, that's the only hope. US style bonbons have all the qualities to be pretty on TV, but I highly doubt TV executives know about them. When I went on TV I brought some bonbons to the executives of that programme and they had never tasted artisan chocolates before (it was nice to meet people creating a TV programme about pastry who did not know anything about pastry).

 

Besides those mental barriers caused by traditions there are also the production issues: I don't know a single professional that makes chocolates and does not have a tempering machine. Professionals here start making chocolates only when they expect to be able to sell enough to cover the costs for a tempering machine. I don't know a single artisan that works like you and others on eGullet do. When you have big guitar + tempering machine + enrobing tunnel, then the production costs for bonbons are much lower than the molded ones, much much lower. Logistic costs are lower too, since molds take a lot of space (if you want to make same quantities as with an enrober). So there will be a lot of resistance by professionals, since moving to colored molded bonbons will mean loosing profit margins.

 

There is a pastry shop in the region that opened few months ago ( https://www.facebook.com/BagigioLaPasticceria/ ) and sells colored molded bonbons. When I visited they had about 8 different kinds, there were about 4-5 pieces for each kind. This should explain their sales volumes. This is the only pastry shop in the area (that I know) that sells those kind of bonbons, I'm not polite in saying this but I was not impressed by them: they chose wrong mold sizes (you can't sell a 8 g piece and a 20 g piece, especially with only 8 kinds); colored decorations were nothing to write home about. Can't comment on taste, I was not tempted to buy them and try. I'm curious to see what they will do in the next 1-2 years for their bonbons offerings.

 

 

 

Teo