Chocolatiers Eat Your Heart Out

[ruthie jewell]

Sorry Kerry, I think you're correct. My notes are super scribbley. And for the clarified butter bit, he may have been talking about ganache. I'm not bad with accents, but fast talking accents are a different story!

The answer to the above question about the freezing alcohol is that yes, you freeze the alcohol in a large plastic cylindrical container with a large opening. Then, as thick as your hole in the chocolate bag is as thick as the finished product, so a larger hole will be more like a tree, a thinner hole is like a chocolate tumbleweed.

Edited November 3, 2006 by ruthie jewell (log)

[Kerry Beal]

Here is one I forgot because I didn't write it down.

Pipe chocolate into freezer temperature alcohol.  Depending on how big a hole you cut in your piping cone you can make twigs, branches or gnarly trees.

←

Hi Kerry,

Boy it sure sounds like you guys had a blast and learned a lot. Thanks for sharing the information that you picked up. I don't understand what you wrote above. Do you mean to pipe the chocolate into like a bucket of alcohol that's been in the freezer? Were you planning on doing a demo on that??

←

That is exactly right, he had a beaker full of everclear that had been in the freezer. I'll see if I can link to my experiments in liquid nitrogen, sort of similar outcome. Here it is.

[Kerry Beal]

Sorry Kerry, I think you're correct.  My notes are super scribbley.  And for the clarified butter bit, he may have been talking about ganache.  I'm not bad with accents, but fast talking accents are a different story!

The answer to the above question about the freezing alcohol is that yes, you freeze the alcohol in a large plastic cylindrical container with a large opening.  Then, as thick as your hole in the chocolate bag is as thick as the finished product, so a larger hole will be more like a tree, a thinner hole is like a chocolate tumbleweed.

←

Your notes are right, he did say that it got darker, I just didn't think it was worth pointing out to him. Figured it was just a slip of the tongue.

[Sebastian]

Milk fat, in a chocolate, has the effect of making it a bit tougher to temper, but lends a great deal of bloom stability once you've acheived that temper. It doesn't do much for prevention of oil migration (ie from nuts), but does make it thermally a bit more stable (ie can better tolerate conditions that would otherwise result in bloom...up to a point, of course). The important thing to consider is that the more milk fat you add, the softer the product becomes and the harder it is to temper - you can increase it to the point where you simply can't temper it anymore, by which time, of course, the benefits of adding it in the first place are now moot 8-)

[Kerry Beal]

I received pictures in my e-mail from Anna-Lisa, who works for Callebaut in Toronto, so I thought I'd post them so you could enjoy.

Jean-Pierre piping, dipping and working on the frozen marble slab.

Piping into frozen alcohol.

The resulting gnarly shapes produced in the frozen alcohol.

Items for his small chocolate showpiece.

Chocolate present, molded from an orange juice carton.

Small chocolate showpiece.

[Tweety69bird]

Fantastic pics Kerry, thanks for sharing them with us. That alcohol trick looks pretty interesting.