Cooking For Engineers

[Donna]

Thanks Michael for responding. I will be cutting triangles and circles with a knife and cookie cutters. I will try tonight your suggestions.

[brookescandyco]

Hi,
I am doing my first demo on chocolate and handmade chocolates for the first time for the public. Can you please give me some info on what you would be interested in, if you were going to see a demo?
Thanks so much,
Brooke
www.brookescandyco.com

[merrimary@msn.com]

In answer to the question about what I would like to see at a Demo...
Techniques... I've been to chocolate demos before so if you want specifics, just let me know.

Also, in answer to the tempering... I am a Dove Chocolate at Home (soon to be renamed Dove Chocolate Discoveries) consultant/chocolatier. I can vouch for the Revolation I tempering machine.... sold elsewhere for $349-$400 - Dove sells it at their in-home parties for $199 for customers or as a hostess 1/2 off item for only $99.50!! It is also part of the higher end starter kit. Want to know more... just email me or visit: www.dovechocolateathome.com/sites/mary

Edited by Michael Chu: I fixed the incorrect url with the correct one.

[chocolateking5201]

What kind of machine is suggested to make the tempering process a little easier?

[Mountain Girl]

I'm about to make my first attempt at tempering chocolate, using your instructions. Do I need to make temperature adjustments for altitude? I live 9600 feet above sea level.

[Phyllis S]

Comments very helpful. Thank you.
After tempering, what's the best way for the "amateur" to keep the chocolate at 88-90 F while working?

[Majesty]

[Guest]

My mom made these chocolate bowls when I was young, we found that one of the easiest ways to remove the balloon is to put a piece of tape near the knot and put a pin in through the tape. The tape keeps the hole from growing so the air leaks out slowly. You end up with a shriveled balloon inside the bowl that can be pulled away more easily than an inflated balloon. You still need to be careful when removing it, the bowl is fragile!

On another note, if I am making truffles at home and I want to dip them in chocolate, and I am only giving them to my husband (who won't care about bloom on the chocolate),

a) do I need to temper the chocolate?

b) or should I just use dipping chocolate or candy wafers?

Thanks!

[Michael Chu]

[Aubade]

I was interested in knowing how to temper chocolate and have read all of the comments . . . very interesting. I love chocolate and after reading this, I have a greater appreciation for those lovely ready-made luxurious chocolates I can buy in a box.

[I love truffles]

So I followed the truffle recipe and used tempering to try to coat the truffles.

I used 23 ounces of milk chocolate chips (Ghirardelli) and 1 cup of whipping cream to get a perfect ganache (instructions were great). Many other websites listed the conversion for dark vs milk as 1.5:1, so this seemed pretty good. This made about 60 truffle balls which I split into two cookie sheets (with a sheet of wax paper on each).

I had another 11.5 bag of milk chocolate chips for the shell, which i split into 2 groups...one for each cookie sheet. The first time, I put the chocolate chips in small pot, heated it by resting it in a slightly larger pot with hot water on the stove, got them just to start getting melty and then removed them from heat and started stirring. This made a great syrup that I could roll the ganache balls in. Key hint here, don't be stingy...when I do it again, I'll probably do another layer (or maybe two). I was doing 2-3 balls per slathering of chocolate on my hand and I would say either do that with multiple layers, or do one slather per ball.

The second batch was not good, but it was interesting. I don't know why, but I immediately started stirring the chips when i put the small pot into the larger pot. What I ended up with was a mass of chocolate that was not melting at all and a finger poke confirmed that it was very very hot. It never did melt (and for fun I nuked it and that turned it into a frothy nightmare...so I coated the rest of the truffles in sugar powder). I don't know why, but don't touch the chocolate until it starts to melt.

Oh, and the truffles came out close to most decent chocolatiers in terms of quality. They usually charge $2-5 per truffle and I spent $15 on supplies (including the chocolate mass in the trash) and got 60 good sized truffles why were well loved by my party. I didn't have a melon baller, but I used a metal teaspoon ring thing that that worked (I don't remember which one i used, but it was one of the rings). Thanks for the instructions!

[pamseb]

I have been helped hugely by all the comments about tempering chocolates. Thanks to everyone who has contributed.

If I want to make chocolate almond clusters, do I have to warm up the almonds before mixing them with the chocolate? Is there a special way of handling ingredients in clusters (temperature-wise or otherwise) to guarantee success and avoid blooming?

[Guest]

Would I be able to use this method in order to dip a chocolate center for a truffle or would it melt while being dipped and if not at what temperature should the chocolate be when i dip into it. If anyone has an answer thank you very much for your time.

[Michael Chu]

[fooburger]

1) If I heat/melt the chocolate to ~ 105F, and I stir it down to 88F (whereupon I put in diced chocolate chips as seeds), can I immediately pour into the mold? Or do I need to work it at 88F for a while (somehow managing to maintain that temperature.. maybe a small hot bath or sorts).
2) My first tempering project is massive... a 35lbs 3' chocolate bunny.. I have the mold arriving today.. I've started testing the process with small amounts of chocolate and am waiting for the mold to arrive to scale up. I'm guessing stirring is important, but the process seems different from say, ice cream, where you are trying to prevent the formation of large scale crystal structures causing ice cream to taste brittle... so my question is, is it better to stir or not to stir? Overstir? Understir? I get the feeling that without *some* stirring, no crystalline structure can form, as the molecules are probably not mobile enough, even in vaguely liquid form.

My game plan is to melt in a very low oven (with a few high heat capacity absorbers to moderate the temperature). Then I'm figuring that while stirring the temperature down, the chocolate will spend a great deal of time cooling very slowly (for a large thermal mass, only the outer surface will actually conduct/radiate heat away, so volume/mass ratio is high, which should cause very slow cooling... though mitigated by stirring). My hope is that if I stir it in a big vat, the chocolate will spend a lot of time at or near 88F.

This is going to be a lot of fun.. and I do hope it goes well.... as for first attempts at molding chocolate, we sure picked the big one.

Thanks for any pointers in advance.
--fooburger