Day 9: Chocolate Techniques
THE DAY HAS COME.. for me to finally learn how to properly work with chocolate. During the final days of my solid state chemistry class, we learned all about why tempering chocolate produces the beautiful shiny, hard chocolate but that didn't help me learn the process of doing so (nor did it make it any easier).
We started our truffle filling by heating up milk and chocolate. This had to then be cooled to a warm 90°F.
While waiting for that to chill, we worked on a buttercrunch. We melted butter, mixed in sugar and corn syrup, and cooked it to 300°F (the crack stage). When it reached that temp, we threw in a bunch of toasted almonds, mixed it vigorously and poured it out onto a sheet pan. Later, we went back to break it up.
Holy jesus it's practically crack.
By this time, the milk and chocolate had cooled enough so we mixed that together and then incorporated ground ginger and butter. We then threw it all into a food processor to aerate and later, mixed in crystallized ginger. Â This was poured between two pieces of parchment and left to set up. We scoped it into a pastry bag and piped it out into little rounds. These were then left to set up so we could roll them into spheres. Apparently, they're not supposed to be perfect spheres since they represent the truffle (mushroom) and the cocoa powder we roll them in represents the dirt. In any case, here came the most anticipated part, the tempering.
We melt the chocolate and heat it up to 110° and then cool it down to 85°. In order to do this, we worked the chocolate on a slab of marble with an offset spatula to cool it down. We then placed the cooled chocolate back into the original mixture to lower the overall temperature. This was then thrown back onto the heat to reach 87°.Â
WOOHOO TEMPERED CHOCOLATE.
We first used this chocolate to enrobe the truffle centers. Instead of using forks, we used our palms by dipping a palm into the chocolate and rolling the center in our palms. This left a perfect thin coating. We then topped it with some crystallized ginger to finish off our ginger truffles.
With the left over tempered chocolate, we dipped our buttercrunch and also made clusters (apparently potato chips are great for this).
Everyone in the class made a different flavor of truffle and we ended up with a lot! On a side note, THE TABLES IN THIS CLASSROOM ARE TRAPEZOIDALLLLLLLL. WHOAAAAAAAAAAA.
Anyway, today's spoils:
There are champagne truffles, curry truffles, earl grey truffles and milk chocolate spiced truffles as well as clusters with everything from cashews to coconut to currants and potato chips.
