Look what Mrs. Pastry and the girls brought me from up North! Two quarts of fresh sour cherries. Oh yeah. If there’s one thing that stinks about living in the more southerly portions of the United States it’s that fresh sour cherries are all but impossible to find. If you don’t hear much from me today it’s because I’ll be spending what free time I have making pie. Excuse me, won’t you?
READ ONAs I mentioned just below, there are two kinds of chocolate bloom: fat bloom and sugar bloom. Neither are catastrophic to your chocolate supply (just melt the stuff), and both can be prevented to one degree or another.
First, fat bloom. If you’re applying melted chocolate as a glaze or as a coating on some home made truffles, all you need to do to inhibit streaks is to put the finished products into the refrigerator. The quick burst of cool essentially freezes the cocoa butter molecules in place before they have a chance to congregate on the surface of the chocolate. Note that the effect isn’t necessarily permanent once the chocolate is removed from the refrigerator, so you might want to keep your whatever-the-are’s chilled
READ ONReader Jey asks if I would talk a little about chocolate bloom and provide some tips for preventing it. Jey, I would be delighted. First let’s define our terms. The grey streaks or spots that appear on chocolate when it melts and re-firms, or when it’s stored for long periods in the refrigerator or freezer, is called “chocolate bloom”. There are two kinds of it: fat bloom and sugar bloom. Both have different causes and fixes.
Fat bloom is caused by cocoa butter pooling up and forming crystals. This doesn’t happen when chocolate is tempered properly because a.) the controlled cooling process keeps the chocolate emulsion nice and stable and b.) it creates a strong and even crystal structure. However untempered chocolate, being something of a riot of different sorts of fat crystals, is prone to unsightly streaks.
READ ONMrs. Pastry and the girls are in Chicago visiting family for four days. This is the second night in a row I’ve had Cheez-It’s and beer for dinner. Men…are we sad characters in isolation or what? Ladies, all you need to do if you want to witness the thin line between civilization and barbarism is […]
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When chocolate liquor, the paste you get when you grind roasted cacao nibs, is placed in a hydraulic press and squeezed, two products result: cocoa butter and cocoa powder. However it’s important to note that the process doesn’t entirely separate the two. Some cocoa butter remains in the cocoa powder, which is designated as either low, medium or high fat, the fattiest being 24% cocoa butter and the leanest being 10% cocoa butter. The rest is all cocoa solids.
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Cocoa butter is a very unusual fat. Granted, in its refined form it doesn’t look like much. It’s white, flavorless, odorless and soap-like in its firmness. However it doesn’t take too much fiddling with it to understand how unique it is. First there’s the low melt point. Cocoa butter is comprised of 21 different fats, all of which melt between 55 and 114 degrees Fahrenheit. The average melting temperature of those fats is 87 degrees Fahrenheit. Which means that cocoa butter melts easily in the mouth — even on the skin, which is why cocoa butter is in such high demand in the cosmetic industry.
READ ONOoh reader Elena, that’s one of my favorite topics. I just happen to have a post on that very thing right here.
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This is not “couverture” chocolate (which means “coating” or “covering” in French), I’ll create a separate post on that subject. This is sort of couverture’s opposite, at least from a quality standpoint. Many people wouldn’t actually call this particular product “chocolate” since it has no cocoa butter in it. Rather it contains one or more so-called “cocoa butter equivalents” (CBE’s), fats like palm oil which perform similarly to cocoa butter but really aren’t the same. They don’t have cocoa butter’s silky and subtle mouthfeel, but on the other hand don’t have its rigidity (nor high price tag). CBE’s aside, these chocolates are almost identical to milk chocolate: high in sugar, low in chocolate liquor, and contain about 15% milk solids.
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Milk chocolate is the lightest and smoothest of all the major chocolate varieties, containing only about 10-20% chocolate liquor. It is the only type of chocolate that contains milk (or cream) solids, those take up roughly 15% of its volume. Milk chocolate is usually 50% sugar and the very smoothest varieties — you know, those very expensive Swiss bars — can be up to 30% cocoa butter. It all makes for a silky and delightful eating experience, if a decidedly less “chocolate-y” one. It’s for that reason that you don’t find terribly much milk chocolate in the pastry kitchen, as that small amount of chocolate liquor is easily lost when it’s used as a glaze or
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Semi-sweet chocolate also goes by the name of “dark” chocolate, at least when it’s in candy bar form, though interestingly it contains more sugar than even most milk chocolate. Semi-sweet chocolate is about 60% sugar by weight. The rest of its volume is made up of cocoa solids (about 15%) and cocoa butter (27-32%). Like bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate it has no milk solids in it, which I suppose is what makes it “dark” by some standards. Semi-sweet has fewer uses than bittersweet in my opinion, which I think is why you don’t see terribly much of it except as an inclusion in chocolate chip cookies, muffins, ice cream, that sort of thing. A lot of people just like to eat it, and really, who can blame them?
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