A few of the true Opera cake cognoscenti out there have emailed me over the last several days pointing out that I left instructions for creating a truly “authentic” Opera cake out of my tutorial. That’s true enough if you don’t consider an Opera cake to be an Opera cake without with the name “Clichy” […]
READ ONFifty thousand page views yesterday. All as a result of StumbleUpon again. Someone there put up my chocolate chip cookie tutorial and, well, let’s just say I’m glad I have an ISP that can deal with that sort of volume (much as I wanted to kill them a month ago). So settle in all you […]
READ ONSo at long last we get around to the opera cake tutorial I’ve been meaning to put up for a week. What can I say, I’m easily distracted by food science. And chocolate, well, it’s terribly interesting stuff. You’ll thank me for all those posts later, I promise you. Well…maybe not. So anyway, opera cake. […]
READ ONHere reader Aaron, an apprentice chocolatier who really has a handle on how to make a suerior ganache, weighs in. All those who aspire to use ganache to make candies like truffles, you’ll want to pay close attention. If I may submit a few tips on making a ganache. In my opinion, it is actually […]
READ ONYou know how it goes. One minute you’re happily stirring a batch of melted chocolate, dum dee dum dum… …and all of a sudden it starts to darken and thicken mysteriously. What the…? It seems to shrink in volume and looks oddly greasy. Then in a few seconds it’s seized up into a thick, putty-like […]
READ ONAnother good question in a long list of chocolate queries (I swear I really did make an Opera cake, shortly I’ll put up the pictures to prove it). Melted chocolate “seizes” when it comes into contact with small amounts of water. The question is: why? The answer is that melted chocolate is a flowing mixture […]
READ ONThat from reader Victor on the tempered chocolate glaze recipe below, which calls for a small amount of clarified butter. The reason has to do with the “fat bloom” I mentioned yesterday. Just as a refresher, fat bloom is what frequently happens when melted chocolate isn’t tempered properly, then re-solidifies. The random, unstable crystal formation […]
READ ONYesterday a reader and I indulged our very geekiest sides as we briefly discussed the way in which crystallizing molecules give off heat as they change phase from liquid to solid. But did you know the process works in reverse as well? Crystals that change phase from solid to liquid (which is to say, melt) […]
READ ONGanache isn’t strictly speaking temper-able, but the rate at which ganache cools and the types of crystals it forms are important. The more of the stable, “Form V”-type cocoa butter crystals you have in your ganache, the better its consistency will be. For that reason, a ganache should always be allowed to cool slowly at […]
READ ONReader Aaron writes: Quick thought about the tempering of chocolate. As you note, refrigeration messes with proper crystallization. However, as crystallization is exothermic, for molded chocolates (especially with poly-carb molds), it helps to pop the chocolates into the fridge about halfway through the cooling process in order to draw out some of the heat. As […]
READ ON