it's so scientific! i mean, different types of chocolate have different temperatures to which one must heat it. dark chocolate for example, must be melted and heated to 122 degrees F, cooled to 81 degrees and then warmed up to about 86 degrees in order to be tempered. we made some pretty incredible things too! milk and white chocolate have a slightly different temperature scale.
it's like a dance. like a tango. you heat it up, cool it down, heat it up a little bit. and then you get the payoff of a gorgeous chocolate, with a lovely shiny surface, a little bit of play time during which you can manipulate it to do a variety of things, and a perfect contraction and delicate "snap" which is chocolatese for "yup, i'm perfectly tempered." by the way... i have a deep respect for Mr. Chocolate, Jacques Torres..and a new found understanding for why he is Mr. Chocolate, and why he does what he does. OH, the things i can get obsessed with. what a perfect siren doth chocolate make. and i MUST take a trip to his shop soon and pick up some of my favorites. nope, not much of a sweet tooth, but give me something deep, dark and so chocolatey you can actually taste something foreign and rainforest-ish ... i'm in heaven. add some ginger, or something hot and spicy or something exotic and i will love you forever. (just ask my husband).
but back to tempering in class...
so there is something called the "chocolate belt." the area of the globe on which we live that is the exclusive area from which chocolate comes! 20 degrees both north and south of the equator, in tropical areas is where one will find the three varieties of chocolate producing trees: forastero, criollo, and trinitario. chocolate pods are harvested (BY HAND) from a tree, which can carry as many as 40 at a time! each pod contains up to 50 seeds which must be allowed to ferment and develop that taste, and color and chocolatey smell that i adore so very much. eventually those beans are roasted, add to that some cracking, grinding, mixing, refining, and conching and voila... chocolate!
i took a little photo to show the various stages and components in the life of a piece of chocolate. i bet you never realized exactly what you were putting in your mouth, how much time, love and labor that goes into a piece of Jacques Torres chocolate! i bet you'll thinking about it now, take a nibble. for the love of chocolate: learn to savor!! :o)
we learned a few methods of tempering... tabling, ice bath and seeding. i enjoy the ice bath method best... i feel most in control of the process with use of the ice bath.
but a word of caution: DO NOT EVER get even a single drip of water, be it in a bowl, on a tool, or heaven forbid directly in your chocolate or alas, you will never temper it because the water will cause it to seize. once that happens, you will have to use that batch to make brownies or something (there are worse things i suppose)... but for the purposes of tempering, be MINDFUL of the water. beware the water! even tempered chocolate has a foe it seems...
i was quite proud of my first attempt at tempered chocolate! it contracted beautifully, curled up at the edges, had a gorgeous shiny coat and had a perfectly lovely little "snap" when you broke off a piece! [taking a moment to pat myself on the back.]
once we played with it, we used sheets decorated with colored cocoa butter to create curls and tiles and things...
and whoa, talk about a chocolatey cake! check out my finished product!! it was a german chocolate cake complete with an amazing filling that is filled with pecans, coconut and a delicious caramel. my favorite view was of the candied pecans that decorated the top. just gorgeous to look at.
we also worked on and completed a black forest cake!! (a long time favorite from my childhood). think whipped cream, think creme d'or, think cherry compote, kirsch...think all things indirectly related to the deep, dark, magical, mysterious german black forest. then we even got to decorate it with a chocolate band that we painted with a tinted cocoa butter and even sprayed the whole cake with chocolate giving it a velvety finish. i particularly loved making the butterflies!
that being said, both of those cakes made it home, through my nightly jog, my subway ride, my train ride, my car ride, my trip up the stairs... with little more than a dent or ding. not bad. of course...they didn't survive the onslaught of neighbors, friends, relatives and friends of friends twice removed... wasn't but a crumb left really. that...and a lonely little chocolate butterfly. i ate that myself.
more to come!
xo
m
3 comments:
Hallo,Mandy,I think that is Japanis garden ,not german dark forest :))
hmm, well the cake is german black forest cake. the chocolate decor is really more cherry blossom inspired (without an appropriate cutter perhaps) and of course, the black forest cake is meant to be inspired by the inclusion/influence of cherry that is famous to germany. the black forest cake (or torte) is typically decorated with a whipped cream, but in this course, we pair a variety of things together as we learn, hence the creative license we took with the decoration to showcase the cherry influnce of both the brandy and the filling. while you often see cherry blossoms etc. on Japanese inspired cakes, Germany developed this cake based on their specific sort of cherry brandy famous in that area. the cake is more called black forest for the brandy used in the cake is called kirschwasser (directly translated as cherry water). and gives this cake its distinct flavor, not so much the trees. ... and the butterflies...well, we were just practicing tempered chocolate techniques. but i guess if you didn't know all that history...you might get the wrong impression.
Yes ,this history is a new for me ,thanks for information :)
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