Tag Archives: caramel

Working as a chocolatier

IP 5 Chocolate box 2-sizedThere are two kinds of people in this world: those who are cut out for food service, and those who aren’t. I tried to be in the first category, but I know that I really belong in the second. I started as a pastry chef, working in bakeries, pastry shops, restaurants, and hotels. Wherever I was, I always ended up working with chocolate.

It was only a matter of time before I worked for some of the country’s top chocolatiers. I started in a teeny, tiny, family-run business where everything was done by hand. At the other end of the spectrum, I worked in a high-volume, high-end setup where, at the height of Christmas craziness, we produced 80,000 chocolates per week.

The family-run chocolate shop

The shop was owned and operated by an eccentric German family. Everything in the shop was handmade from family recipes that dated back three generations, written in faded ink on yellowed paper that was spattered with ancient stains.

In the basement, there was a bakery where I learned to make 25 litre batches of dense German nut tortes, roll out 6 feet of puff pastry by hand, and make soup vats full of caramel.

Caramel is also known as liquid napalm, as the two-inch scar on my right thumb will attest. If you are unfortunate enough to have it contact your skin, this is what will happen: your neurons will register that a liquid at 165 degrees Celsius has just hit your skin. A half-second later, your brain will realize that in the time it took the first neurons to fire, said liquid has burned its way through the top five layers of your skin and is making its way through your flesh, on its way to the bone.

dark heart 2-sized

The basement bakery was hot, and dusty with flour. I preferred working upstairs in the 6-foot square space that I shared with two co-workers, where we stirred endless vats of chocolate. Gym? Who needed a gym? I had the world’s best biceps, trained from hours on end of stirring stirring stirring.

We whispered sweet nothings to the chocolate. We coaxed it until it formed precious Form V crystals, the required crystal formation for perfectly tempered chocolate. Then we would transform the chocolate into heart-shaped boxes, Easter bunnies clutching baskets of flowers, and happy face lollipops.

piano 4-sized

We dipped truffles by hand. I can still hear the tap tap tap of the dipping forks on the edge of the bowl. My favourite days were when we made molded chocolate confections: domes full of pistachio marzipan, square buttons full of coffee ganache, faceted jewels full of mint ganache…

In my last week there, I made a piano out of chocolate.

The high-volume chocolate shop

The high-volume shop glittered with machines. The enrobing machine, with its long conveyor belt, brought to mind the chocolate episode of I Love Lucy. My co-workers were, quite honestly, the most efficient people I have ever worked with. Ever.

Here, we didn’t have to coax the chocolate into beta crystals. Two tempering machines kept dark and milk chocolate circulating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We worked clean and we worked fast. We were a well-oiled machine. We made bonbons, we cut them, we enrobed them, we decorated them. And, the next time we did it, we worked cleaner and faster. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We spent most of our time on the enrober, which coated the bonbons in a thin shell of tempered chocolate. There was a small platform where we’d set the naked bonbons, and then they’d take a chocolate bath in the enrober. They emerged on the other end and we would finish them with custom decorations.

My favourite task was to set the bonbons. The machine beeped at set intervals, and I raced myself to see how many bonbons I could place on the belt before the beep sounded. I raced around to the other end of the enrober to pick up the finished bonbons, then back to the other end to set some more. Meanwhile, two co-workers stood calmly in the middle, decorating the enrobed bonbons with what can only be described as zen calm.

Chocolate domes-sized

It was a game I played, willing myself to beat my old record.

Each bonbon got its own delicate decoration, none of which were simple. Many of them needed a cocoa butter transfer, which had to be applied in the 20-second window after the chocolate emerged from the enrober, before the chocolate set. Some bonbons were christened with a nut, placed at a very precise angle. Others got a sprinkle of sea salt, a drizzle of white chocolate. My least favourite decoration required a single leaf of edible gold. Gold leaf likes to stick to itself and to the container that it’s in. It’s like ketchup: you get none, or you get the entire bottle.

We also made molded chocolate caramels. Lots of them.

My kitchen, today

In the end, I found out that I’m just not cut out for food service. I’m not knocking it, just saying that it doesn’t work for me. The 16-hour days, the (ahem) less-than-ideal pay…it just doesn’t make sense.

Working in someone else’s chocolate shop, you have to make whatever is in their product line. Customers expect those products every time that they visit the shop. Consequently, being a chocolatier is one of the most routine jobs that I could have chosen. It also happens to be one of the most technical, which is why I was drawn to it—but I’m easily bored, so routine doesn’t sit well with me.

I don’t make money playing around in my kitchen, but I can be creative with what I make, and make money elsewhere. If it’s delicious, then my friends and family get to benefit from my brilliance. And if it isn’t…well, I’ll probably eat it anyway.

…I’m back!

Huzzah!

Hello, lovelies. Thanks for your patience while I took a bit of a break. It was a case of life spinning madly out of control, and something had to give. While I’m sad that it was this blog, I’m glad to be back and writing. I’ve had a good think about how to balance the things I need to do with the things that I want to do, and I’ve come to a decision.

I’m going to post, at minimum, once a week. Yes, that’s significantly less than the daily posts that I started with. However, seeing as how I started this blog while I was delightfully unemployed, I think that a weekly post is a happy compromise. It’s a case of quality versus quantity. This way, I can have a week to think about what I want to say, and make it count. [So she says hopefully.]

Yup. And now we return to your regularly scheduled programming.

I’ve started working with chocolate again. I’ve been writing about it and tasting it for nearly a year now, but I really needed a break from working with it. It didn’t occur to me how much I missed it, but I’ve been experimenting for the past couple of weeks. And, I’m pleased to report, I love it again. LOVE. IT. There’s something about watching chocolate melt, playing with the temperatures, tempering it, and inspecting the final products. And, of course, eating it.

In honour of International Bacon Day, I made a batch of bacon caramels and dipped them in chocolate. Dipping the caramels was surprisingly tricky. They were softer than caramels that I’ve worked with before, so I had to work quickly before they relaxed into limpid pools of caramel goodness.

And, each caramel donated a bit of bacon fat to the bowl of chocolate. It was exceedingly generous of them, but by the end of the batch the chocolates were looking like they weren’t setting as well. I panicked a bit (oh noes! have I lost my tempering touch?) until I realized that it was a layer of bacon fat on top of the chocolate. Hrm. They did set in the end, and they were delicious, but this is a logistical detail that I’ll have to work out.

This weekend, when gifted with some fresh basil from a friend’s garden, I made some lemon-basil truffles. They’re more basil than lemon, but they taste bright and summery and delicious, and I’ll take it.

In culinary school, I always emerged from chocolate classes looking like I had taken a bath in it. I was notorious for getting two horizontal streaks, one each at chest-level and waist-level. Chest-level corresponded to the rim of the giant bowl of chocolate that I was tempering, and waist-level corresponded to the height of the granite counter.

Thankfully, I work cleaner these days. The kitchen is spotless and I didn’t get anything on my apron – though, I confess that on my evening run yesterday, I found a  streak of chocolate on my high-tech, air-wicking running shirt. The chocolate pixies must be after me. It only makes me run faster.

Burnt caramel and peanut butter

Let’s play a game. I’m going to think of a word and then say the first word that comes to mind when I think of that word.

Okay, so that last one isn’t usual fodder for that game, but I think the word association is valid.

Recchuiti is famous for his burnt caramel. It’s in a confection, it’s in his fleur de sel caramels, it’s in his almond caramels, and it’s probably in a bunch of other products, too.

I was incredibly excited to try his burnt caramel confection. According to the lovely little menu card, it’s his signature piece. An entire chocolate empire, built on the back of this one chocolate.

Well.

Erm.

…It’s a much more subtle thing than I could have imagined. I had lofty visions of smoke and depth, sweet and burnt, chocolate and sugar. In comparison, the real thing is – I’m just going to say it – rather underwhelming.

I got hints of burnt caramel (emphasis on the word burnt) while tasting the ganache, but didn’t really get the full burnt caramel flavour until the ganache had melted. And then, the smokiness just kept going and going. I’ve never experienced that before: having a flavour be dormant and muted while on your tongue, and then tasting its full flavour for a full minute afterwards.

On the whole, I think it’s a little too burnt for my liking. But I have to give a nod to the extraordinary experience of tasting something after it’s gone.

And, to leave you with a happy thought for the weekend: Recchuiti’s peanut butter pearls are to die for. Think Reese’s Pieces, but grown up. Think real peanut butter, think real chocolate, and think about a tiny, crunchy surprise in the middle of the whole she-bang.

I dare you to eat just one.

Caramel is magical, and science is delicious

I’m a big nerd. I may not wear a lab coat anymore, but I’m still conducting experiments all the time. Case in point: when I visited a friend in Boulder, Colorado, I knew that it was one mile above sea level. The first thing that popped into my head was “high-altitude baking experiments,” the results of which I still have to document.

When it comes to food, I’m always thinking about the science behind it.

Take caramel, for instance. It seems simple, right? Put sugar (white, crystalline) into a pan and heat it up to 165 degrees Celsius. The resulting caramel (brown, liquid) looks, tastes and smells nothing like sugar. How did it do that? What were the molecular changes? At what temperature? It gets me every time. I think it’s magical and fantastical.

And then there’s Christopher Elbow‘s vanilla bean caramel. It’s lovely, honest flavour. In fact, this chocolate was missing from my chocolate menu and I had to guess what was in it. Sometimes, this is fun; often, it’s a crapshoot as flavours are muddy or, ahem, overly subtle. Well, this was clearly vanilla bean caramel. The caramel was rich and buttery, and just sweet enough. The fragrant vanilla floated on top of the caramel – and who doesn’t love seeing vanilla bean seeds in their food?

But let’s get to the cool science. The mouthfeel was amazing. It was perfectly smooth, but not oozy. As I do with my chocolate tastings, I cut this one in half to get a cross-section view. The caramel looks solid in the shell: it flows a little bit, but it stays in the shell. But then you pop it in your mouh, and your tongue is, quite literally, bathed in liquid caramel. It’s partly to do with the heat of your mouth, but there’s also the molecular structure of the caramel. The study of things that are sometimes liquid, and sometimes solid, is called rheology. I think it’s pretty freaking cool.

But even if you don’t, appreciate this: it makes for lovely caramels.

Robin Chocolates chocolate caramel fleur de sel

Every Christmas, I make edible gifts. Last year, I made chocolate caramels that were to die for. I ended up making a second batch because I ate so many quality control samples. Little did I know, they’re fun to make and fun to eat, but such a bitch to wrap in cellophane. Wrap, wrap, crinkle, crinkle. Shoot me now.

Well, Robin Chocolates took the smart route and put their chocolate caramel inside a molded chocolate. Chocolate caramel, as opposed to straight caramel, tends to be a less oozy and messy. The chocolate provides a bit of structure to the whole thing, and while it really does depend on the actual recipe, it’s generally a firm caramel.

There are little flakes of fleur de sel on top of the chocolate, which is a crunchy, salty surprise. The chocolate for the shell is slightly darker than the other pieces I tried, and that bitterness plays well off the sweet (but not cloying) caramel.

I do think the caramel’s a little bit, well, oily. It doesn’t taste extra buttery, so I don’t think it’s excess butter. I almost wonder if it’s an alternative sugar, like glucose, or some other invert sugar. Caramel’s a little bit temperamental, and if you’re not careful you can get a big mess of over-crystallized sugar (picture rock candy, but without the stick). Sometimes candy makers will dope their caramel with some other kind of sweetener to minimize the chance of over-crystallization.

It’s not a deal breaker, but it’s a bit distracting. I think I’ll stick to my own chocolate caramel, with a bit of fleur de sel sprinkled on top.

You can buy Robin Chocolates here. Their online store isn’t up yet. If you ask very nicely they might ship stuff to you, but only if you live in the continental US.