Grant Park Sewing

Got to work this morning and found out that we weren't going to work!  So, I grabbed a box of un-sewn patches and drove over to Grant Park to get some sewing done before it got too hot.

I only got a few finished.  Mostly because I was distracted by the Cyclorama (huge spinning painting about the civil war).  

Sewing by the pool with a pimento cheese sandwich in a second.  

It's been an odd day so far.

The Pontouf

The mascot of this blog is...

A chocolate bilby!

It's the closest thing to a chocolate imaginary kangaroo we could find.

Tempering Woes

Worked with white chocolate some yesterday.  It's much different than dark and milk.  It's easy to chop, but  extremely thick when melted.  This made enrobing very difficult.  It felt like throwing a piece of ganache at churning cement.  We weren't able to get many done because we lost temper.

I'm not going to try to put the definition of tempering into my own words.  I'll be borrowing a lot of my explanations and definitions from Andrew Garrison Shotts book Making Artisan Chocolates: Flavor Infused Chocolates, Truffles, and Confections.  He does a much better job than I would anyhow.

So what's the difference between tempered and untempered chocolate?

Well...

"Tempered chocolate sets quickly at room temperature, hardens as it dries, is shiny and brittle, shrinks slightly as it sets (and therefore releases easily from a mold), has a smooth mouth-feel, and, once set, holds its luster and shape at room temperature for extended amounts of time without melting.  However, once reheated past a certain temperature, the chocolate will melt, and at that point it is no longer tempered.  Untempered chocoalte dries very slowly at room temperature, is tacky to the touch, sticks to the inside of a mold, has a cakey texture when eaten, and usually has a blotchy appearance."

And, how do you do it?

"Tempering is the process of of melting chocolate, cooling it down, and heating it up again slightly.  Basically, it is raising and lowering the temperature of melted chocolate so that the fat crystals in the cocoa butter stabilize.  That's a simplified scientific explanation.  The practical one is that you are simply adjusting the characteristics of the melted chocolate so that it sets up with a nice glossy shine, doesn't melt in your hands upon contact, has a pleasing texture when eaten, and melts nicely on your tongue."

At SCR we use a tempering machine, which does most of the work for you - except our humidity in house is out of whack and the machine is temperamental (pun intended).

We worked on tempering by hand.  Which involved standing by the microwave and testing the temperature every minute, then cooling it down, and finally microwaving it again to the correct temperature.

The three levels of temperature varies by chocolate and it takes a lot of practice to understand what is best for the chocolate you are using.

Display

Had a big talk about how to display chocolate (or any food really).  The key is for the board to look full, but also for people to feel like they are getting the last one - pretty tricky.  Geometric patterns should never come before the first two rules, but lines help to draw the customer in.  Don't pair white chocolate beside dark or it will get lost on the board.  It's a lot of information, but will make more sense once I start doing it myself.

I enrobed the lavender, praline, black cat, and fig truffles in dark.  It's becoming easier to do.

Also made two sets of lollipops.  The first had cocoa powder (+ something I already forgot) and smelled like brownies.  The second had a lot of horehound in it.  For my first set, I watched the pot to see how the sugar changed with the temperature. At different temperatures it is used for different types of candy - soft ball, threads, hard ball, soft crack, and hard crack.  We wanted hard crack for the lollipops, so it had to get up to 300 degrees.  Boiling sugar also will pull off your skin when you touch it - I had a bit of a close call.

I also stayed late and watched how to make ganache.  It was a milk chocolate green tea ganache, and was surprisingly simple to make.

And I made dark chocolate mendiants with a do-it-yourself pastry bag - large chocolate disks with coconut, pistachios, walnuts, cranberries, blueberries, and mango.

Busy day.  Really tired.

Cleanliness

No time to write.

Yesterday I learned how to enrobe chocolate - ie. dip the ganache into the tempered chocolate that covers it.

I am also learning how to be clean.  Very slowly.

Tempering chocolate is frustrating.  It's nice being able to see what are likely going to be issues when I try and make my own.

Taste

Slow day.  The t.v. show hosted by Mo Rocca on the Cooking Channel came in and filmed.  Mo Rocca wasn't there, but it gave us a lot of down time in the shop.  We couldn't make anything because it would be too loud.  Mostly we just sat in the back, peeked in at the film crew and read cookbooks.

The most important thing I got out of today was taste.  To be able to make new flavor profiles you have to have a deep understanding of taste.  The key is to build up a store of flavors in your head and be able to verbalize them.  Once you have all these and you taste something that you would like to use, you then have to decide what goes well with it.

One recent creation that SCR has done is a gauva patê de fruit with a sweet corn ganache and then topped with a sugared serrano pepper.

I also learned about using natural essential oils.  They are perfect for adding flavor.  Just stay away from the synthetic stuff.

First Day

Well, it is technically the morning after.  I was exhausted last night and couldn't make myself stay up for a few minutes to write.

What did I do yesterday?

I stapeled corrugated cardboard to the front counter in the shop.
I learned how to properly hold a knife when dealing with chocolate.
I chopped a lot of chocolate.
I fiddled with the tempering machine.
I washed dishes.
I helped make almond dragees.
I helped (a little) to make blueberry and pink peppercorn bars.
I learned how to properly hold a scooper.
I scooped ganache into tiny identical balls.

Sounds really easy, right?

Ganache was created by the devil.  It's the creamy chocolate with all of the flavor on the inside of a chocolate truffle.  The basic make-up of ganache is chocolate and cream but you'll also find cocoa butter, glucose, and a few other things depending on what you're making.  Incorporating all of these, you have a thick sauce that you throw in the freezer.

I got it after the freezer.  It is a solid block.  And it takes a lot of pressure and direction to get it into the scooper, pack it in tight, scrape off the excess and pop it out onto a sheet.  I'm lacking the pressure and direction,  so it was like attempting to scoop hard cement.  After a few minutes of this, my playing with the ganache turned it into a soft mush that was impossible to scoop.  My hands were covered in it.  My apron was disgusting.  The scooper was slipping.  About five of the fifty I made were slightly presentable.  Luckily though, I learned to refreeze the ganache then wait a few minutes.  This made scooping easier, particularly once I practiced holding the scooper correctly (many fingers are involved).  But, I still think ganache is awful.

The almond dragees were a lot easier.  Dragee means "sweet little thing." I was handed caramelized almonds and told to freeze them.  Once cold, I mixed in melted dark chocolate and then made sure none of the pieces stuck together.  This was repeated three times.  Once the chocolate covered almonds were set, they are covered in cocoa powder.

For the blueberry pink peppercorn bars, my job was to take the chocolate molds that had been filled with a mixture of chocolate and blueberries, tap it hard on the counter to release all of the bubbles and then spread pink peppercorn on the bottom of each bar.  The job was easy, but I had to work fast to keep up with the molds that were being filled quickly.

I left around 7:30.  Exhausted.  I had only eaten a few handfuls of almonds and a few pieces of chocolate.  Made it home, laid down for a few minutes, and then gathered up some energy and left to visit friends for dinner.

Tired.  Sore.  Excited.

Atlanta #2:

After our Spring Break trip to Atlanta, I decided I wanted to get a job/internship/apprenticeship as soon as possible - just to see if this chocolate thing is for me.

 My first choice was the French Broad Chocolate Lounge - It's in Asheville, it's near a lot of my friends, and it was what started this whole obsession.  I worked up the courage and sent a heart-felt email to the owners and figured I'd have an answer by the end of the week.  The worst that could happen was they could say no.

No.  Not even that.  No response.  Assuming they just missed the email, I sent two more out.

Still nothing.  

I sent a handwritten letter.  Who doesn't reply to a letter?

Silence.

The people who inadvertently started this whole project in my mind weren't with me.  So, instead of moving up to Asheville, I hung my head and decided I'd find something better to do.  

It took me awhile, but after weighing the options of going to school or back to camp I decided to do neither and join my brother William sailing.

I spent my evenings studying for exams and reading up on coastal cruising.

And then my cousin Lilly spotted a post on facebook from Sugar Coated Radical.
They wanted a summer intern.

After a few emails (which were answered promptly) I found myself driving down to Atlanta for an interview.

And I got it.

Mother's Day:

Both of my parents have been extremely supportive in my chocolate aspirations, but I'd like to take this sappy greeting-card designed day to legitimately thank my mother.  Nancy Lampe has helped me turn this idea into a more possible reality and has kept the ball rolling.  I really look forward to one day working with her as a partner.

Thanks also for teaching me that it is a good idea to start early:

Of course, this is a joke.  My mother is a classy lady.  

Last night, Mom and Dad came to Raleigh for dinner and dessert.  We discussed Atlanta plans and celebrated mothers day.  For Mother's Day I gave Mom two books that I thought deserved some mention here.

The Sweet Life In Paris by David Lebovitz covers Lebovitz's amazing journey through the pastry and chocolate world of Paris.  Appropriate.  Mom and Dad are hoping to spend a year or two in Paris (according to the 5 year plan).  They are also going to sail the great loop, move to New York City, and build a house.  Go Mom!

The second book, What Einstein Told His Cook by Robert L. Wolke, falls in line with my recent read Molecular Gastronomy.  Figured we both could be up to speed.  Both books feature a few interesting recipes, and seeing as she has on of the biggest recipe book collections I've ever seen, I think it was a very nice Mother's Day gift.  Love you Mom!

Atlanta #1:

I'm having to back track a few months for everything to make sense.  How did I find Sugar Coated Radical  (where I'm interning) in the first place?   Well...

Nancy Lampe (mom) has gotten really excited about chocolate and desserts.  She is probably more excited than I am about all of these goings on.  In late December, she and I shared a birthday party at Café Luna in Raleigh, NC.  She handed me a manilla folder filled with different chocolate shops/restaurants/bars all in Atlanta.  And that is how we ended up in Atlanta over my Spring Break.  We visited a few places worth mention:

Cacao Atlanta was Mom's first realization of what chocolate can be.  They are a bean to bar company, meaning that don't buy chocolate that has already been ground down and with other components added to it.  Instead, they buy the whole beans and grind them down themselves, adding only a small amount of raw sugar to the chocolate when it is in it's liquid form.  The shop (they just opened a second in Buckhead) is overly polished but enjoyable.  It's a serious chocolate company and treats its chocolate and customers that way.  Another interesting tidbit on Cacao is that they don't use any milk chocolate.  I'm not a connoisseur of chocolate in any way (not yet at least) but I found their chocolate to be a little too bitter at times.  All in all, Cacao was eye-opening.  It is great to see how much you can do with chocolate and the process that goes behind creating it into something tiny and wonderful.

Maison Robert is a classic confectionery.  Robert Reeb is from the northeastern France where he studied under his father as a third generation pâtissier-confiseur-glacier and then moved to Switzerland for more training (I'm stealing most of this information from their website).  Macaroons, tarts, chocolate - everything was the traditional European chocolate that we've heard about through mouth-watering stories from friends.  The business model of Maison Robert is much different from what I am considering, but it's worth a visit if you are in the area.

 Disappointing.  Schakolad is a franchise out of Florida.  We found it in a strip mall.  They offered mediocre chocolate truffles and chocolate in molds.  Need chocolate shaped like a hammer?  They've got it.  How about a stethoscope?  Got that one too.  It was a little too silly for my tastes.  But, after telling them why we were in Atlanta they gave us a great lead.  "Have you been to Sugar Coated Radical yet?"
Well, no.  We hadn't.  So we went.

Magic.  Word of mouth.  A funny shack on the edge of Virginia Highlands.  It took courage going in.  Mom and Aunt Ruth (she was hanging out with us for the day) were wary.  Inside we met Taria and a tiny room full of chocolate.  But it wasn't chocolate like any I'd had before.  It wasn't Cacao pretentious, or classic Maison Robert, or CVS worthy Schakolad.  It was contemporary and new and adventurous and the best chocolate we had tried so far.

And this is where I'll be working this summer!  Patience, next post...

What I'm reading:

According to the few people I've spoken to about really great cooking, understanding the science behind food is really important.  Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This covers the chemistry and physics behind not just cooking, but eating food.

I'm a not a chemist, so the concept of even attempting to figure out how it all works on a molecular level is daunting.  But this book is written for people like me, who took rocks-for-jocks to cover their science credits.

...

Blogs are awkward things to start:

For those of you who know me, or have at least spoken to me in the past 7 or 8 months, you know of my intense curiosity for chocolate.  Or, more explicitly, how do I make chocolate and how do I make it more than just a hobby?

Last summer I discovered chocolate.  Good chocolate.
Since then, it's been a lot of conversations and ideas.  Two trips to Atlanta, Georgia.  The creation of a small culinary library.  The failure of one internship.  The gaining of another, better one.  Excitement.  Fear.  And, a hazy goal.

With this blog I hope to share what I'm learning with my friends and family and to keep a better record of it all for myself.

Hope you enjoy it, and wish me luck!