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| This is what happens if you melt pure chocolate, then let it set without tempering. It hasn't gone bad, the lighter swirls are just the cocoa butter that has separated from the cocoa paste. It can be fixed by tempering (this photo is of the little box of chocolate I have in the cupboard to practice with). |
Chocolate works on its
own terms. It does what it wants when it
wants, and if we can even hope to manipulate it, we have to follow its set of exact
and demanding rules. Maybe it seems like
I am making it sound harder than it is.
How complicated could it be, right?
Melt the chocolate, mold the chocolate, un-mold the chocolate, and it’s
done, right? Not quite. In order to work with real, pure chocolate
(without artificial fillers or oils), it has to be tempered; a process that
breaks down the chocolate molecules, then re-crystalizes them in a stronger,
shinier way. Without this process, it
never sets and it sticks to molds. It
gets soft at room temperature. It looks
swirled and dull (ever left a candy bar in a hot car, then put it in the
fridge?). At home, we have a lot of
products that are designed to circumvent tempering, but they aren’t
chocolate. They are chocolate-flavored
candy that is full of oil and emulsifiers that help them set and remain hard
simply by melting and allowing to cool.
Anyway: I usually have
pretty good luck working with chocolate, but even so, I was still a little
nervous going in to the showpiece lesson.
Chocolate Showpiece
Chef Hervé approached
this like any other lesson. It was,
after all. In two and a half hours, he constructed
a beautiful sculpture made entirely of chocolate. While he worked, he explained what elements
would be required for us: A chocolate
base that looks like granite, a large molded piece, a tall hollow cylinder as a
support, a chocolate flower, chocolate leaves, and two “other techniques”
(options: molded spheres, thin curved pieces, piped pieces, “coral,” or “straws). Each
element would be easy to make; the hard part would be balancing the design and
keeping the chocolate tempered throughout our five-hour class so that it could
be used as a glue when we finally assembled the sculpture. The Chef used between three and four
kilograms of chocolate, and said that we would each be given five kilos of dark
chocolate and as much white chocolate as we wanted to complete our piece.
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| Chef's HUGE chocolate flower! It's so big! |
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| His showpiece from the front |
We were required to
come with a sketch, so I drew three and chose the best one. I woke up an hour before the alarm on the
morning of my practical, so I made a digitized version with color. I was nervous that my showpiece would fall
over.
I was prepared for the
practical, but still nervous. I didn’t
have any trouble, really, until it came time to assemble my sculpture. The first piece I glued into place, the large
molded teardrop piece, was leaning badly backward, and it was too late to fix
it. Because of this, I had to place the
flower flush against the piece (rather than tilted slightly forward as I had
planned). Chef Hervé suggested that I
stick a scrap from my leaves, a tall, attractive red-colored white chocolate
piece, right in the front. I did it,
then realized that he was probably joking, but again, it was too late to remove
it. I also had a little less chocolate
left than I had hoped, so it became difficult for me to glue things toward the
end.
All in all, though, I
was satisfied with my showpiece. It
looked close to my sketch, and it was stable for the time being. After it was finished, I was to walk it
through a door, down three steps, around a corner, through another door, and
place it on to a table. I felt like I
was on Food Network Challenge! Nothing
broke, and the showpiece lesson was officially over.
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| My showpiece from the front. You can see my digitized sketch hanging on the paper above it. |
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| My flower -- not bad for a first try! |
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| From the back. I was inspired by tree fungus... does it show? |
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| Whew! Successfully moved from the practical kitchen to the table. |
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| Ta-daa! |
It was a wonder than
all the pieces fit on the two tables they designated for us! When it was all over, 23 of us each made a
chocolate showpiece with approximately four kilograms of chocolate. Wow!
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| 23 showpieces! Our display made the hallway smell amazing. |
Chocolate Bonbons
After tempering five
kilos of chocolate for the showpiece, bonbons seemed like they would be a piece
of cake. Chef Hervé demonstrated seven
different types to us: Nougat (a chewy,
thick honey base dotted with assorted nuts), Cinnamon and Pistachio Bonbons
(white chocolate shells filled with a soft white chocolate, pistachio, and
cinnamon ganache), Chocolate Caramel (caramels flavored with dark chocolate), Dipped
Marzipan (thick almond paste dipped in dark chocolate), Praliné (dark chocolate
shells filled with a hazelnut praline and bits of crispy, dried crêpes), Palets
Or Café (coffee-flavored dark chocolate ganache dipped in dark chocolate and
colored with gold dust – “Or” is “Gold” in French), and Tea Truffles (dark
chocolate shells filled with a chocolate and tea ganache). We learned the technique behind molding
perfect, bubble-less shells, filling, and closing them.
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| Chef's shiny Palets Or |
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| He taught us how to color our molds. These are the pistachio bonbons...appropriately green! |
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| Chef's Nougat...it's like a thick, sticky marshmallow with nuts |
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| On the top: Dipped Marzipan. On the bottom: Tea Truffles It is encouraging to see that even the Chef gets some small bubbles in his mold sometimes |
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| Chef's Pralines. I didn't like the log mold initially...but tie design has grown on me. |
For the practical, we
were to make five candies in five hours: the Cinnamon and Pistachio Bonbons,
Chocolate Caramel, Dipped Marzipan, Praliné, and Palets Or. The practical went well for me, overall. The Chocolate Caramel was the most difficult,
technically, and I nailed it. My white
chocolate shells are a bit too thick, but the dark chocolate ones are “perfect
for the exam,” as Chef Hervé pointed out.
The dipping on my Palets Or was too thick, too, but Chef really liked my
marzipans. Everything was consistently
sized, a major goal of mine for the lesson, so I was pretty excited about
that. I tried to paint a little design
into the molds for the pistachio bonbons, but a lot of the color stuck, so they
didn’t all turn out attractively…but my log-shaped Pralinés look really
nice. At the end of the five hours, I
had between 165 and 175 candies to take home.
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| My Pistachio Bonbons (left) and Pralines (right) It's a shame that my color didn't really work out for the pistachio ones. |
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| My Palets Or |
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| My Dipped Marzipans (left) and Chocolate Caramels (right) A+ for size and shape consistency! |
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| My little Praline logs (the tastiest kind!) |
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| What I presented for the practical. |
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| I left with SO many candies! Well over 100 of them. |
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| I inadvertently made my marzipans look like a little guy in a hat... Quinn named him "Marzi-man." |
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| From left: too thick, too thick, PERFECT! |
After the practical,
Chad picked Quinn and me up at school with the car because we were allowed to
take our chocolate showpieces home. The
car definitely helped…I’m not sure I could have walked the thing home. When it was safely on our counter (missing a
couple pieces from the ride), Chad was a great sport in helping me take photos
of it. It’s a good thing we did! This morning while we were still sleeping, the
direct sunlight found the showpiece and pretty well destroyed it. First it fell over, then the pieces facing
the sun caved in and drooped over. I’m
glad it happened – now it will be easier for me to melt it down and use the
chocolate for practice!
From Every Angle
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| The base really did look like granite! |
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| The leaves were really shiny, and had some texture from the veins I carved into the chocolate |
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| Missing a few pieces, with my bonbons on the base |
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| No, the photo isn't crooked...that's definitely the showpiece. See how the white chocolate piece in the front is getting floppy? THAT is why it was a joke when Chef suggested that I put it there. White chocolate is not very resistant to heat. |
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| From the back |
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| So many finger prints! Definitely one of the top things I need to improve for the next time. |
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| From the right side |
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| Now we can eat it! (Just kidding - I'm going to separate the dark from the white chocolate and melt it down to have it here for practicing) |
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| Whoops! |
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