Post by bigus on Apr 2, 2013 2:52:28 GMT -5
Hi All
I had a little choc making session over Easter and the aim was to replicate Damian Allsop's (an independant commercial UK choc maker) water ganache filled chocolates.
I purchased some Peruvian Criollo raw cacao powder, organic cacao butter and agave syrup. For extra flavour, I decided to crumble freeze dried fruit into the ganache when filling the chocs.
This was only my second time making my own chocs and I encountered 2 main issues.
The first was getting the "shell" right.. I found an article on the web that suggested filling the silicon mould and then tipping it up so that the chocolate runs out back into a pan. Mine wasn't runny enough so I ended up scooping it out with a spoon and then using a combination of my finger and the handle end of a small paint brush to spread the choc up the sides of the moulds. That was very fiddly and the result was very uneven and several chocs crumbled when eventually getting out of the mould.
Q1: I used a 1:1:1 ratio, i.e: 100g of each cacao powder, cacao butter and agave syrup. I'm thinking maybe I should increase the cacao butter ratio but don't want to use more than is necessary. What proportion of ingredients do you guys use? If you used a dry granulated sweetener such as coconut palm sugar, would that affect the ratio?
Q2: The resulting chocs tasted very nice but the chocolate was very intense in flavour and totally overpowered even the relatively strong flavour of freeze dried raspberries. The aforementioned Mr Allsop manages 70% filled chocolates that taste much more subtle and allow other flavours through. Is this down to the ratio of powder to butter or is it the type of cacao powder or are there other tricks?
Thanks
Bigus
I had a little choc making session over Easter and the aim was to replicate Damian Allsop's (an independant commercial UK choc maker) water ganache filled chocolates.
I purchased some Peruvian Criollo raw cacao powder, organic cacao butter and agave syrup. For extra flavour, I decided to crumble freeze dried fruit into the ganache when filling the chocs.
This was only my second time making my own chocs and I encountered 2 main issues.
The first was getting the "shell" right.. I found an article on the web that suggested filling the silicon mould and then tipping it up so that the chocolate runs out back into a pan. Mine wasn't runny enough so I ended up scooping it out with a spoon and then using a combination of my finger and the handle end of a small paint brush to spread the choc up the sides of the moulds. That was very fiddly and the result was very uneven and several chocs crumbled when eventually getting out of the mould.
Q1: I used a 1:1:1 ratio, i.e: 100g of each cacao powder, cacao butter and agave syrup. I'm thinking maybe I should increase the cacao butter ratio but don't want to use more than is necessary. What proportion of ingredients do you guys use? If you used a dry granulated sweetener such as coconut palm sugar, would that affect the ratio?
Q2: The resulting chocs tasted very nice but the chocolate was very intense in flavour and totally overpowered even the relatively strong flavour of freeze dried raspberries. The aforementioned Mr Allsop manages 70% filled chocolates that taste much more subtle and allow other flavours through. Is this down to the ratio of powder to butter or is it the type of cacao powder or are there other tricks?
Thanks
Bigus