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Post by Brad on Mar 18, 2006 13:18:16 GMT -5
Howdy All.
I have some non-deodorized cocoa butter that I've been using for fondue chocolate, and am now ready (albeit not that willing) to try some white chocolate.
I read somewhere that white chocolate made with non-deodorized CCB actually tastes pretty good and doesn't have the blandness typically associated with it.
Can anybody point me in the right direction with regard to a recipe?
Thanks.
Brad.
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Post by Alchemist on Mar 20, 2006 13:21:21 GMT -5
Brad, check the recipe section of Chocolate Alchemy. White chocolate is there. White Chocolate
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Post by chocdoc on Apr 4, 2006 22:06:07 GMT -5
I have made my first white chocolate.
I wanted to have a caramalized flavour, so I took 100g of sugar and caramelized it in a pot with a tsp or so of lemon juice. When it was a nice golden brown I poured it out on a sheet of parchment and let it cool. I broke it into chunks added it to 300g of white sugar and ground the mixture in my spice grinder to an icing sugar consistancy.
I poured 500g of melted cocoa butter in the stone grinder, gradually added the sugar, then added part of 425g of a mixture of whole milk powder and skim milk powder (I didn't have enough of whole milk powder). After I had added about 350g of the milk powder the mixture got really thick and threatened to shut down the grinder, so I turned it off, melted another 333g of cocoa butter and added it. This thinned things out nicely, so I added a few grams of crystalline vanilla and let it conch for a few hours.
I didn't want to leave the unit running overnight, so I poured it out into pyrex to cool. I heated it up again to continue the conching, and found it melted very quickly and rather unusually. The mixture was very thin, but as I heated it up to about 135 F it thickened considerably. I let it conch for another 5 hours today.
Tempering a small amount of it was a little unusual, it went from very thin to very thick at 24 degrees C, I heated it back up to 28 degrees C, then molded in 3 small bar molds.
It is very smooth, tastes fresh enough, however it tastes too much of cocoa butter.
I think in my next try I will add a higher percentage of caramelized sugar, and less cocoa butter. I'm not quite sure how I will deal with the thickening when I add the milk powder, perhaps heating a bit part way through and adding it over a longer period as the mixture seems to thin a bit over time.
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Post by Brad on Apr 5, 2006 1:17:33 GMT -5
Chocdoc;
Thanks for the demonstration. I noted in your description that you found your white chocolate to have a bit too much cocoa butter flavour...
This can easily be resolved by using deodorized cocoa butter. I have both (regular and deodorized) and I find that they are both valuable given certain uses of chocolate. I'm guessing if you use a combination of both, you will get a very nice balance without it being overpowering as you had observed.
BTW: John sells both.
Brad.
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Post by chocdoc on Apr 5, 2006 16:36:56 GMT -5
Brad, Thanks for the suggestion.
I do have some deodorized cocoa butter, but it's not so much the flavour of the cocoa butter I have a problem with, I think there was just too much cocoa butter relative to the other ingredients. It tastes the same as when I'm having a molding problem and I add extra cocoa butter to my white chocolate to make it more stable. Just a bit "fatty". I think what I'm going to do is melt the chocolate I have made and gradually add about 200 grams of milk powder, then conch until smooth.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
Kerry
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Post by patsyswine on Jul 12, 2010 12:15:22 GMT -5
No recipes, I'm afraid, but I need help. I am passionate about making truffles and desperately want to try white chocolate truffles, but I can't temper the chocolate, or get it to set properly. I have a tub of lecithin which I heard would, but don't know the quantity to use. Can anyone help? Thanks
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Post by cheebs on Jul 12, 2010 17:09:22 GMT -5
Lecithin certainly will not help your chocolate to set. If anything, it will make it more liquid. White chocolate needs to go a little lower than dark, usually the manufacturer will have published parameters for each chocolate. To be honest, I've never had any more problems tempering white chocolate than milk or dark. When table tempering, with white I work it on the marble until it's about the consistency of refried beans and then add it to my saved hot, untempered chocolate. If it doesn't fully melt out I'll give it 2-second blasts in the microwave until the temperature reaches 90-91, and keep stirring until the mix is homogeneous. I finally test temper with a knife tip to make sure it worked. If you're having trouble getting your white centers to set to the desired consistency I would suggest you either reduce the cream/liquid or add more chocolate. Tell you what: next white ganache we make here at the shop, I'll videotape the procedure for you. Should be sometime this week. That should be of a lot of help.
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Post by patsyswine on Jul 18, 2010 12:11:06 GMT -5
Thanks Cheebs. That is great. Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. To be honest, I didn't know you had replied, but I am very grateful. I don't know what it is about me and white chocolate. I seem to have mastered the other kinds but white chocolate just doesn't like me. With your kind help, maybe our relationship will change. ;D I will let you know if it does or doesn't work. If it doesn't I might give up, but I doubt it. Try, try TRY again. Isn't that what they say?
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Post by Brad on Jul 18, 2010 12:37:18 GMT -5
Patsy;
There's your trouble: 91 degrees is too high for white chocolate. What's most likely happening is that you are destroying too much of the "good" crystals when you try heating it that hot.
The best way to think of chocolate from a working standpoint, is that chocolate is a bunch of small solid particles (sugar, milk powder, vanilla, etc) all suspended in a specific kind of Fat. The fat has specific behavioral properties which allow it to do what you want. In a case where there is a lot of that fat (such as in dark chocolate) it is easier to get the results you need. However, in the case of milk chocolate, and even moresoe in white chocolate, that quantity of specific fat is less and more dispersed through the whole product. This means you need to be more precise with your technique, and ensure more of that specific fat crystalizes.
When tempering it, don't take your white chocolate any higher than 88, and I'm sure you do just fine.
As far as the lecithin in your truffle centers goes... well... All I can tell you is that we make 10's of thousands of truffles every month - some of which have white chocolate centers, and we NEVER use lecithin, simply because it plays no part in setting a ganache center.
Brad.
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dove
Neophyte
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Post by dove on Feb 27, 2013 14:56:36 GMT -5
Brad, check the recipe section of Chocolate Alchemy. White chocolate is there. White Chocolate Hello. That link isn't pointing to the white chocolate recipe anymore. I think this is a good link for the recipe: www.chocolatealchemy.com/recipes_Chocolate5.phpIt looks like the same link to me, but the "C" is capitalized in this one, so perhaps that makes a big difference. That was an old post, so I'm guessing the site has been rearranged since then. Anyways, I was hoping to get advice on how to make this recipe without any kind of machinery. I am just starting out and will be working with only regular kitchen equipment for now. Can someone please tell me the directions for doing this recipe the old-fashioned way (using the double boiler method)? Do I need to slowly melt the cocoa butter before adding the other ingredients or can I put everything together in the double boiler at the same time? What temperature (Fahrenheit) do I bring the mixture up to initially? What temperature do I cool it to? What temp do I bring it back up to for working conditions? I understand that you temper white chocolate just like dark or milk chocolate except that the temperature is a bit lower. Is this correct? Does using organic cacao butter change anything as far as temperature goes? I recall someone saying that the high-quality butter has a lower melting point. Is this usually true? How do I adapt for that? One degree lower than the normal temperature for cacao butter? Or should I just stick with the normal temps for now and see if I need to adjust it from there? Since my cacao butter is obviously untempered, I won't be able to use the seeding method, correct? Or can I seed/temper white chocolate using raw butter? Everything is from scratch here, so I don't have any "finished" white chocolate to use for a seed. I prefer to not do that, anyways. If I can't seed the chocolate, I planned on just melting the whole recipe and bringing it all down to the appropriate temp and then back up. Is that okay? I don't have a slab do the tabling method. I figured I could use the cold-water-bath method mentioned at The Chocolate Life (I think Brad was the one describing it). Is that appropriate for white chocolate, too? I have also seen where just a portion of the chocolate was taken out and put in a separate bowl to be cooled in an ice bath. The cooled chocolate was then added back to the other (essentially becoming a seed in that way?). It sounds easier to bring the whole recipe up to temp then back down and up again. Does it matter which way is done? Is one better than the other? ~~~ Would it be okay to adjust the amount of sugar in the recipe up or down, as needed? Or would that throw off the whole recipe? Also, if I wanted to use vanilla bean, about how many (6" beans) would I scrape and use in the recipe for a nice vanilla flavor (not too weak, nor too strong)? I assume a lot of that has to do with bean type and quality and also individual tastes, so I know my mileage may vary on that. I just wanted to get a general idea. Do I need to dehydrate the beans before scraping them because of the water content? At what point in the chocolate-making process would one add the beans? Would it be just before the tempering process started or would you infuse the beans in your cacao first for whatever length of time (12-24 hours?). How would you keep the butter liquified for something like a day while the beans infused? Could I put the bowl on something like an electric radiator? Like set the bowl in another container and put that on the heater? It's a very low heat. Does anyone think it would be appropriate, needed, or desirable to grind the dehydrated beans (just the innards--not the whole pod) into a powder and use that instead of the vanilla flecks? Would that give the recipe a more vanilla flavor? Thanks for any and all help. I apologize for having so many questions.
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dove
Neophyte
Posts: 4
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Post by dove on Mar 1, 2013 10:08:07 GMT -5
I'm guessing that the answer is the same that I received in the other thread where I posted about adding sugar to liquor? I assume that means that even making white chocolate without a machine is out of the question. ? I wonder how people are getting away with using honey to make white chocolate? Does anyone know why that works without seizing? I've come across a few white chocolate recipes and half of them contain honey. I'm almost afraid to experiment with them since organic cacao butter and raw honey is so expensive. These are a few of the recipes I've seen. The ones that don't use honey are making the chocolate (using sugar) without a grinder. Has anyone tried something like this? Some of the end products look okay but some of them are just wrong--lol; they seem very chalky and grainy. I'm sure that's alright for home-use, but it's not something I'd sell. They don't all look bad, though, so what gives? bittersweetblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/the-white-stuff/www.texanerin.com/2012/10/homemade-honey-sweetened-white-chocolate.htmlournourishingroots.com/honey-sweetened-white-chocolate-and-gaps-white-chocolate-chips/nourishedkitchen.com/white-chocolate-cranberry-bark/www.buzzle.com/articles/how-to-make-white-chocolate.htmlThat last one is calling for alcohol extracts, which again is something I thought I should avoid, and earlier in the instructions it says not to let water get in the bowl so they're obviously aware of the liquid factor. Does alcohol behave differently than water in chocolate? I'll just use vanilla bean when making chocolate, but I wonder why this is working when you're not supposed to use extracts. The recipes seem to work for all these people, so I'm not sure what to think.
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curt
Neophyte
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Post by curt on Jan 18, 2022 1:15:30 GMT -5
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