Temperamental Chocolate

Welcome to Module 4 of culinary school!

Mod four is all about chocolate making and advanced cake decorating, with some fancy sugar-work mixed in.  It is my last in-class module (mod five is my externship- which I have thankfully secured!) and I am trying to savor it as best I can.  The fact that we have been working exclusively with chocolate for the past three weeks or so helps to appreciate the sweetness of the experience.

The first thing to know about chocolate work is how to temper it.  Well, really it's the second thing- how chocolate is made is actually both interesting and surprising but I will leave that to the experts.  Not tempering, though- I will attempt to explain that.

It is very important to temper chocolate (unless one is baking with it- then it doesn’t matter).  The word (in the culinary world) refers to slowly heating, then cooling the chocolate in order to ensure proper crystallization.  The result is smooth, shiny chocolate that has a nice snap when cooled.  Un-tempered chocolate is usually dull, streaky and sometimes even lumpy.  It melts in your hand (unless it has a candy coating!) and has an "off" texture.  If you have ever tried just melting chocolate down and making/dipping anything in it, you will understand the difference between that and properly tempered chocolate.  There are three methods for tempering chocolate, but they are technical and I wont describe them here.  There are exact temperatures and thermometers involved.  Gloves are often worn.  It’s pretty impressive and intimidating, take my word for it (if you don't want to take my word for it and want to learn more about tempering chocolate, read THIS article)..

Working with chocolate is extremely dirty work.  It is nearly impossible not to get splattered with it, or find that you have dipped your sleeve in a bowl of it, or find that there are crumbs of it near your mouth. I have hit that trifecta many times.  Luckily for people like me, plastic aprons are provided, ensuring that in the very least one's torso remains clear of brown stains.   These aprons are reminiscent of the plastic lobster bibs that I often see on Red-Lobster commercials.  I am usually the first in the class to don a plastic apron, and I can be found at the beginning of every class routing through the day's equipment pull to find my prize.

So far we have made dipped delights, butternut crunch, rolled truffles and molded chocolates.  To round out our chocolate module and to Wow our loved ones, we made chocolate showpieces.

Have you even seen a Food Network Challenge, where participants are expected to create a showpiece from start to finish, five feet high, and then move it across a field, through a moat and up a mountain?  You must have missed that one.

We were given three or four classes to complete our sculpture, a modest 18 inches high, and were told to move them to the conference room down the hall.  I feel confident in telling you that the two experiences, that of the one on Food Network and my own, are parallel in ever way but one:  We worked with a partner. Note that when attempting to make your own chocolate sculpture, only use tempered chocolate, otherwise there will be disastrous results.

The piece I worked on with my partner had a vines and leaf theme.  Sadly for me, it was another group who created a rising phoenix (can't make this stuff up). Why didn’t I think of that first?

Impressively yours,

Sarah, the chocolate splattered Apron Queen