Month: October 2019

On October 11, 2019

In Sabbatical Life

Ta-da! My homemade Belgian dark chocolate truffles filled with a olive oil and sea salt ganache.

I’ve always loved making things. One of the things I want to focus on during my sabbatical is revisiting my love of making, of creating things for the fun of it.

Growing up, we had a book on our shelf called The Chocolate Lover’s Cook Book. One summer, once a week I selected a recipe from the book and my dad and I would make it together. We did this almost every Sunday that summer as a way to spend quality time together. One recipe was for a Chocolate Box dessert. It involved making a chocolate cake, cutting it into small squares, surrounding the squares of cake with squares of chocolates to make a box, and then filling the box with piped whipped cream and a cherry to finish. It was a very sophisticated dessert in my grade school mind, and I still remember that Sunday well, some 23 years later.

As an adult, artisan chocolate truffles are fascinating to me, and they definitely qualify as sophisticated. I received a box of Christopher Elbow chocolates as a gift a few years back, and I was awestruck. Each piece was like a tiny work of art – glossy, colorful, highly decorated. And they taste as good as they look – a crisp shell of smooth chocolate gives way to a deliciously flavorful soft filling in the center. I’m actually not the biggest chocolate person, but these fancy artisan truffles still tempt me.

Inspiration: gorgeous chocolates from Christopher Elbow
(photo courtesy of https://www.elbowchocolates.com/)

I’ve had some flavor combination ideas floating in my head for a while, and I wanted to learn to make my own artisan truffles. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made truffles before, the scooped and hand-rolled in cocoa powder/sprinkles version of “homemade truffles.” But I wanted to take it to the next level – the glossy colorful shell, soft filling, expensive chocolate version! But I was also intimidated. Thanks to shows like The Great British Baking Show (ugh isn’t this show the best?!) I know that chocolate – real chocolate – must be “tempered” in order to achieve that trademark shiny finish and snap found in fancy chocolatier shops. You can’t just melt chocolate and use it willy-nilly. I have learned this from experience.

When my dad and I made those chocolate boxes all those years ago, I was in charge of melting the chocolate in the microwave, and pouring it out onto a sheet of wax paper to let it cool before my dad scored and cut it into squares. One batch of chocolate squares came out strange – the chocolate was no longer shiny. It was dull and cloudy, and instead of snapping cleanly through with a knife when my dad cut it, it was too soft and the edges had a rough and powdery finish. I realized that I melted it too long in the microwave – it got too hot. This was my first experience with the science of tempering chocolate – I didn’t know it then, but what happened was that I had heated the chocolate out of temper. All the beta crystals, the ones responsible for the gloss and snap of finished chocolate, had been knocked out of alignment with the high heat. Boo.

Guittard couverture chocolate!
I chopped up this block to use for the tempered chocolate shells of my homemade truffles.

Since that fateful day as a kid making chocolate boxes, I have had a few dalliances in the chocolate making world. While I was in law school, cake pops showed up on the scene. Everyone was into cake pops, even Starbucks got in on the action (I think nowadays Starbucks is the only place that still gives a shit about cake pops). I got in on the trend, and made some festively decorated cake pops for special occasions. For these cake pops, I worked with compound chocolate – chocolate that has been processed with vegetable fats, and doesn’t contain the high cocoa butter content found in real chocolate. This makes it easy to work with, there is no need to temper the chocolate, just melt and go. The added oils helps achieve that glossy sheen with minimal fuss.

But compound chocolate doesn’t pack the same punch. It’s convenient and looks great, but the mouthfeel is lacking. It doesn’t melt in the mouth the way that real chocolate does. Real chocolate, the good kind, starts to dissolve instantly on the tongue. Moreover, the flavor is muted in compound chocolate. There is no richness, no nuance, no depth. There is no comparison between compound chocolate and high quality, real couverture chocolate.

Example of real couverture chocolate: Valrhona!
(Photo courtesy https://shop.kingarthurflour.com/items/valrhona-dark-chocolate)

For that real shit, you gotta break out the thermometer and get precise with it. To temper dark chocolate, you melt the chocolate to ~115F, then bring it down to ~82-84F in order for those crystals to re-align, then bring it back up to 88 – 90F (the “ideal” working temperature). Milk chocolate and white chocolate require slightly lower temperatures for tempering.

Tempering real chocolate is finnicky, but worth it.

This week, I decided to roll up my sleeves and finally make fancy homemade chocolate truffles, with real chocolate. I was gonna get over my tempering trepidation and make the thing! I hit up Spun Sugar in Berkeley to buy high quality couverture chocolate and pure 100% cocoa butter (to color and use for decoration). I purchased nice molds with fun shapes from Amazon, and went to Berkeley Bowl to get my supplies for the ganache filling.

For the flavor profile of my first handmade truffles, I was inspired by my favorite Salt & Straw Ice Cream flavor – Arbequina Olive Oil. The ice cream is rich and decadent, and the grassy and floral flavors of the olive oil shine through. It’s one of my favorite ice creams in the world.

Guittard semisweet chocolate and Halen Môn sea salt.

For my personal twist on this inspiration, I decided to make Belgian dark chocolate truffles filled with a olive oil and sea salt ganache. I used Cobrancosa olive oil which hails from Portugal. This olive oil has a complex flavor – grassy, creamy, herbaceous, with a strong peppery finish. It’s a robust olive oil that I felt would hold its own against chocolate. For the sea salt, I used Halen Môn sea salt from the Isle of Anglesey. It’s the fancy salt I have on hand, I got it from Trader Joe’s a while back. It’s beautifully flakey, not that it matters so much for the current application!

I made the olive oil and sea salt ganache first, to allow time for it to cool back to room temperature before piping into the truffles.

I heated the cream with some light muscovado sugar, and then poured it over the chocolate and sea salt. Once the chocolate and cream were fully incorporated into a smooth velvet, I slowly drizzled in the olive oil.

Leaving the ganache to sit and cool before scooping it into a piping bag, I turned next to the business of decoration.

Carefully heating small batches of cocoa butter and mixing it with fat soluble food coloring, I got my Jackson Pollock on. Splatter everywhere! For yesterday’s batch, my first batch, I used aqua and yellow. For today’s batch, my second batch, I used aqua and violet.

Fun splatter art with colored cocoa butter! Sadly this shade of violet didn’t translate great on dark chocolate, live and learn.

After my splatter art was set in the molds, I was ready to start tempering my chocolate.

Not gonna lie, I was nervous.

Yesterday, I used the classic double boiler method to melt down my chocolate. Today, I used the microwave method. Both days I used the seeding method to temper my chocolate.

To learn more about tempering methods, see this very informative video: https://youtu.be/z1dHYZgko_k

Melting chocolate in a double boiler is the classic method for a reason. It gives you a lot of control over your chocolate, and you can remove the bowl from heat as frequently as necessary to prevent overheating. The risk lies in the steam from the boiling water – if any water gets into your chocolate, the chocolate will seize up and be ruined. You also have to keep a close eye on it at all times, stir constantly, and do frequent temperature checks.

Chopped Guittard couverture chocolate, before I sat it over simmering water to melt.

Yesterday, I chopped up a pound of Guittard bittersweet couverture chocolate with a knife to melt in the double boiler. It tempered beautifully, and at 89F it was very fluid and easy to work with in the mold.

Today, I worked with a pound of Callebaut belgian 60/40 dark chocolate callets. I melted them in a silicone bowl in the microwave, and the callets were convenient to work with. I didn’t need to spend a lot of forearm strength to chop up the chocolate, and seeding with the callets was a breeze. However, I had a hard time melting it in the microwave and keeping the chocolate workable at 89F – it was much less fluid than yesterday’s Guittard chocolate.

I’m going to keep experimenting with both methods of tempering. Right now, I prefer the double boiler method, it was easier to melt the seeded chocolate and still keep the temperature below the danger zone of destroying crystals.

Tempered chocolate shells filled with my olive oil & sea salt ganache.

I poured a layer of tempered chocolate over my decorated molds, and after letting it set for a few moments, poured and scraped off the excess. Now I had some shells to work with! It was time to fill them with ganache. Using a piping bag, I filled the shells 3/4 full.

Then, after bringing the tempered chocolate back up to working temperature, I poured on another layer to seal the ganache into the centers of my truffles. Another scrape with my bench scraper, and they were ready to pop in the fridge for a final set!

Glossy truffles! Phew, I tempered my chocolate properly.

Because my chocolate was properly tempered, the truffles released from the molds easily, after a satisfying smack against my countertop. I heaved a sigh of relief! The truffles were gorgeously glossy, just like I intended!

Yesterday’s truffles had some QC issues. I hadn’t set the aqua and yellow colored cocoa butter correctly, so many of my truffles had bits of rough exposed chocolate from where the cocoa butter stuck to the mold and peeled off of the tempered chocolate.

Today, I made sure to set my violet and aqua colored cocoa butter carefully, so the batch came out pretty even! Practice makes ~~perfect~~ better.

Another improvement: today’s truffles have a much thinner shell. Yesterday, I wasn’t as careful with the pouring and scraping of my initial layer of tempered chocolate, which meant that the truffles had a thick shell of chocolate surrounding the ganache. This made for a more rustic quality, not bad, but not what I was aiming for. I wanted a thin layer of chocolate shell that cracks easily when one bites in, leading to an instant explosion of flavor from the ganache. Today’s truffles hit that mark! Woo!

Comparison shot! Yesterday’s truffles (L) have a much thicker shell, hence less ganache filling. Today’s truffles (R) have a nice thin shell and more tasty ganache filling!

On the downside, because today’s chocolate was less fluid and thus more difficult to work with, the bottom of today’s truffles are rough looking. Yesterdays’s truffles have a beautiful smooth cap of chocolate on the bottom, thanks to the high fluidity of the chocolate I was working with. Ah well. Can’t win them all.

How do they taste? Fantastic! The smooth thin shell of dark Belgian chocolate snaps satisfyingly between the teeth and begins to melt instantly as the ganache floods your mouth with flavor. The filling is still very chocolate-forward, but has a nice herbaceous earthiness thanks to the olive oil. The sea salt is not very prominent, I may have to tweak the proportions a bit for my next iteration!

Thanks for joining me for Part I of my chocolate truffle making adventure! For Part II, I will be exploring a different type of chocolate and different flavor filling, as well as a different decoration technique! I have some fun boxes and wrapping for my chocolates, so I am hoping to make up some truffle variety boxes for my friends and family as gifts.

We are attending an engagement party this weekend, and I am saving my most beautiful truffles to put in a box as a gift for the happy couple.

Will has also implored me to give away most of the chocolates I have made, because he says that otherwise he’ll end up eating them all. They are pretty damn tasty if I do say so myself.

Your first job, or your worst job…

Assignment for my creative writing class, see this post for context!

Day 9 - 10/3/19
Daily Writing Prompt: Your first job, your worst job, or…

Assignment:
First (or early) jobs make great fodder for both fiction and nonfiction. Our first work experiences take us out of our comfort zones, place us among coworkers for the first time, often with very different life experiences than our own. It's no wonder they prove so memorable.
Free-write about one of your formative experiences at a first job. Be as vivid and concrete in your details as possible, aiming to show us (rather than telling us) what it felt like to be thrust into this situation, doing this kind of work. Just follow a memory.

“Don’t cover the rice like that, the customers like seeing the food they’re being served!” my supervisor barked at me. Customers?! I thought to myself, looking around my college dining hall at the bedraggled 18 year olds, shuffling around in their sweatpants and flip-flops with their trays full of pizza. “I noticed that the rice was getting dry, so I covered it,” I explained to her calmly. I adjusted my UCSC Banana Slugs hat, which was the acceptable alternative to the health board’s required hairnet. “Do what I say!” my supervisor spat at me, before storming off in a huff.

This was the second time I had been chastised for using my brain on the job. I’d only been working in the dining hall for a week, and I was already bored senseless. Serving up food at the “Global Cuisine” station in my dining hall (“Global” my ass – it was basically a poor man’s Panda Express) was just a series of repetitive actions. Grab a plate, scoop up whatever slop we were serving that day, plop on the plate. Grab, scoop, plop. Grab, scoop, plop. One, two, three. Same, old, thing. Kill, me, now.

On my previous shift, she yelled at me for separating the beef and broccoli into two piles: beef on one side, broccoli on the other. It was the obvious innovative solution for students continually requesting that I add more beef or more broccoli to the scoop on their plate. Instead of digging through the lumpy brown sauce to find the requested adjustment, I could readily access more of the bovine protein or verdant fiber with minimal effort. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with the food, this looks terrible!” she yelled at me, while she stirred up my carefully sorted piles back into an indistinguishable stew.

I learned that I vastly preferred working in the back of the dining hall, washing dishes. Yes, it was disgusting work – students liked to fashion artistic sculptures with their leftovers, mashing together their sandwich crusts with leftover soda, and creating a spire decorated with errant pepperoni and carrots from the salad bar. I was then tasked with scraping these revolting renderings into the trash, spraying the plates down with the pressurized water sprayer, loading them into the crates, pushing the crates into the industrial washer and dryer, and then unloading the scalding hot plates, stacking them into the carts. First In Last Out, the first plate in was the last plate out in the stack, I would think to myself – FILO vs FIFO (“first in first out”), just like we learned in my Data Structures & Algorithms class.

The work was labor intensive, and I’d return to my dorm room stinking of the aerosolized ketchup and mustard that the pressurized water nozzle would spray back onto me, my fingers calloused from stacking plate after boiling-lava-hot plate. But at least we were left alone back there, me and Jason (my co-worker who was also, incidentally, my weed dealer). No supervisors came to yell at us or micromanage. We listened to Tool and Metallica, and talked about our lives while we scraped the plates, stacked the cups, untangled the forks. One, two, three.

Edible Memories

Day 8 - 10/02/19
Daily Writing Prompt: “Edible Memories”

Assignment:
Today I'm going to have you access your memories through memories of food. Its preparation. Its enjoyment--or the opposite. Serving it, or being served it. The choice is up to you. All of us have "edible memories."

My family makes jiaozi, chinese dumplings, together. When I was little, I would watch my parents make the jiaozi, just the two of them. My dad would soak the greens and then massage them with salt, grind the meat, and then mix up the filling. The entire kitchen would fill with the scent of garlic and white pepper. He would carefully mix the dough, combining flour and water, knead it, and then roll it into a long snake. Then, his trusty chef’s knife gleaming, he’d expertly slice the snake into uniform chunks before flattening them out with his palm, and then roll them out into perfect rounds with his rolling pin. My mother would then grab one of these dough disks, add a wad of the prepared filling, and then quickly fold and shape the dough into the perfect jiaozi shape. I would watch this whole procedure with wonder, eyes wide with anticipation and hunger.

As I got older, I was allowed to help my mom with the jiaozi wrapping. There were now two sets of chopsticks jutting out of the bowl of filling, one set for me, one set for my mom. I remember carefully cradling a round of the soft dough in my hands. After placing a ball of filling in the middle of my dough, my mom then directed me how to wrap a jiaozi. Make a taco fold, join the edges in the middle, and squeeze. Then, with a crimping motion, make the little folds on each side, fusing the dough edges together along the way. I quickly learned that selecting the right amount of filling from the bowl is an art in itself – grab too large a chunk of filling, and when you try to close the dough around it, it comes squishing out and prevents the dough from sealing. Too little, and the dumpling will look sadly deflated, like a mylar balloon half a month after the birthday celebration has ended. But when you scoop out just the right amount of filling the jiaozi looks plump and balanced, and rests happily upright.

Before long, we would have rows and rows of wrapped jiaozi, standing at attention like little dumpling soldiers. Half were destined for pan frying, half for boiling. All would end up in our waiting tummies. My brother would occasionally join us in the jiaozi wrapping. I have a particularly fond memory of the four of us making jiaozi together a few years ago, while listening to ABBA (a rare music choice that all four of us could agree on) and dancing around the kitchen.

Before that pet there was another

Day 7 - 10/01/19 
Daily Writing Prompt: “Before that pet there was another”

Assignment:
Use "Animals," by Miller Williams as your prompt. Think back to when things were different. There was an animal then. Use that animal, perhaps a pet, perhaps not, guide you back in time and shape your free write. As always, you may write nonfiction, fiction or poetry, depending on your mood and where your pen guides you.

Our first aquarium was kept in my bedroom, in our “old house” that we moved out of when I was still very young. Tim and I would stand with our noses pressed against it, our breath fogging up the glass. There were two goldfish in there. “Milk makes us grow up big and strong! Mom says so!” the four year old Tim says, as he dumps his glass into the tank. My dad comes in, his eyes widen in alarm when he sees the milky water.

———————————————————————-

Our outdoor fish was big. He lived in the pond in our backyard, which Tim and I had dug over spring break when I was in middle school, and my parents had finished with rubberized tarp, decorative stone, and a nice wood bridge. He had survived many winters, thanks to the pond de-icer. He seemed to thrive on a diet of bugs – especially the mosquito larvae that we continually battled against in the summertime. We would sit by the pond and talk to him, he paid us no mind at all.

———————————————————————-

My dad felt strongly that if we were to keep bunnies, they should be given as much freedom as possible, and not live a life of confinement in a cage. He built a hutch in the backyard, with a ramp, and an enclosure that gave them a wide roaming area in the dirt of our backyard. I litter-box trained our two floppy eared bunnies, by scooping their round pellets into the litter-box enough times that they learned that that corner was the one to do their business in. I don’t remember what we originally named them, but I do recall that I eventually re-named them “Beelzebub” and “Lucifer” – the freedom of free ranging had turned them feral. We spent all of our time frantically retrieving them from under various hiding places in our backyard. They had learned to dig under the fencing enclosure to escape, but would then hide in terror from all the birds, cats, and coyotes in the neighborhood. They were too dumb to realize the hutch and enclosure were for their safety.

———————————————————————-

“I’m coming by now, and I have a tiny creature with me,” Forrest texted me. We were going to meet Isaac for coffee and vegan pastries at Timeless, the morning after we had a band celebration for Forrest’s birthday. Forrest picked me up in his truck, and indeed there was a tiny black puppy nestled on a blanket in the passenger seat. She was so petite I could fit her neatly in my two cradled hands. “We heard something screaming when we were walking home on San Pablo after leaving Missouri Lounge,” Forrest explained. “She was wedged between a cooler and the wall, someone had abandoned her on the street in that cooler I think!” How could anyone be so cruel, I thought to myself, gazing down at the wriggling black critter, who was gnawing on her front paw. “She spent the night sleeping in Nick’s beard, and peed in it,” Forrest continued. “He thinks we should name her Sabbath.”

We meet Isaac in front of Timeless, and Sabbath is terrified of Isaac’s sturdy and large frame, cowering away from him. She’s clearly come from a traumatic background. She seems most comfortable nestled in my arms, or biting Forrest’s beard. She’s curious, and her tiny switch of a tail flicks in double time. I buy her a tiny collar at Pet’s Mart, fuchsia pink, to compliment her glossy black fur. We makeshift a leash out of rope, but she’s so small we think she is likely too young to safely walk around on the ground, for fear of parvo. We are astounded to learn from the vet staffing the adoption event at the Pet’s Mart that judging by the size of her teeth and paws, she’s likely around 12 weeks old! She must be malnourished to be so tiny. But at least we don’t have to worry about formula feeding her.

After some debate, we decide she is going home with Isaac – he’s the only one who has a lease that allows dogs. Sabbath is ours.

What I won’t remember

Day 6 - 9/28/19
Daily Writing Prompt: “What I won’t remember”

Assignment:
Inspiration is "Bullet In The Brain," by Tobias Wolff (https://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_27/section_1/artc2A.html)
Once you've finished reading, I want you to imagine that you're the person who was just held up at that bank. You just got shot. What don't you think about? What is your last memory? Following Wolff's example, be as concrete and vivid as you can. Give us images, and sensory detail. Show us the final scene that your mind conjures up in its last moments on earth.

As the bullet passed through her brain, Amanda did not remember any of the things she thought she would. And she had engaged in this thought experiment often, in line at the grocery store, waiting while her car was smogged, or laying awake at night in bed. It was a common game for her to imagine which of her seminal and consequential life memories would bubble up in that moment when her life “flashed before her eyes.”

Now that the moment of her death had arrived, with a literal bang, Amanda did not think of any of those life moments she had rehearsed. She did not remember her first love, Jimmy, or the way it had felt to fall in love for the first time, when she was too young and naive to be afraid of the inherent vulnerability it takes to love and be loved in return. Nor did she remember how shockingly painful it was to have her heart broken for the first time, the gnawing ache in her chest that she harbored for months on end.

She didn’t remember the first time she rode her bike on her own, the streamers on her pink schwinn flapping in the wind while her dad hooted and hollered in pride behind her. She didn’t remember peering into her baby brother’s bassinet for the first time, turning to her mother and exclaiming, “You have to be very careful, you know, he’s very little!”

This is what she remembered. Her cheeks prickling, red from the cold. A field of white. Her small frame crouching down, constricted by her winter layers, hat, snow pants, her mittens hanging down to the ground, held in place by yarn. Gazing in wonder at each individual snowflake as it landed on the mille-feuille. One snowflake, joining a thousand layers of other snowflakes. Each one unique, but indistinguishable in the crowd.

Exploding the moment