Category: Sabbatical Life

I haven’t written in a while, and now that I’m dipping my toes back into the job search game, I want to take a break from writing yet another post about my chocolate making hobby to write a post to reflect a little on these last 4 months.

Today, I realized that I like the person I am now way more than the person I was 6 or 7 months ago.

When I was so constantly stressed and unhappy about my job, that irritation bled into every facet of my life. I was short tempered with my friends and my family. I was also extremely mean to myself. It was almost as if, because I felt constantly irritated by the feelings of inefficiency/ineffectiveness/insufficiency at work, I had no space to deal effectively with anything else, my relationships included. Every small thing just added to my constant irritation, and I would respond in an irritated manner. I snapped easily, things that weren’t in actuality a very big deal felt like a big deal and then I’d in turn respond as if they were a big deal. I remember feeling so frustrated with myself. I would berate myself for not handling a situation or interaction better, laying awake at night mentally self-flagellating because I didn’t deal with a situation the way I wanted to: with patience, and kindness towards both myself and the other party.

My therapist and I have talked about a coping strategy in the past. We colloquially refer to it as “the bubble.” Firstly, I work on mentally creating a little bit of space for myself, and work towards feeling good and grounded in that space. It’s almost as if there is a layer of space around me, not to keep others “out,” but rather to give myself room to just Be. With this layer of space, when someone else presents something to me (be it criticism, an emotionally difficult suggestion, or just perceived criticism/something else that I am triggered by, etc), rather than becoming immediately reactionary (for example, becoming instantly emotional and so swept up in that tornado of shit that I don’t realize what’s happening until I come back down), I have that key bit of space to interact and engage rather than just react.

It’s as if the other party presents the idea/criticism/suggestion to me on a piece of paper and just sticks it to the outside of my bubble, which is a good 2 feet in front of my face, instead of smacking me full-on the forehead with a post-it note. I can see the idea/criticism/suggestion more clearly because I have that metaphorical 2 feet of clarity, and I have the room to breathe, think, and consider.

This strategy works well for me, but during that time when I was still working at a job I was so unhappy in and feeling constantly anxious/stressed, I had to work SO HARD all the time to create that bubble for myself, and to fight to not immediately get into that reactionary place. It was exhausting.

Since taking this time off and being able to have the freedom to just Be, and to explore ideas, try new things, pursue my hobbies as much as I want without guilt, I have found that I have not had to work hard at all to create this bubble. In fact, I have this space to just exist, I have this bubble that I feel grounded and good in, without almost any concerted effort at all.

I am more patient, I no longer have to fight myself to stop from becoming reactionary and overly emotional with others. I feel calm. I feel good. It’s hard to describe in words, but I feel “dropped into myself.”

To explain a bit further, I have been doing a lot of self examination through the lens of a book I recently read.

I’ve been reading a lot of books during this sabbatical (one of the great luxuries of time off is the freedom to read as much as I want), and one of the books that has had a large impact on me is It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self by Hilary Jacobs Hendel.

Here’s an excerpt from the Amazon description of the book: “In It’s Not Always Depression, Jacobs Hendel shares a unique and pragmatic tool called the Change Triangle—a guide to carry you from a place of disconnection back to your true self… Accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), the method practiced by Jacobs Hendel and pioneered by Diana Fosha, PhD, teaches us to identify the defenses and inhibitory emotions (shame, guilt, and anxiety) that block core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement). Fully experiencing core emotions allows us to enter an openhearted state where we are calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear.”

The change triangle is a map to moving past our distress so we can spend more of our time in calmer, more vital states of being. The change triangle is grounded in the latest scientific research on emotions and the brain…

Ideally, we create a balance between our emotions and thoughts. We need to feel our feelings, but not so much that they overtake us, impair our functioning and ability to be productive. We need to think, but not so much that we ignore our deep and rice emotional lives, sacrificing vitality.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel

During my sabbatical, I have felt much more grounded in myself, and it has been much easier to drop into this openhearted state where I am the “7 C’s” that Jacobs Hendel describes (calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear). This is not to say that I don’t struggle and get emotional (I am a passionate and emotional person by nature). Introspection and self improvement is a constant journey that I am very much still in the midst of. However, I feel good about the way I have been handling difficult conversations and situations as of late. No late night mental self-flagellations necessary.

I like the person that I am now, and I hope I can continue and take this version of me forward into my next chapter in life.

Let’s go old school and bring marble into the chocolate tempering equation!

I’ve been brainstorming a series of tea flavored chocolate truffles! First up: earl grey. It’s a sophisticated tea, and I thought the bergamot flavor (flavour?) would go great with dark chocolate. Once I settled on making earl grey tea ganache, I had to decide what method of chocolate tempering I would use this round.

After experimenting with different tempering methods including seeding and sous vide, I wanted to try a more traditional and professional approach!

Have you ever been to a fancy artisan chocolate shop, and watched them pour melted chocolate onto a marble countertop and swirl it around? It’s a method of chocolate tempering called “tabling.”

See this video for details on “how to” table chocolate, but I briefly describe my experience below.

I melted dark belgian chocolate as per usual in a double boiler to ~115F. Then, I poured about 3/4ths of the melted chocolate onto a marble slab, and spread it out in an even layer with an offset spatula. Next, I took a pastry scraper and swirled the chocolate around slowly on the marble until it cooled to 82F.

Finally, I scraped this cooled chocolate back into the original bowl still containing some melted chocolate, and stirred to combine. Ideally, the chocolate ends up at ~88F, the correct “workable” temperature. If a bit under temperature, I warmed the whole lot briefly on the double boiler until it reached 88F. Then, after doing a quick sanity check with some baking parchment, the chocolate was ready to use!

I really enjoy this method of chocolate tempering. It’s very tactile, as you can feel the chocolate crystal structure changing on the marble as you work the melted chocolate atop it. I also found that it tempers chocolate beautifully. The chocolate sets very hard and crisp with a perfect glossy sheen. In my own personal experience, the tempered chocolate that results from tabling is far superior to my results with sous vide.

Additionally, since one works with only completely melted chocolate in this tabling method, there is no concern about errant bits of unmelted chocolate (as happens if one is not careful when using the seeding method). And it requires far less effort and stirring than the seeding method as well, saving one from forearm fatigue.

Any downsides? There are only two that come to mind.

One downside is having to obtain a marble/granite slab in the first place. It requires finding a slab that is “perfectly” smooth to work with (we have granite countertops but the granite has a lot of tiny crevices, which would trap chocolate and/or be less of a clean surface to work on). And obviously, marble is pricey. However, I found that a standard 16″x20″ marble pastry board works well as long as one is not working with too much chocolate at once. The cost of a marble pastry board is expensive, but not exorbitant. I looked at one at Sur La Table which was GORGEOUS, but decided to be frugal and get the no frills one from Cost Plus World Market for $40.

The other downside is having to clean the marble slab before and after chocolate work. Marble is, unsurprisingly, very heavy.

Overall? It’s worth it. I’ve since made 2 other batches of chocolate truffles with the marble tabling method, because I love the results so much.

AKA Let’s bring science and technology up in this bitch.

[For parts I and II of this series, see here and here!]

I swear this blog is not only about chocolate making. I am a bit behind in my writing in general, but given how enamored I am with my new hobby, it makes sense that my writing is a bit chocolate-centric for the time being.

Two weeks ago, I spent several days in a row entrenched in chocolate. I had a few items to make on my chocolate “to do” list, including chocolate frogs for a Harry Potter themed dinner party! Additionally, I wanted to experiment with a new method of chocolate tempering. Up to this point, I have been using a double boiler or microwave to melt my chocolate, and then the seeding method to temper it. It worked well, but was very labor intensive. Lots of stirring, and it was always a bit of a chore trying to get those last chunks of chocolate melted smooth once the temperature dropped closer to the desired 82-84F.

I already have an Anova sous vide that I use mostly for cooking 145F soft boiled eggs via Kenji López-Alt’s recipe, and the occasional steak. But while spending all that time furiously stirring chocolate and diligently measuring the temperature every few seconds, I found myself wondering if there was a way to use the precision temperature control of sous vide to make my chocolate tempering work easier.

I had my concerns though. As I mentioned in my first chocolate post, water is the enemy of chocolate. Just a few drops of water in melted chocolate can cause the entire batch to seize up and be ruined! Part of me kinda wrote off the idea of sous vide for chocolate, because of this.

Ridiculously, I didn’t do a google search for “tempering chocolate sous vide” right away. I just wondered about it idly in my head, and had a few brief conversations with Will and some friends where I pondered this question aloud. But after another afternoon spent battling a particularly viscous batch of chocolate back into temper via furious stirring like some of deranged witch at her cauldron, I finally looked around the internet for some answers in re: sous vide and chocolate.

Turns out: yep, you can totally temper chocolate via sous vide. RIGHT ON.

See the Serious Eats article I just linked for more details, but basically, after sealing dark chocolate in the vacuum sealed bag, you drop it in a water bath set to 115F to melt it, taking the bag out occasionally to massage the bag to help the chunks melt. Once melted, you adjust the sous vide down to 81F, and pour in some ice until it reaches that temperature. I double checked the sealed chocolate with my infrared thermometer (an excellent upgrade for chocolate work, much easier than having to clean a digital probe thermometer after every measurement) to ensure it reached this same temp to allow form V crystals to develop, before whacking the temperature up to 90F working temp (which also melts the other “non desirable” crystal structures down). During this whole process, I regularly massaged the bag to agitate the chocolate and hopefully help ensure even crystal formation.

The process was amazingly easy, and so NEAT AND TIDY. No melted chocolate covering bowls/spatulas/thermometers/etc during the initial melting process, everything was contained in the vacuum sealed bag. I was getting excited. SCIENCE TO THE RESCUE I thought! Sous vide was a game changer!

Once the chocolate was up to 90F working temp, I removed the bag from the water bath and dried it thoroughly. I snipped a corner off with scissors and basically had an awkward piping bag full of tempered chocolate ready to use! Again: so neat and tidy! I did a quick temper test on a strip of parchment, and it looked pretty good!

Unfortunately, that day was a bit of a scorcher here. It was nearly 80 degrees inside my house (we don’t have AC so if it’s hot outside, it gets hot inside), which wasn’t great for chocolate work. I noticed that my chocolate shell layer in the mold wasn’t setting at ambient room temperature, as per usual. It remained resolutely glossy and liquid, refusing to turn to satin and set. Was it the heat, or was it the sous vide methodology? A bit of both? I am still not quite sure what was to blame.

In order to get the chocolate set and ready for me to pipe in the ganache filling, I had to pop the mold in the fridge. That seemed to do the trick, and I proceeded to fill the shells with ganache. In the meantime, I was able to seal the remaining chocolate off in the bag, and throw it back into the 90F water bath to keep warm until I was ready to seal my truffles! It was amazing! I still reached in there to agitate the chocolate regularly (I’m not sure if agitation was still necessary at this stage, but I did it to be safe).

Once my truffles were done and set (which seemed to require longer in the fridge than normal, again I’m not sure if the unusual heat in my kitchen was to blame or if it I had done something off in my tempering process), I popped the truffles out of the mold. They looked great! So shiny!

But once I ate one, I noticed that the texture was off. The shells did not have the distinctive snap of tempered chocolate all the way through, they seemed a bit soft in spots. Nooooooo!

I will have to try sous vide tempering again now that the temperature has dropped back to “normal” in my house. I want to determine whether this subpar chocolate was a result of non-ideal ambient room temperature or my sous vide methodology.

Hopefully I can get a good result on my next attempt, because the benefits of tempering chocolate via sous vide are plentiful!

Pros of sous vide tempering:

• It’s so lovely to not have to spend so much time and energy stirring. #lazyaf
• Having the melted chocolate contained in a vacuum sealed bag for so much of the process is so neat and tidy!
• Way fewer bowls/spatulas/etc to wash!
• It was also great to be able to re-seal the remaining chocolate in the bag, and pop it back in the 90F water bath to keep it warm at usable temperature until I was ready to seal the truffles off. Super convenient.

Cons of sous vide tempering:

• Using single-use plastic vacuum-sealing bags to keep the water away from the chocolate is necessary for sous vide, but is kinda wasteful and bad for the environment.
• My hands turned prune-y from submerging them to retrieve the bag of chocolate to squeeze and agitate the chocolate every few minutes.
• Still TBD how much of this was to blame on ambient room temperature or user error on my part, but my truffles that used sous vide tempered chocolate did not turn out as snappy as my truffles that used chocolate tempered via the seeding method.

Stay tuned for my next post, in which I explore yet another method of chocolate tempering!

In the meantime, here’s some pictures of my other chocolate creations that I made the same week I was experimenting with sous vide:

AKA tempering white chocolate is a damn pain in the ass.

[For part I of this series, where I discuss my experience with tempering and working with dark chocolate, please see my previous post]

High off of my success from the previous two days of making Belgian dark chocolate truffles, I was excited for my next adventure: white chocolate!

I was especially excited for the decorating possibilities that the shiny, pristine canvas of white chocolate provides. As I mentioned in my previous post, my beautiful aqua and violet cocoa butter splatter art didn’t quite translate on dark chocolate the way I had hoped (the violet looked navy blue, and was barely perceptible on the dark chocolate).

I am aware that white chocolate is polarizing. Since there are no cocoa solids in white chocolate (just cocoa butter, sugar, and milk solids), many people eschew it entirely. “It’s not real chocolate!” cry the naysayers, shaking their fists in consternation. And I get it. It’s not. But I appreciate some nice high quality white chocolate every once in a while! I even appreciate some garbage white chocolate sometimes, remember those Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme candy bars? As a kid, I was willing to trade 3 Snickers for one of those bad boys come Halloween.

However, I was also hesitant. From my research, I already knew that white chocolate requires lower temperatures than dark chocolate when it comes to the tempering process. I already anticipated it would be more difficult to melt the seeding chocolate, and that fluidity would be an issue with the lower temperature of the working chocolate (I had some struggles with fluidity already, depending on which brand of chocolate I was tempering).

I was right to be hesitant. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, I had to make the ganache filling!

One of the reasons I chose to work with white chocolate for this iteration, aside from the decoration possibilities, was that it seemed the fitting compliment to the Japanese yuzu flavor ganache filling I wanted to try out! I love yuzu so much. It’s such a deliciously fresh and distinctive citrus flavor. One of my favorite beers is the Hitochino Nest Yuzu Lager, and anytime a restaurant is serving anything that involves yuzu, I am going to want to order it.

I scoured Berkeley Bowl for yuzu fruit, but didn’t really hope/expect to find any. Luckily, I found bottles of yuzu juice in the Japanese food products aisle! Score. I had hoped to be able to find an actual yuzu fruit in order to zest the peel for stronger flavor, but figured that I could use a nice organic grapefruit in a pinch. But I got lucky: when I went back to Berkeley Bowl on friday to purchase more cream, I saw an employee putting out a brand new product: dried organic “yuzu pieces” (upon reading the label, it was very close to what I was looking for: dried yuzu peel)!

My first try at yuzu ganache didn’t quite go as planned. I tasted the yuzu juice on its own, and it seemed pretty flavorful! However, it is a juice, and not a concentrate. The rule of thumb when it comes to ganache is a one to one cream to chocolate ratio, and you reduce the amount of cream accordingly to account for any added liquid flavorings in order to not fuck up the consistency of the ganache. For example, if you’re working with 4 oz of cream and 4 oz of chocolate and want to add 1 oz of liquor for flavoring, then you would reduce the amount of cream to 3 oz. Otherwise, the ganache may be too liquid-y! Hence, I started with 3 oz of cream, 4 oz of Guittard white chocolate chips, and 1 oz of yuzu juice. Tasting it, I couldn’t detect the yuzu flavor at all in this ratio! Dammit! I tried adding increasing amounts of dried yuzu zest in order to bump up the flavor, but in the end, I had to add more yuzu juice. Unfortunately, this meant my first my ganache was way too runny.

In another bad move, I also tried adding 1 tbsp of softened butter to my ganache. It can sometimes be a good idea (depending on the application of the ganache) as it imparts an even silkier mouthfeel. But in this case, it sort of made everything worse. I had insufficiently softened my butter so it required a shit ton of whisking to incorporate it. My first yuzu ganache was a runny sad mess. It wouldn’t set properly.

I had to do it again! This time, I went with 2 oz of cream, 2 oz of yuzu juice, and 4 oz of Guittard white chocolate. This ratio ended up working much better. I used approximately 2 teaspoons of dried yuzu zest. I omitted butter entirely. This time, the consistency was good, and the ganache set nicely at room temperature. The yuzu flavor was shining through the ganache, despite the intense sweetness of the white chocolate. I think it helped that I added a pinch of sea salt too!

Now it was time to decorate! On Thursday, I had experimented with a new decorating technique. I bought some orange colored edible luster dust from Spun Sugar, and tried brushing it on the insides of the polycarbonate mold before pouring in my tempered chocolate. I had watched someone do it on YouTube to great success. Sadly, it went horribly for me. When I released the chocolates from the mold, the shine of the tempered chocolate was mostly obscured, and instead of being shimmery, the luster dust just caused the chocolate to look dusty and rough! FML! Upon research, it looks like the general application of luster dust is to brush on after the chocolates come out of the mold. Whoops.

Not wanting to mess around, I decided to use the same splatter technique I employed the previous days, but with a twist! I melted down some more of the 100% pure cocoa butter, and added some orange and green fat soluble food color respectively. To the orange cocoa butter, I added a bit of the orange luster dust to mix in, just to try. The liquid cocoa butter shimmered impressively! But sadly, when I did a temper test of a few drops in the fridge, it was clear the shimmer was not very noticeable once the cocoa butter set. Oh well. I dipped a small pastry brush in the orange cocoa butter, and painted a stripe on one section of each mold. Once that was set, I took another pastry brush and splattered green cocoa butter over the mold.

Now it was time to temper the white chocolate! Hooooooo boy. I worked with Callebaut couverture white chocolate callets, from Belgium. I used the same double boiler method for tempering that I used on Wednesday, but with slightly lower temperatures. I melted the chocolate to 110F, then added my seed callets and stirred to bring down to 82 – 84F. My god, melting the white chocolate callets was a chore. My forearms were burning, it’s a good thing I do aerial silks and pole and have grip and forearm strength built up. I had read one article that said that the working temperature of white chocolate was 84F but I was skeptical. At that temperature, the white chocolate was far too viscous to work with, and many of the seed callets were just refusing to melt all the way, no matter how long I stirred.

I did some more research, and found this article, which said that I could bring the chocolate up to 87F as a workable temperature. I don’t know if the beta crystals are destroyed at the same temperature when it comes to white chocolate as dark chocolate, and my initial google searches did not yield any concrete answers aside from lower temperatures being necessary for reasons [vague hand-waving gesture]. But I knew I did not want to ruin the temper and start over again, after stirring that bowl of white chocolate for so long! 87F turned out to be a sufficient temperature to melt the last small chunks of callets in there, phew. But, it was a very delicate balance trying to keep the white chocolate at 87F! Stirring the bowl on the double boiler for 5 seconds at at time, then stirring the bowl on the counter, then returning it to the double boiler for 3 seconds, back and forth, all the while watching my thermometer like a hawk. So. Much. STIRRING. Poor Will, at one point he tried to talk to me when I was engaged in this stirring dance while I was waiting for the “temper test” of a tiny bit of chocolate setting in the fridge, and I snapped at him. Tempering chocolate was causing me to lose my temper (DAD JOKE). I apologized later 🙂

Once the temper test came out satisfactory, It was time to pour the still remarkably viscous white chocolate into the mold! Because the chocolate was still so thick, it was a bit of a pain to work with. 87F just doesn’t give you much of a window, it cools down so quickly! Luckily, after banging out the air bubbles and pouring out/scraping the excess, I was still left with some thin shells! NICE.

While these shells set, I scooped the cooled ganache into a piping bag. I also had to keep doing the stirring dance with the white chocolate on and off and back on again over the double boiler. After the amount of work I had put into tempering that batch, I was not about to let it cool completely and have to start over! No f-in way. I think this is why people generally suggest working with a larger amount of chocolate (like 2 lbs) – it will stay workable longer. I’ve been working with 1 lb at a time and it’s a right pain in the ass.

I piped the yuzu ganache into the set shells to about 3/4 full. Ideally, you want to give the ganache time to set in the shells as well. If it forms a bit of a skin, this helps to prevent the ganache from mixing in/splooging out when you pour more tempered chocolate on top of it to seal in/finish the truffles. I’ve had mixed results with putting the ganache filled shells in the fridge – I feel like it affects the cocoa butter decoration poorly, and leads to some cracking/separation of the decoration from the chocolate. To be safe with his batch, I skipped the fridge and let the ganache set in the shells for a bit at room temperature. However, since I was still doing the now loathsome task of keeping the tempered white chocolate at 87f over the double boiler, I was eager to finish these truffles. I didn’t want to stir any more! UGH.

Admittedly, I rushed a bit and poured the tempered white chocolate on too soon. While waiting for the white chocolate truffle bottoms to set, I noticed that there was some liquid pooling on a handful of the truffles – this was the ganache that had partially liquified and sneaked out. I took some extra tempered white chocolate and an offset spatula to seal the bottoms of these as well as I could, but as these wouldn’t stay fresh as long due to the ganache being exposed to the air, most of these leaking truffles were relegated to being eaten at home!

I let the truffles finish setting, and then turned them out onto some baking parchment. I’m not sure if it was the polycarbonate mold being new (I did season it with cocoa butter first), or the white chocolate being a diva, or what but I had a hell of a time turning these truffles out. Several stuck to the mold, and cracked when I finally released them. BOO.

But hurray! All the stirring was worth it: the white chocolate had tempered beautifully with glorious shine, and the painted and splattered design popped on the light backdrop! They looked great!

How do they taste? To be honest, with the additional white chocolate of the shells, the yuzu flavor is now almost completely overpowered! Noooooo. So sad. White chocolate is just so sweet and cloying that the delicate yuzu flavor of my ganache doesn’t hold up. While the ganache alone is wonderfully citrus-y, it’s hard to detect the citrus when the truffle is eaten as a whole. Sigh.

I think the next time I try this, I might try to find a yuzu concentrate. I think that the juice is too subtle, and the amount of juice it would require to punch up the flavor would render the ganache the wrong texture as it would basically omit all the cream.

Next, I picked the best looking, most structurally sound truffles from all my batches of truffles to put in gift boxes.

The cream of the crop were gifted to my friends Adam and Cassidy at their wedding engagement party yesterday!

I also brought along the imperfect truffles (still delicious) to share with the party guests. They seemed to be a hit, as the tupperware container was quickly empty!

Today, I took the leftover chilled ganache and divided it into little balls rolled in Guittard cocoa powder (for the olive oil and sea salt ganache) and matcha powder (in the case of the yuzu ganache) as additional rustic homemade truffles. They are also delicious, and it was honestly a nice break from tempering.

Truffle adventure complete! I’ve had a great time obsessing over chocolate making these last 5 days. I’m going to take a little break, but I’ve got another chocolate project up my sleeve for next week! Stay tuned.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

One of my sabbatical activities is finally exploring some creative writing projects. I signed up for an online writing class through Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, and today was my first day! In this class, we are given a daily writing prompt, and we are supposed to write 30 – 60 minutes each weekday, with the option to work in a small group to provide each other feedback and support.

I’ve always had ideas to write about, but let fear stop me from ever writing or fleshing those ideas out. Inspiration would come inconsistently, randomly, and always at inopportune moments. And if I did think about actually writing, I’d always tell myself, “My idea is not any good, there’s hundreds and thousands of people out there that could write about that same idea, and do a better job.” Fear of imperfection was the dictating force.

But I think the idea of writing for the sake of writing is refreshingly neutral – there is no “goal” aside from the act itself. I was especially heartened to read the instructor’s encouragement to the class: “Please try to set aside your FOQ (fear of quality) and silence your inner critic. Whether you’re a “good” or a “bad” writer is not only subjective but irrelevant to our purposes. No one in here will judge you, so try not to judge yourself. Your best writing will come from a place of fearlessness and exploration and joy, and I hope that in return this creative practice brings more joy into the rest of your life as well. ”

Frankly, my inner critic is loud as fuck, so this is gonna be a challenge. But hopefully with this being a daily exercise, the repetition will help me get over my fear.

Earlier this year I read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. In it, he describes a phenomenon he calls “The Resistance” – which, among other things, is the fear that keeps us from pursuing our dreams and doing “the thing” we want to do – the fear that we won’t do a good job. The fear that convinces us that it’s better to not even try.

“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”

Steven Pressfield

One of the ways the artist combats this Resistance is by showing up, every day, and doing the work. Doing “the thing.” To sit down and just write (in this case), every day.

My goal is to write every weekday, in the morning, for at least 20 minutes. Hopefully on some days when I am inspired I will write more. But with this specific and attainable goal of 20 minutes, fingers crossed that I can meet this goal even on days that my brain feels like it’s full of incoherent mush.

Another reason I started this blog was to have some sort of accountability for my daily writing, even if no one actually ends up reading this blog and the accountability is illusory. By sharing my writing, even some of the writings that I think suck or have no value, hopefully I can conquer my fear. I’ll be doing The Thing.

I’ve always been a little anxious when faced with blocks of free time. Growing up, I found comfort in the structure of a routine. I liked knowing “what’s next.” When not at work, I fill my free time with activities – classes in aerial/circus arts, playing in a Doom metal band, going on trips with my partner, scheduling meals and catch-up dates with friends, etc. But things are changing up a bit now, because…

Last week, I quit my job.

It was a circuitous path that led me here. Well, ok not so much circuitous as meandering. Ok … not so much meandering, as much as it was a frantic “do all the things omg you cannot be a failure” panic journey.

I could go into more detail about my career path thus far, and maybe I will in a later post. But in the meantime, I’ll give you the gist. I graduated from law school and received my license to practice law in CA in 2011. I briefly practiced law, sort of (most attorneys don’t consider document review real law practice), for a few years culminating in a 2 year contract working at Google. Unhappy as a lawyer, and with my contract soon ending, I had to come up with a plan. At Google, being surrounded by engineers (all of whom had employee provided health insurance and 401ks, neither of which I had, as a temp contractor) really made me think. I was approaching 30, and damn I really wanted those sweet, sweet benefits – medical, dental, vision, retirement savings, the whole 9 yards. I hadn’t seen a dentist in years, and I was living paycheck to paycheck – bay area rent plus my monthly student loan payments were making it nearly impossible to save anything. It seemed like these Google engineers were happy. And their teeth looked clean as hell. Lawyers, as you well know, are seldom happy – you may mistake them for being happy, but most likely they are drunk.

I decided to take the plunge to switch careers and become a software engineer – the job prospects seemed better, and analytical thinking is a transferrable skill I told myself. After a period of self study, I applied to and was accepted to a coding bootcamp, I worked myself harder than ever before, had a few emotional breakdowns along the way, and with some luck and perseverance, landed an associate engineer position at this cool new company called Slack. That was 4 years and 8 months ago. My feelings about my career at Slack are complicated, but mostly positive – I met some of my best friends there. But I was (and am still, very much so) grateful. I was finally able to have job stability, I got my teeth cleaned and cavities filled (hallelujah), I began saving for retirement. I did that Real Adulting™ shit. And after a few years of working super hard and taking minimal breaks because I felt like I had to prove myself, I was finally able to look up from that hamster wheel of survival and realize: I was tired. I was burned out. I needed a break. So, I decided (after some consternation) to take a break.

And now, here I am. I am faced with a field of unstructured free time. I honestly don’t know exactly “what’s next.” And I only feel a little anxious. I also feel excited. I’m also so grateful, because I know what an enormous (enormous!) privilege it is to have the luxury of free time. And I’m happy that you (whoever you are) are here to follow me on this journey.

Folks, this is sabbatical season.