Another day another chocolate, today continued Andrey Duboviks chocolate course. We made 8 more chocolates today with 4 different fillings, strawberry tomato, hazelnut orange, macadamia, and kalamansi caramel. Kalamansi is a type of citrus fruit, closest to a sour orange. We started by making all of the different designs using similar techniques to yesterday and some new ones. One of the new techniques we used was with water. We did two different techniques, one with steam and one with a rain shower effect.
We also used the silicon stamp that was created yesterday. Unfortunately due to the cold english weather it did not set as hard as needed so we did end up using one he had created at home. Silicon does not respond well to cold weather so the english cold really set us back. After all the designs were done we works on making the shells and then the fillings.
We tempered some of the fillings on marble shown in the left photo, this helps with some ganaches set faster. Its not always necessary but can be helpful with gianduja fillings (chocolate nut fillings). We also made some crispy inserts for the strawberry tomato filling and the hazelnut orange, both were delicious. Speaking of the strawberry tomato filling, we created tomato water by letting puréed tomatoes sit in a seive with a cheese cloth over night. The water that drips out was then used in the filling to add an aroma of tomato. Chef Andrey based this recipe on a cocktail he once had that blended tomatoes, strawberry, and tarragon.
In the right photo above you can see all the cocoa butter clouding the sky as he sprayed the chocolate. We had to open the door to the shop to get some air movement and to not get choked out by cocoa butter. Another technique he used today was mixing a little bit of milk chocolate with the white chocolate to create a swirled shell (shown in the top left photo).
Finally we capped off the chocolate bonbons from yesterday, Andrey piped tempered chocolate on top of the bonbons and then scraped them in a swift motion to quickly cap them. Tomorrow we have four more chocolate bonbons to make and we have to cap off the eight from today. Hopefully by the end of the day we will have them all popped out and get to start tasting!
It all looks so amazing.