Seeing as our last Food Lab was last summer, have your intrepid Food Labbers been subsisting on nothing but carry out and boxed mac & cheese since then?
Fear not!
We've been cooking and eating together QUITE well and QUITE frequently, just not Labbing much, partially because we've all been suffering from a bit of topic-block. Given everything we've taken on since we first launched this crazy project in 2010, what remains?
I'll tell you what remains: CHOCOLATE
Mad Kitchen Scientist was the one who started the whole thing off, observing that "chocolate is something that WE do not know, and knowing about tempering and all such things is becoming something fashionable among foodies."
How did it take us more than ten years to take on chocolate? How did we not notice we hadn't taken on chocolate? That I do not know, and yet, here we are.
Will it surprise you to learn that our initial plan turned out to be a bit ambitious?
Our initial list included:
- Taste test various % cacao
- Make chocolate from cacao beans
- Differences between Dutch process & natural process cocoa powder
- Different methods of melting chocolate
- Fixing seized chocolate
- Tempering chocolate
Chef Spouse regularly makes me homemade truffles, and we were currently out, so we had our base already chosen for the tempered chocolate (my other idea was coconut and/or peanut butter Easter eggs, but I was overruled). Because the ganache base needs time to cool before it can be formed into truffles and dipped, Chef Spouse prepared it before everyone arrived. He favors alcohol as a flavoring agent, so we went with my two favorites: absinthe and añjeo tequila. (He used to use sweet liqueurs like Amaretto and Chambord, but we both realized they tend to be cloying.)
We had seen chocolate made by hand from cacao beans on a recent trip to Mexico, so Chef Spouse was eager to give it a shot and ordered 1 kg of organic cacao beans. They arrived fermented - the first processing step - but not roasted, so after tasting the pre-roasted beans (pleasantly fruity and bitter), we went on to roast about 10 oz. immediately following the simple 5 minutes at 400 - 5 minutes at 350 - 5 minutes at 325 - then 300 until done (~10 minutes) recommended pattern.
(I should point out that eating the fermented but not roasted beans can be a little dangerous - similar to eating raw eggs or meat, both of which you already know we do - so roasting not only allows you to remove the beans' husks, it also kills any pathogens on the beans. Anyway, we each tried a bean, we didn't chow down on handfuls. But do so at your own risk.)
Sooooo....getting the inner beans out of the husks turned out to be a bit of a production and put the whammy on most of the rest of our plans, including the plans to turn those beans into chocolate. We now each have a container of nibs waiting to be chocolatized in the hopefully near future. Fortunately, if you store them carefully, they have a pretty substantial shelf-life of up to two years.
However, while everyone else was fooling around with the hot beans, I decided to get onto the cocoa powder tests. I had done a bit of advance research at Serious Eats and Sally's Baking Addiction, where I learned that in addition to slight taste differences (Dutch process, to my taste buds, is more chocolatey, while natural is "brighter"), it comes down to acidity. Dutch process produces a neutral pH of 7, while natural process is more acidic, coming in at a pH of 6 or even 5.
Why does that matter?
Well, what are you making? If it's a baked good that depends on baking soda for its leavening, it may matter quite a bit, as alkaline baking soda requires an acid environment to be activated.
So I pulled out my mom's simple chocolate eggless cake recipe, which I remembered relying on baking soda, and got to work. I measured out all the dry ingredients into two bowls, one with natural and one with Dutch process cocoa powder.
Then I turned to the wet ingredients: canola oil, water, vanilla....damn it. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the recipe also includes a small amount of vinegar. FOR ACIDITY.
So much for that test. Both layers rose just fine.
So I said screw it, made some cherry icing, and turned them into a cake.
Meanwhile, the hullers were still at work.
Eventually, they finished and were able to return to the ganache and form the truffle centers.
At this point we broke for dinner: cacao-crusted hangar steaks and roasted cauliflower and steamed green beans with Mad Kitchen Scientist's take on a Cacao Picada Sauce
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Cacao Picada Sauce (loosely adapted from Saveur)3/4 c olive oil
8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1/2 c almonds
1 c fresh parsley
~3 T of dark chocolate (baking chocolate at least 60% cacao)
~2 T sherry
salt, freshly ground white & black pepper
Toast almonds. Simmer garlic in olive oil until just getting some golden color.
Put almonds, chocolate, parsley in food processor or blender. Process in chunky salsa. Add sherry and garlic & oil. Blend to desired consistency. Season with salt & peppers and adjust other flavors as desired.
After eating, it was on to the idea that started this whole thing: tempering chocolate and, more specifically, covering the truffles in the tempered chocolate.
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After diner, it was back to the truffles.
(Due to a promise to an old friend, I am forbidden from taking part in the making of truffles, so I was merely an observer at this point.)
So I asked Chef Spouse what he learned about working with tempered chocolate, and he replied that it gets hotter than you think it will faster than you think it will, it keeps rising in temperature longer than you think it will, it's harder to get it to working temperature than you would think it would be, it's harder to hold it at optimum working temperature that you would think it would be....and having three pairs of hands to dip the truffles was a MAJOR improvement over his usual solo process.
I'm sure that's all true, but the finished product is so delicious, who cares about your troubles, Chef Spouse? ;)
Drinks to accompany? A take on a Oaxacan old fashioned (reposado tequila, mezcal, agave nectar) that we tested with both mole and chocolate bitters, universally agreeing that the chocolate bitters win. (I think we should rename it a Mayan old fashioned.)
We never got to playing around with seized chocolate or the chocolate tasting or, of course, making chocolate by hand. As I said, overly ambitious.
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