Is there anyone here who doesn't consider themself to be a very good cook?

Do you think you can handle that anyway? Anything else that could be a source of questions later?

Trivia: The cacao tree's genome sequencing was completed in 2010, so improvements may be able to be made to future plantations of trees.
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Work well worth it, though!


That was kind of a mouthful---I can kind of go overboard with chemistry if nobody checks me. Any questions here?

And, the most important question---"If I mess up, is this still gonna taste good?" Yes. Yes it is. Just eat them over the next day or two instead of expecting them to keep all month. The difference between tempered chocolate and untempered chocolate---well, a Hershey's Kiss straight out of the wrapper when you bought it in an air conditioned store, compared with a Hershey's Kiss that you carried in your hip pocket all afternoon. Still tasty, but a little messy.

Kind of like with baking bread---if you're worried you're going to mess it up, just make it so it comes out of the oven right as dinner's served. No matter what you messed up, if it's warm out of the oven, it's going to taste good. If you want to give your work a critical analysis, then let it sit overnight and cut into it cold.

Trivia: Cacao trees are a tropical plant---they are not hardy below 59F . They need 2000mL of water annually, as well.
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So now let's actually temper some chocolate.

If you have a double boiler, put your chopped chocolate into the upper section and bring the water in the lower section to a low boil. Make sure your upper section has a lip so no steam infiltrates your chocolate. As the chocolate warms, stir it continually. Once it's melted, turn the heat off. You can let the chocolate continue to sit over the water so it stays melted.

I don't have a proper double boiler---I usually just put a metal bowl over a pan---but because I want to avoid getting my chocolate wet, I just used the microwave. (The oven would work too.) By a series of crazy random happenstances, I have a marble slab. So I figured I'd do this the old fashioned way, even though I don't have a digital thermometer.

But I was totally surprised, because as I was stirring my chopped chocolate, I realized I had done the seed crystal method without even realizing it. Lickety-split, I was ready to enrobe!





Start rolling your ganache spheres through the tempered chocolate. Set them on waxed paper to cool.



Trivia: Immediately after harvest, the cocoa pods (both the seeds and the white pulp) are left to ferment at the hands of natural ambient yeasts for up to a week to develop flavor. After fermentation, they are dried, and then sent to manufacturing plants. .

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Yeah, I spent a foolish number of hours chopping this stuff by hand. I have a food processor, but it wasn't strong enough, it just jammed. It almost would have been worth going to the store and buying a better one (but I didn't.) My choppin' arm is probably the stronger for it. less

Yeah, I spent a foolish number of hours chopping this stuff by hand. I have a food processor, but it wasn't strong enough, it just jammed. It almost would have been worth going to the store and buying a better one (but I didn't.) My choppin' arm is probably the stronger for it. less

Per square (inch? cm?) of root area?

Hm.

I neglected to write down a source for that, so let's strike it from the record.

I usually think of water in terms of acre-feet (Vaccinium macrocaropon, for example, need an inch per week as a rule of thumb)... hrmmmm...

I stand called out. less