August 31, 2010.
Truffles have been pretty much my favorite thing ever for a very long time. Today I found out that all this time, I’ve been eating them wrong. Apparently, you’re supposed to let the entire truffle melt in your mouth without biting or chewing. I can barely even fit a whole truffle in my mouth. I guess I can’t eat truffles anymore.
I almost had to punch an inanimate object this week. My group was making milk chocolate truffles, so we had to temper milk chocolate. To do that, we had to heat the chocolate between 113℉ and 122℉, cool it to 80-81℉, then heat it back up to 88℉. According to Chef Gronert, we couldn’t be a single degree off or the chocolate wouldn’t really be tempered. Also according to him, our thermometers are inaccurate; his bottom lip is the ultimate authority on judging temperature. I’m not so sure about that.
We’re all pretty new to the whole chocolate tempering thing, so it’s expected that we’ll make some mistakes. One of those mistakes was accidentally heating the chocolate to 90℉ as our end temperature. We had been told that if the chocolate was overheated even 1℉, we would need to re-temper it. FYI: That is not fun. We did not re-temper. We tested it on the back of a spoon and it set just fine, so we used it the way it was.
Once we tempered our chocolate, we had to roll our filled and sealed truffles in it. How did we do this? We covered our hands in chocolate and then rolled the truffles around in our hands. The result? Little chocolate dots all over my uniform. I looked like I had been misted with melted chocolate. I have no idea how it happened.
I’ve decided that I never want to see or taste chocolate again after today. Let’s see how long this lasts.
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