T.A.T

My friend Nicholas and I just finished our Chocolate Truffles and Treats course at the French Culinary Institute, and I’ve got to say we were a lot like Lucy and Ethel in that long ago episode set in the chocolate factory.  Though the class was largely lecture, by the time we got around to actually making truffles and rochets we were a total train wreck. 

The class started out innocently enough with us learning about the origins of chocolate, the best zones for growing it as well as the way that chocolate goes from being a giant seed pod on a tree, through fermentation, drying, roasting and ends up in it’s wonderful parts of cocoa butter and chocolate liquor.  It seems a very similar process to the way coffee comes into being, and I found it very interesting.  In fact, the production lesson reminded me quite a bit of when Brian and I went to Hershey, Pennsylvania a couple of years back and took the “Chocolate Ride” at Chocolate World…a rollercoaster adventure through the life of a cocoa bean.  Of course this class wasn’t so much like a ride, but the information was still quite good.

After the initial introduction into our friend the cocoa nib (the nugget of gold that’s left after the pod is processed), the instructor, Chef Thomas took us through the lengthy, and I mean lengthy way that one tempers chocolate.  I vaguely remembered going through this when I took my pastry course a couple of years ago and I had the same response to it today as I did then. The answer:  “no thank you”. 

I may be a patient person, quite patient in fact, but tempering chocolate is a very, very specific thing.  It’s all about staying within specific temperature ranges to form beta crystals that ultimately allow you to coat items such as nuts, fruits or other chocolate and get the beautiful perfect seal of chocolate-y goodness.  Temperature, Agitation and Time…T.A.T. as Nick was calling it, is the key to unlocking the secrets of tempered chocolate.  The first two I can do, but the Time part takes a special kind of person.

I think it’s wonderful to be given a gorgeous piece of perfect looking, perfectly tempered chocolate candy, but I am just not the man to do it.  Tempering for me falls into the same sort of tedious realm as programming or writing scripts for the computer…when more science than art begins to take over I have a tendency to mentally check out.

Luckily for me I had my friend Nicholas to keep me entertained.  It’s something he is very good at, and he makes a wonderful companion for really any occasion.  In a sense, he’s like the perfect bag to match your outfit.  Anyway, we didn’t do any tempering of our own today, we just watched the chef take us through the process and then let us get our hands dirty with the chocolate he had melted.

There is a large machine at the school chefs use to melt and keep chocolate at a specific temperature.  It was very cool looking and I kept being reminded of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.  There was a spout attached to one portion which melted chocolate kept pouring from.  Augustus Gloop would have saddled right up and put his mouth underneath to drink from it’s luscious fountain. 

Some of the chocolate was taken from the machine and “worked” on a marble countertop to cool and develop beta crystals. It was then added back to the vat ‘o chocolate machine, mixing in and slightly cooling the remaining melted chocolate.  Back and forth, heating and cooling, “working”, developing crystals on a molecular level, this process happened to get all the chocolate in the machine to exactly 89 degrees, perfectly tempered, so we could use it for our candies.  

The first thing we made was quite lovely.  It was a chocolate bowl we created with a balloon.  You dip the balloon in the bowl of tempered chocolate several times over the course of 5-7 minutes, letting each coating start to dry and lose it’s sheen before dipping once more.  Afterwards, the balloons were placed in the refrigerator to chill and set-up.  At the end of the class we popped the balloons and were left with little bowls to fill up with candies.

Over the course of the 4 hour class we made chocolate and orange flavored truffles, but the chef also prepared slivered almonds in a simple syrup (sugar and water cooked down), tossing and cooking them in the sugar until they took on a golden hue and the sugar made a crunchy coating on the outside of the nuts.  The almonds were then mixed with candied orange peel and then tossed in the tempered chocolate.  We pulled them out and made small mounds or “rocks” called rochets.  Additionally, we used whole almonds in a similar fashion and tossed them in regular confectioner's sugar in the end.

Nick and I really got into the production, getting chocolate all over the place and trying to go as fast as we could to get as many rochets done in the time we had.  Suddenly it seemed like we were in some sort of speed competition with the clock and everyone else in the room just trying to make as many as we could as fast as we could… as well as make them the best because that’s just the kind of guys we are.    Our chocolate kept cooling and we would get help from the chef’s assistants around the room to get it back to the right temperature…we mixed too much chocolate into the nuts and then had to hunt down more nuts to balance out the chocolate, and by the time we were done we had enough candies for a dinner party.   Plus, we were forced to eat one or two or ten or twelve pieces along the way, and fortunately for both of us we really hadn’t eaten all day so by the time we were done gorging ourselves we were nearly ill.  I know I shouldn’t spill such secrets, but we were kind of pigs.  Lucy and Ethel would have appreciated it.

Coincidentally, (though this may seem a side tangent), Jaques Torres is one of the bigwigs at the French Culinary Institute (where we were today), and is famous around the world for his chocolates.  Apparently he was the one who found the Willy Wonka chocolate spout machine while on a trip to Belgium.  Many of his other chocolate making machines and wonders can be seen at his store located at 350 Hudson St. at King St.. which is close to where I’m currently working.  Yesterday, as our “High Calorie Friday” treat (as my friend Jack and I like to call it) we went to the Jaques Torres store to get some pieces of chocolate and a mocha as a pick me up from the long week.  Jack and I had seen Chef Torres there once before and he even spoke to me briefly as I fluttered about star struck.  Yesterday, we saw him once more, but this time none other than Anthony Bourdain was interviewing Chef Torres for his show “No Reservations” on the Travel Channel. 

Well, I nearly lost my @#$#@#$t!!!  I love Anthony Bourdain, more than even my love for Jaques Torres.  He is the original “bad boy” of the kitchen world and wrote a fantastic book called Kitchen Confidential I absolutely loved.  It’s all about the seedy underbelly of the restaurant world and was also one of the first tomes to denounce celebrity chefdom…he really hates on Emeril quite a bit.  Anthony laughs somewhat about his book now because of the celebrity status he achieved in his own right, but he is such a hilarious guy and I love his show.  I couldn’t believe I got to see him in person.  God, I love New York.

Such a busy, busy week of chocolate it ended up being from not only my class but Jaques, Anthony and a naughty chocolate buttercream I made Wednesday night to accompany Randy’s cake for her niece Elizabeth’s birthday.  Valentine’s Day is only a week away, and I’m not sure how much more chocolate I can take.  I’m sensing a diabetic coma lurking around the corner, waiting to grab me by the ankles and pull me under into the dark.  I need to go home and just sit at a salt lick for a bit to refresh my palette.  Unfortunately I know me, and what will ultimately happen is the opening of my chocolate bowl of truffles, one whiff beckoning me to have another piece, just one more teeny tiny little piece because they are so damn good.  And will I give in?  Yes.  It’s just who I am.

The frozen Hudson River near the Tappan Zee Bridge