[Mike Nolan]

Chef Russ at chocolate school said it takes making about 100 of them for it to become effortless. (He would have them made and filled about as fast as he could talk about it.)

I spent two evenings practicing making parchment bags, enough to get the mechanics down but not enough to develop consistency or speed. I've made about a dozen of them since then, I probably need to practice some more. (I"m hoping to take Chocolate 2.0 some time in late 2017 or 2018, but I need to build up my skills and stamina first, losing some weight would help the latter.)

A trick I've seen online is to make a small tear through the layers at the top to 'lock' the shape of the bag. Folding the top down after it has been filled works well, too, and helps to keep things clean. (One thing Chef

We would store filled bags in a chocolate warmer so that they stayed tempered and didn't set.

We had large plastic piping bags available for things like piping large amounts of ganache into molds (since we were making about 16 dozen of everything), but when working with chocolate you often want smaller bags of a different type of chocolate or colored cocoa butter available for decoration or embellishments, and we had to make those ourselves, though they did have pre-cut triangles for us to use.

[Mike Nolan]

I recommend you look for 'langues de chat' recipes. (Yes, that means "cat's tongue".) That's basically what the cookie part of a Milano cookie is. I haven't found the right filling recipe yet, though. Next time I'm just going to try some tempered milk chocolate. (Or maybe a mix of milk and dark chocolate.)

When you say 'cut off a corner', it sounds like you were using a ziplock bag. I find it difficult to make precise shapes that way, the bag is clumsy to hold compared to a standard pastry bag. I went to the restaurant supply store and bought a roll of disposable pastry bags in two different sizes. I just looked online, a roll of a hundred Ateco 12" pastry bags is about $10, or a dime each.

Or you can do what I've been practicing since I went to chocolate school, make pastry bags out of parchment for less than a penny. It took me about a dozen tries to get the basics worked out, and I probably need to do a few dozen more to make it nearly effortless.

[Mike Nolan]

Looking at the Wikipedia guide on Good Eats, Season 1, Episode 13, "The Art of Darkness", is probably the episode where he talks about tempering chocolate.

I think I saw that episode in the list of programs on the Food Channel over the weekend, too.

[Mike Nolan]

There are quite a few pages on the web that talk about how to temper chocolate. I had read several of them before going to chocolate school, it isn't that we did things differently there, but the hands-on experience was worth the time and cost.

The biggest trick on tempering chocolate is to be able to control and measure the temperature fairly precisely. In school we used infrared thermometers to test the temperature of the chocolate as we stirred it.

The temperatures below are for dark chocolate. For milk chocolate subtract 2-3 degrees (C) and for white chocolate subtract 6-8 degrees.

You need to get the chocolate warm enough to melt out all the existing fat crystals (45-50 degrees C) then cool it to the point where it can form new crystals. The crystals you want have the highest melting point of the five crystal structures, so you want the chocolate in the 28-32 degree range. (There is a sixth crystal structure, but it generally only forms when chocolate sits for a very long time.)

If you have some tempered chocolate on hand, you can use that to 'seed' the right crystals by stirring it into your un-tempered melted chocolate. You need to add about 10% by weight to seed it properly.

Otherwise you need to let the chocolate cool, working it to develop crystals (we did this on a marble surface), then reheat it to melt the 'wrong' crystal structures, which have a lower melting point and stir it some more to get the right crystals to spread.

We used strips of parchment paper to test how well tempered our chocolate was. Dip a strip in the chocolate then set it on a second strip of parchment to cool. If it is well-tempered, you won't get any streaks in the cooled chocolate and it will have a 'snap' to it.

I bought a small chocolate pot after spending a week at chocolate school. It gives me fairly precise temperature controls over a range of 20-50 degrees (C).

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't have a loose bowl, but I've been told that putting a small piece of masking tape on the bowl helps lock it in without making it so firm you can't get it off.

[Mike Nolan]

when I have extra egg whites, I often make meringue cookies with mini chocolate chips in them.

[Mike Nolan]

I just posted both my recipe for mayonnaise and my recipe for Thousand Island salad dressing, which uses the mayonnaise recipe.

[Mike Nolan]

Earlier this week I made chicken breasts with mirepoix and sweet peppers, tonight I'm making pepper steak.

[Mike Nolan]

As far as I know, most bagged produce does not have a preservative in it. A good restaurant will wash it and spin it dry anyway, though.

[Mike Nolan]

I've been in the kitchen of some high volume restaurants, the lettuce comes out of the bag and is onto a plate in such a short amount of time that preservatives are not needed.

[Mike Nolan]

Salad bars are breeding grounds for all sort of food-borne illnesses and allergies. Too many salad bars don't keep warm foods hot enough or cold foods cold enough. Cross-contamination of foods at a salad bar is commonplace, so anyone with a gluten allergy (just to mention one) has to be very careful. I've been to far too many restaurants where the people stocking the salad bar know very little about what each item contains, many of them come straight out of a carton, jar or can. (One of our pet peeves is places that don't know that ranch dressing contains garlic.)

The reason garlic is considered 'healthy', as I wrote in my first blog post last spring, is that it slows down your digestion. That means you absorb less of the food and what you do absorb is broken down into things your body can handle better.

That's great unless, like my wife and perhaps another 2-3 % of the population, your body's reaction to garlic is to basically shut your digestive system down completely for several hours.

The FDA and USDA don't recognize garlic allergy as a food issue yet, but 30-40 years ago they didn't recognize gluten allergy issues, either, so there's still hope.

In many restaurants, they use jars of pre-minced garlic, which may contain preservatives. These days there are limitations on what preservatives can be used on salad bar items, but I suspect many restaurants make their own 'preservatives' that ignore those limitations.

[Mike Nolan]

I made an apple pie on Sunday morning and made popovers to go with supper before the Super Bowl.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I made boeuf bourguignon and Thousand Island salad dressing (starting by making my own mayonnaise).

[Mike Nolan]

Maybe it's like Velveeta or the Kraft jar cheeses, no refrigeration needed until it's opened.

[Mike Nolan]

Well, now I need to itemize mine:

KAF AP
KAF bread
GM unbleached
pastry flour
cake flour
White Lily Flour
bleached AP flour
whole wheat flour (freshly ground in my mill) from both hard red and soft red wheat berries
cracked wheat
wheat bran
vital gluten (seldom used these days)
semoina
sprouted wheat flour
rye flour
rye chops
corn meal
corn flour
cornstarch
potato flour
potato starch
sweet rice flour
brown rice flour
tapioca flour
barley flour
sorghum flour
millet flour
teff
garbanzo bean flour
arrowroot
almond flour
hazelnut flour
pecan meal
oat flour
oat bran
rolled oats
steel cut oats
buckwheat flour
soy
flax

Listing whole seeds would take some time, too.

And I may have missed a few.

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