[Mike Nolan]

I got started making the almond rocher last night, boil almond slivers in a sugar solution for 2 minutes then toast them in the oven until they caramelize.

They're delicious before I even add the chocolate! I'm making two small test batches, one with some milk chocolate and one with Ghiradelli chocolate coating (not a true milk chocolate, as it has palm kernel oil instead of cocoa butter.) I think the Ghiradelli coating tastes funny by itself, but I tried a taste of the leftovers in the bowl after making a small batch of 'haystacks' and it tasted pretty good.

[Mike Nolan]

Interesting, I wonder which date is right?

Proofreading is getting to be a lost art, even at the Trib.

[Mike Nolan]

Sometimes I wonder if recipes that call for a small amount of sugar are holdovers from the 50's, when active dry yeast still needed a boost.

Have you tried a teaspoon of vinegar in your 72 hour recipe? That helps break up the complex starches, which should make sugar less necessary.

[Mike Nolan]

I think it's hard these days to create a truly original recipe, and it'a always a lot of work to perfect a new recipe you're developing.

I'm not really into 'holiday' baking, which is often more about shape than taste or texture, so I won't be entering, but I will be interested to see the finalists.

[Mike Nolan]

It happens in professional kitchens, too. I was talking to a pastry chef who said he was working on a major event at a country club, making 100 cheesecakes. He had just started putting them in the ovens when he saw the big bowl of eggs sitting untouched.

So, he dumped the filling back into a big bowl, added the eggs, put everything back in the pie shells, and put them back in the oven. How'd they come out? He said "It was not my best work."

[Mike Nolan]

But you're supposed to believe the government reports telling you 'there is no inflation' and 'food prices are at their lowest point in years'.

[Mike Nolan]

Looks like a fruitcake to me, which might be a perfect analogy for most presidential elections, especially this one.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't have the varieties of chocolate and many of the other ingredients we used in class (like the yummy white-chocolate covered freeze-dried strawberries), but my chocolate tempering pot came this afternoon and I'm starting to plan for a chocolate session soon. I do plan to take photos. (I'll have a better camera, too, I didn't take my Canon T6I DSLR to Chicago, just the Nikon Coolpix, which fits in a shirt pocket.)

The real challenge may be scaling some of the ganache recipes down to a size I can make (and use) at home. (The good news is ganache keeps for about two weeks and can be reheated.)

I'm going to try to repair the bat and either make new legs for my spider or start from scratch and see if I can make a more realistic looking one.

[Mike Nolan]

It's not that I've deliberately stopped ordering from King Arthur Flour, but I haven't been on their website in weeks, and have no specific reason to go there. If/when I run out of white pastry flour, that's still the only place I can find it online. But I haven't baked a pie in months, what with my wife on a 20-carb diet.

I'm getting into photography so I've ordered a lot of photo gear online this year, and now I'm getting into chocolate, so I've ordered a bunch of chocolate gear (a tempering pot, molds, etc) online in the past week.

I did bake a Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake this week, though. I need to make white bread, so I'll probably make Vienna bread some time in the next few days. I make 3 loaves at a time from the Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty bread recipe, freeze 2, and usually wind up throwing away a third or so of each loaf after 8-10 days. But that means a batch lasts me 3-4 weeks.

[Mike Nolan]

My mother was a pretty good cook, she worked in a restaurant for a while so she was adept at all the 'short order cook' stuff. We ate a lot of hash and chop suey, because it was easy to make enough to feed 6 kids. She worked full-time from the time I was in 5th grade, but she could throw together a pretty good meal in a half hour.

My grandmother was even better, I can still smell her pressure-cooked ham. I don't know what she put in it, the closest I've come is to marinate the ham in Dr. Pepper. In a small town we did a lot of pot lucks, and my grandmother would bring a variety of casseroles, though I honestly don't know what they were any more.

Her rice pudding was creamy and my grandfather ate a bowl of it nearly every day. She didn't use a recipe, and I've never duplicated that taste and texture, a combination of rice and tapioca comes pretty close, but I'm fairly sure she didn't use tapioca.

I helped can a lot of pickles and tomatoes growing up, and a fair amount of apple jelly too. I don't do much canning these days, I'm more likely to freeze stuff, like tomato sauce.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got a lot more pictures to post, including several closeups of the buffet table. I brought one of the skulls (the smaller white one) home, along with one of the pumpkin candy dishes. My wife has them as her Halloween decorations at her office, everybody says, "Oh, what a nice plastic candy dish!", then they realize it's made of dark chocolate, spray painted with orange cocoa butter.

I think what you're thinking of as owls are bats. Here's a high-res photo of them:
(Right click on it to get the high-res version.)

I brought one of the bats home, but sadly the wings broke off in transit. I'm going to see if I can repair it next week when I've got some tempered chocolate to work with. The repairs won't be spray-painted black, though.

[Mike Nolan]

Sounds like the kitchen would be an interesting place to work, or just watch and listen. (Might help to be able to speak Italian, though.)

[Mike Nolan]

There won't be much about baking, this was a class about making chocolate candies, not baking with chocolate. I do have a few pictures of some of the fancy desserts we had at lunch that I'll post in part 3. I'm also going to talk a bit about spending a week eating in Chicago. (It's never been much of a 'fancy restaurant' town but it's well-know for 'good food'.)

I think nearly everyone who works at the Chocolate Academy has attended cooking school, most had a pretty solid work history in food service, too. So there's probably more cooking talent there than in several high-caliber restaurants combined. Since their primary mission is to develop recipes and convince restaurants, bakeries and chocolatiers to use their products, being able to speak to a chef on a professional level is highly desirable.

[Mike Nolan]

All flours will compact as they sit, and it is always a good idea to loosen it up before measuring flour. Weighing flour is always more accurate than dry measuring, but if a recipe doesn't give weights or doesn't say what it assumes a cup of flour weighs, you're going to have to figure it out by trial and error. That's why I take careful notes on any new recipes I try.

Things like sugar and salt that have a more defined crystal shape will not compact very much, so powdered sugar will compact more than granulated sugar.

[Mike Nolan]

It was an interesting 4 days, and I'm completely worn out. I'm going to drive out to visit my brother in NW Illinois tomorrow and will get home on Saturday, so the first report will probably not be until next week. I took a lot of pictures, most of which show details of specific techniques, but I have some good pictures of the various goodies we helped make and some of the pieces our instructor made while we watched or worked on other tasks.

The Chocolate Academy lab is incredible; they have a machine that cuts things like cake and chocolate with high pressure water. It costs over $100,000, but a large production bakery can probably make it back in cost savings (faster cutting and less waste) in a couple of years. We didn't get to use it, but we saw it in action several times by the other chefs on staff.

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