Sweet Confections Part 2: How to Make All The Chocolate | Bake It Up a Notch with Erin McDowell

[Music] first things first let's talk about sugar sugar sugars trust us you're going to want to use the granulated sugar too in addition to just sugar we're going to be talking about candy and confections sorry [Laughter] we also have these special guys which are dipping forks or spoons these are specifically for dipping in chocolate and we'll talk about that a little more later [Music] [Music] all right we've done a lot of sugar cooking so let's dive in to chocolate which is really if i'm being honest my nemesis so i need you to help me get it right i'll help you okay let's do it okay so we got a few different chocolates to talk about here but first let's talk about dark chocolate so dark chocolate and semi-sweet chocolate are pretty much the same thing dark chocolate is going to contain cocoa butter cocoa liquor not booze but cocoa liquor which is the dark part of chocolate sugar emulsifier and occasionally vanilla dark chocolate needs to contain a minimum of 35 cocoa liquor which is surprisingly low yeah it also needs to contain either 50 to 100 of cocoa butter often when you see the percentage of your chocolate that can be a combination of your cocoa butter and your cocoa liquor oh that's really interesting i didn't know that and i think at the end of the day if a recipe calls for dark chocolate kind of anything in that spectrum right of absolutely is going to work in those recipes unless a recipe really calls for something specific you're not going to face a major mistake or be unable to do the recipe if your percentage of chocolate is a little bit different right for sure so it a lot of it does come down to personal preference when you're looking for something that's very very bitter a baking chocolate which tends to be a hundred percent cocoa liquor which is going to be all of the bitter parts of chocolate is very important but if you're making a chocolate chip cookie and you like your cookies a little bit sweeter go for something on the sweeter end of the spectrum and then if you're working with something that you really want to pump up that chocolate flavor you can go for something a little bit darker and i think with dipping and things like that making ganache you're not usually using unsweetened chocolate so in this episode we're mostly focusing on dark milk and white you know however you want to use them and milk chocolate then let's talk about how it's different than dark so milk chocolate will include some milk fat in there the remaining ingredients are essentially the same so your milk chocolate because it has milk fat will become a lot more viscous when you're working with it so if you're tempering the chocolate it'll be a little bit more difficult it will also temper at a much cooler temperature than your dark chocolate and even further so your white chocolate will temper even more cool so one of the things to remember when you're tempering chocolate is that the chocolate will temper right around the same temperature as your body so when you're checking that temper you want to check it accordingly going on down the scale so dark chocolate is right around body temperature milk chocolate even cooler and white chocolate the coolest so you're saying also this is kind of an easy way if you don't have a thermometer if you're not actually checking you can actually just stick your finger in and kind of based on your body heat if it feels a little bit warm you know it's it's going to be a little bit too hot and if it's starting to feel closer to your body temperature you might be nearing closer to temperature oh you do it on your wrist do it on the inside of your wrist so your fingers uh especially our fingers yeah i have no feeling in my fingers become quite desensitized over time so the best way to do it is in a stainless steel bowl that you check on the inside of your wrist the inside of your wrist is still going to be pretty accurate to a real temperature and going to represent a really good test so if it feels just about your body temperature or slightly cool to the inside of your wrist you're just about there awesome so white chocolate obviously doesn't have any cocoa liquor in it is that correct correct and definitely has a lot of that vanilla flavoring in there which i mean we love it you know people say like white chocolate it's not real chocolate it just it has its place guys like there's a lot of amazing times to use white chocolate and also so does dark chocolate so does milk chocolate then we also have these kind of fun extras in front of us well actually there's one more that isn't a total fun extra which i think is this one um which is a caramelized white chocolate we have a recipe for this on food 52 it was a genius recipe ages and ages ago it's so good where you can actually just caramelize white chocolate yourself at home in the oven and it's exactly what it sounds like it caramelizes the sugars that are inside and it is so good but then it still kind of melts and behaves like regular old chocolate so it's just kind of another option again for some complexity of flavor and a beautiful kind of caramel color that i love then we have these flavored chocolates over here that i'm obsessed with the main component is the cocoa butter correct yes so these are delicious chocolates that you can use that will act very similar to like a white chocolate they are pretty high in cocoa butter content and they have gorgeous flavors added to them like raspberry passion fruit and almond okay so now that we've learned a little bit about all the types of chocolate let's dive into tempering this is something i really struggle with and in school i used to have to ask evan to help me all the time and the thing is tempered chocolate what it does is it brings it to the right temperature and you're agitating it in a way that when the melted chocolate sets up it has that beautiful shine and that beautiful snap that's what we love so let's clear this out bring in some chocolate and start tempering [Music] before we dive into tempering let's define one more important chocolate term which is curvature cuvature chocolates are any chocolates that are exceptionally high in cocoa butter these are the best chocolates to use for tempering so your standard grocery store chocolate chip while delicious isn't going to be the easiest to temper they have a lot higher concentration of milk fat and emulsifiers that'll make it very very viscous it's really difficult to get the high quality finishes using non-cooperative chocolates so some examples of cuvette chocolates that are you can find online or in some of your um you know more specialty types of grocery stores valrona which is my favorite caliber um what else we have any other recommendations you could you could even use some lint chocolates if you're in a pinch they tend to get a little expensive because those bars are a little small but they do work out just fine and those are the ones you're going to be wanting to use anytime you're dipping or doing some of these things that really require that like nice snap and a nice thin coating which is like what we're going to do with some of our tempered chocolate today yes um okay so now that we know what koficher is we've got some chopped up chocolate and evan is gonna show us her tempering method now why don't you start and i'm gonna give a little disclaimer here so evan's method for tempering chocolate is really amazing um because it uses the microwave so it's a little bit less scary than trying to do it uh some of the other ways which we're also going to talk about a little bit seeding or tabling the reason i want to give a little bit of a disclaimer is because evan is doing it exactly how we were taught in school using a stainless steel bowl a stainless steel bowl in the microwave you might say whoa but actually this is completely fine as long as the bowl does not touch the sides of your microwave it needs to just be in the center there can't be any other tools any uh forks knives spoons anything else made of metal not a good idea to put in there but your classic stainless steel bowls are going to work really well if you're too scared to do this we completely understand just melt your chocolate about 90 of the way in the microwave as evan's going to show you in a ceramic or a microwave-safe glass bowl and then you're going to want to transfer it to a stainless steel bowl because that stainless steel is really important for the rest of the process cool okay additionally it's also very important to microwave your chocolate in short bursts chocolate does burn very easily in the microwave so you want to microwave it at about 30 seconds at a time no more and stir it or agitate it in between so that you're getting some of the melted parts back in with the unmelted parts and then you can move forward now that really brings us to kind of the concept of tempering too which is one really important thing about tempering is you need to start with tempered chocolate when you buy chocolate at the store it will come tempered when you start with temper chocolate it's a lot easier to maintain that temper so if you're using this method you want to make sure that you're starting with a well tempered chocolate so anything that you buy at the store will already be that way okay i'm already scared that i'm going to ruin it i'm going to let you take it back over because aaron is very scared of tempering chocolate but i'm really ready to temper up a notch we're we're done we're done we're done you did it i almost over did it maybe so now what we're going to do is we're going to keep stirring the temperature here put it to the inside of your wrist feel that it's warm to the inside of your wrist that warmth is going to continue to melt the chocolate what you're doing right now is you're melting the fat there's a few different fat crystals inside of the chocolate alpha and beta and right yeah and gamma but that's that's a whole nother thing sorry i forgot you gamma so there's a few different fat crystals inside of the chocolate and what you're doing is you're trying to get them to all be friends you want them to line up nice and neat like little soldiers all in a row and when they line up all in the row and they hold hands because the first one started and he was like hey everybody look like me and then they all line up and they hold hands and they all look like each other that's when we get snapped that's when you get shot and shine so what we're doing is we're agitating to promote the crystallization of that fat crystal this is the same thing we were talking about in sugar cooking which is um time temperature and agitation promotes crystallization yes exactly so now we're we're working the chocolate in that regard this chocolate in particular while it is cuveture is a little bit lower in cocoa butter content and so it's pretty viscous and this will probably be similar to what we can find at home which is great because this will really give you a good example of how to work with your chocolate at home and how thick it might be because again sometimes you watch these videos of incredible chocolatiers and candy makers and they pour the chocolate and it's just so thin and fluid that's a little bit different than what you're going to be working with with a lot of the kinds of chocolates that we can typically get at the grocery store but it's not going to make it any more difficult to produce the candy it's just a little bit of a different texture one of the other tips that i like to do and why i like to use a bowl like this a metal bowl a metal bowl will conduct heat really nicely and what you're trying to do when the chocolate is warm to your wrist is you're trying to pull heat out of the chocolate you can work on a stone surface like this or you can work on any surface really one of the things that i kind of do is i dance around a little bit and you kind of move your bowl to different areas of the counter where the counter is cold so put your hand on the counter and feel for those warm surfaces if the surface is warm scoot away and that will allow for the heat to kind of come out of the bowl a lot faster see that's what i was doing wrong this whole time i've never danced you gotta dance never done it now now i know like no one's watching i just added a piece a chunk of our seed here so seed being tempered chocolate this was from the store we chunked it up you'll notice that there's some scuff marks on the chocolate those scuffs are often called kisses and that's where the chocolate kind of kisses and scuffs against each other and it just leaves a little bit of a scratch mark on the chocolate my chocolate here in this bowl was a little on the warm side so i added a seed from this chopped chocolate bowl and i'm just gonna continue to stir this chocolate to make sure that any of those little soldiers line up in the correct shape all of that fat crystal lines up in the right shape that we want it to be in and one of the other methods that we learn about a lot and that you've probably seen some on the the interwebs is tabling and in tabling you agitate and help lower the temperature of the chocolate by putting it on a marble or or another kind of cool clean work surface it's usually marbled though um and you kind of just spread it back and forth and then return it to your bowl of melted chocolate and that combined cooling down of some of the chocolate and the agitation is going to do the same thing as what evan is doing however especially for people at home tabling is a pretty big mess so it is a lot of fun and it's it's very beautiful to watch but this method of just kind of melting the chocolate letting it melt slowly and adding more pieces if you need to is really really simple and kind of in just about five minutes usually evan can get the chocolate tempered and uh what the next batch we do i'm going to do it so that i can see if i mean you can do it i just get nervous guys but that's the whole thing what am i always telling everybody at home that you can absolutely do it and so i am starting this new year off by conquering my fear of tempering chocolate and after we have tempered chocolate what can we use it for we can use it for everything everything enough said so once you have tempered chocolate you can make beautiful ganaches butter ganaches are absolutely fantastic we're actually going to talk about that in our bite size episode so come back for that guys you can also use tempered chocolate to make chocolate cups so you can fill your chocolate cups with things like a soft caramel or with a peanut butter any sort of nut butter i mean fill it with any cookie butter then you can also use your tempered chocolate to dip strawberries fresh fruit our nougat or marzipan um lollipops it's great for decor i have a recipe on food 52 from years ago where i took a piece of parchment paper and spread a little tempered chocolate onto it and wrapped it around a cake and then peeled the paper away and there was this you know beautiful chocolate like kind of wall on the outside of the cake yeah it's really cool um and you know we talked about things like chocolate ruffles and and stuff like that so there's a lot of cool decor things you can do and of course using tempered chocolate for dipping other candies like our nougat our marzipan all of these things uh are great uses for tempered chocolate one of the things to remember with tempered chocolate is that whatever surface you put it on will be the finish of your chocolate so if you have a highly shiny surface like an acetate sheet or a well-polished chocolate mold you'll come away with something that's super shiny whereas if you put your chocolate onto the inside of a little foil cup the chocolate when you release it from the foil cup will mimic the surface of whatever it's against so even if you have well tempered chocolate if you put it on a surface that doesn't have a high shine you might not see that super high shine and when you've seen those beautiful shines before it often is because they're using some of these this kind of special molds or special things that really impart a high shine um but again shine does not equate to deliciousness and today that is what we are focusing on deliciousness and that snap because when chocolate isn't in temper it also can kind of be crumbly and we don't want crumbly caramel cups which is what we're going to be making with our tempered chocolate right now so i checked my temper i took the end of an offset spatula you could use a butter knife or a spoon anything of that nature you dip it into the chocolate and you let it set away from a draft away from the cold away from the heat just let it set with dark chocolate it'll take about two to five minutes for it to set you want to look for fully set chocolate so here i have a complete set chocolate there's no tackiness i'm not able to leave a fingerprint behind when i touch the chocolate i know that my chocolate is tempered and ready to work with i do also have one big seed still in here because i have that seed i want to make sure that i don't use it in anything else this would overseed my chocolate overseeded chocolate becomes very difficult to work with there are too many of all of those little fat soldiers lining up together and then all of a sudden your chocolate goes from this luscious liquid to like chocolate thick so quickly so i'm just gonna push that big old seed off to the side and then i can work with the rest of my liquid chocolate so i'm going to put it into a piping bag can i get an assist yes wonderful [Music] now that i have my chocolate in my pastry bag here some scissors for you thank you i'm going to cut a rather large tip we want to cut that straight across and we are going to fill these cups rather full because this chocolate is pretty viscous erin you can go ahead i'll do it while you do it great you can plop these out pretty soon this is the part i'm good at we're just going to go ahead and turn them over so we have our chocolate cup sitting on a wire rack on a parchment lined baking sheet and as evan's filling them i'm just going to turn them over this is going to help it run down the sides really evenly and also help the excess drain and this is really important like we said with thicker chocolate because with really really thin chocolate it will just kind of flow around when you're working with anything that's a little bit thicker and that would also go for milk chocolate and white chocolate this is going to be a lot easier method so we'll just flip it over and then we'll give it a little bit of a shake to help encourage all that chocolate to fall out and fall through the rack and honestly we were saying this yesterday the hardest part of this process is going to be washing this rack later like the chocolate part is actually the easy part and all the chocolate that runs through the rack can be reused it is well tempered chocolate so that you can continue to use it it'll firm up nicely and you can use it for anything else okay so let's check a couple of these that's looking good oh yeah cool looking good so all the excess chocolate has kind of flowed out and if for some reason your chocolate doesn't flow out it might mean that it was a little bit cool um you know starting to thicken up a little bit you can always coax it a little bit you can use the tip of your pastry bag to coax it up the walls you can use your fingertip anything that you want to just help make sure we've got an even coating now we need these to set before we try to put any filling in otherwise as a liquid filling especially like our caramel is just going to start to combine with the melted chocolate if we're not careful so we'll let them set and like you said it really only should take five minutes or so if the chocolate is in temper which is just enough time to put our caramel into a pastry bag and get ready to finish these cups [Music] seriously underrated modeling chocolate evan and i both think that modeling chocolate is seriously underrated and so we wanted to show you in this episode how to make modeling chocolate modeling chocolate is so easy it is only two ingredients melted chocolate not tempered not tempered so i extra like it and corn syrup once again corn syrup is our friend in in this uh recipe and what it does is it literally makes a chocolate that is malleable like play-doh like fondant or gum paste and it can be used for so many things and the one common thing that you might know modeling chocolate or has a very similar texture is um a certain i don't know if we can say the brand name though i'm realizing chewy chocolate candy yeah individually wrapped how you might find at halloween uh and they're inside a certain pop that a certain owl has asked some questions how many how many licks does it take to get to the center of a blank pop they're shaped like this yeah how you make modeling chocolate is literally just combining these two ingredients together we're gonna combine our melted chocolate and our corn syrup until no streaks remain and that the mixture is one of our favorite words in the pastry world homogenous so once the mixture is homogenous it's still going to be kind of chocolaty and um fluid and stuff it needs to set a little bit right i think it kind of looks like brownie batter that's good once it becomes a nice homogeneous brownie batter you're just going to turn it out onto a sheet of plastic wrap and let it kind of firm up it'll become much more malleable and pliable like the one that i have in my hands if it gets a little too firm you can give it a few zaps in the microwave just 10 seconds and then you'll find little pockets that are a little bit softer and you just want to knead it like bread dough until it all becomes homogenous and today we're going to use these to make a chewy chocolate center in a delicious hard candy lollipop and we're just going to use our lollipop molds that are safe for heat that we talked about in the equipment section and all we're going to do we've got our little sticks we're just gonna make little um rounds or you can even kind of try to make them the shape of your mold like a little heart heart-shaped this is a great activity to do with really young kids because it's a it's a food safe fun playing kind of activity the chocolate is completely edible at this point and is really quite delicious and you can make modeling chocolate with white chocolate and you can yeah and milk chocolate with all sorts of different types of chocolates it does act a little funny at times sometimes the modeling chocolate it is somewhat of an emulsion so sometimes uh some of the chocolates modeling chocolates that are made with white chocolate or milk chocolate will have some of the excess cocoa butter seep away all you need to do when that starts to happen when you see it starting to separate or break is you want to massage it to get that excess cocoa butter out and then you want to pat it dry you don't want to have a film of cocoa butter on the outside of your modeling chocolate you'll end up with cocoa butter chips inside of it and more importantly with this modeling chocolate once you've got it's great in confectionary use like this but it also is a really great way to smoothly decorate the outside of a cake sort of like fondant might be used but it tastes a lot better because it tastes like chocolate and also it's great for making different decorations like evan makes sometimes as decorations chocolate roses from the modeling chocolate so after we made little modeling chocolate centers for these pops we just did our same sugar cooking techniques cooking a sugar syrup to 310 which is what you want for hard candy and after it comes to the right temperature that's when we added the coloring and any flavoring we want to add in this case we added a little candy flavoring to make them taste extra sweet kind of merging our chocolate skills with our newfound sugar skills as well to make these really lovely y'all lummy lollipops lovely lollipops when we were little we used to call them poppy laps poppy loves so this kind of combines our new chocolate skills with our new sugar skills to make one delicious treat and this is just an example of some of the things that you can do with chocolate so i'm going to get all the different treats we made out here and let's make a spread and show you everything that we've learned in this episode [Music] thank you so much for joining me well us for this episode of bake it up after we talked about all things candy and confections as always all these recipes are available on food52.com and you can find the links in the video description below thank you so much to my bestie evan for coming and making me less scared of chocolate and showing us all the different ways that we can get creative in our home kitchens and make some yummy candy i can't wait to see what you guys do with some of these recipes so if you're making any of them if this episode inspires you please tag us tag me tag food52 and use bake it up a notch we would love to see what you're baking with that said i think it's time to eat some candy so i think i'm just gonna finish off by saying happy baking what are you gonna eat yes this one okay i'm gonna have a lollipop look how look how wonderful that is so cute cheers mine's easier to eat than yours [Music]

Channel: Food52

Views: 78,650

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, bake it up a notch, erin mcdowell, erin jeanne mcdowell, evan coben, how to temper chocolate, how to temper chocolate in the microwave, how to temper chocolate seeding method, chocolate seeding method, marble slab chocolate tempering, how to make modeling chocolate, homemade modeling chocolate, tempering chocolate method, easy modeling chocolate recipe, best modeling chocolate recipe, erin mcdowell chocolate

Id: 0TkzY1XOf2s

Length: 26min 3sec (1563 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 12 2022