The truffle machine!

I know I’ve posted before about tempering couverture for coating (or enrobing) your truffles, but I finally got some pictures of the process to show what is happening.

This is picture of the temperer itself, the Hilliard Little Dipper. It was a gift from my wife one Christmas. It weighs a ton so I really have to wonder how she carried it into the house.

The temperer has a large bowl where the chocolate is melted. The bowl is heated by two lightbulbs underneath (remember the Easy Bake Oven?) and tunrs to heat it evenly. There’s a separator across the middle with plastic scrapers that keep the blocks of couverture out of the melted chocolate that accumulates in the front section.

That white wire going in from the left side is the thermocouple which helps to regulate the temperature. Like I said, heating is done with two lightbulbs (remember, the melted chocolate will get to only 120F at the very most), and cooling is done by shutting off the lights and turning on a fan that is mounted on the side.

It all runs automatically and all the user has to do is set the temperature. This one has mechanical dials which I prefer over the little push-button digital stuff, which break and wear out more easily.

You can also stop and start the bowl turning as well. Oddly enough, the temperature scale is pretty accurate. I use a thermometer along side it to verify but if you just used the temp dial you would probably be ok.

I started this with the standard truffle recipe,

but the one thing you might modify is the amount of cream. I always have a hard time judging how much to use. When you coat truffles, the couverture shinks as it crystallizes, and if it has alot of shrink (lots of cocoa butter), and there is excessive moisture in the centers, the shells cracks slighly and liquid oozes out. Not that it tastes bad, but it gives it a bad appearance. For this batch I used 3/4 cup of heavy whipping cream for each bag of chocolate.

To start off, I set the temperer temp to 110F and put the big blocks of couverture in the back section and let it spin until all of it melts. Its a pretty slow process so I went out for my 3 miler while it was melting (8:42 pace, sweet :) ). There’s a nice plastic lid for the temperer (not shown) that you should put over top while its running to keep toys and birds and stuff from falling in it while its running.

I usually like to cut the couverture with some cocoa butter to thin it out. At working temperature (~88F) it sometimes has a high viscosity and it gets tough to dip the centers in it.

You can buy it from lots of places. I’m not sure where I bought this from but I think it was from Caviar Assouline. This pic is the 6 pound tub from Valrhona and be aware when you buy the tub that it is solid at room temp (well, certainly below 93F), as you can see from the chunk of it sitting in front of the bucket. It has no real flavor and only a faint smell of cocoa. Its really nice for thinning out your chocolate because it won’t really alter the taste, just the texture. Don’t even think about adding vegetable shortening. Blech.

Even after saying all that, I forgot to add the cocoa butter. Duh. So the couverture was very thick and it had some lumps from pieces falling off the sides. I couldn’t add more cocoa butter later because then I would need to retemper it, although, as you’ll see, I needed to do that anyway and STILL forgot to add it. Geez.

After the couverture had melted, I turned the temp down to the lowest setting to cool it down and form my good form V cocoa butter crystals. When it gets to about 78F it will be very thick and lots of it will stick to the sides. At this point I turn it up to about 88F and let it warm up again. Then I test the temper by two methods. One way is to put some on a piece of foil and see what it looks like as it cools. The other is to just dip a center in it and see how it looks there.

Here’s some on the foil and you can see all the swirly lines on it indicating the temper is not good. And if you compare two truffles here, the one on the left has good temper and the one on the right is bad. Its kinda hard to see the stripes on the right one but they are there. Notice also the color is different. The way the cocoa butter crystallizes affects both the color and texture. The nice temper leaves a shiny smooth surface. Also, as the chocolate cools, you will see it change from the lighter brown color (like in the mixing bowl) to the darker color of the cold solid courveture.

So I had to reheat the couverture back up to about 100F, and then cool it down again to get a good temper on the chocolate. Then I could do the dipping. I use a long tined (sp?) dipping fork for this.

The fork looks a little funny in the pic but you can see it again here where I’m dipping it in the couverture.

I drop the center into the chocolate and push it down gently so that it gets covered. You kind have to be carful because the bowl is spinning and you don’t want the thing to get sucked down and lost in there. When you scoop it out, you need to kinda tap it on the surface of the chocolate to draw off the excess so it won’t have a big “foot”. The foot is the small base of coating on the bottom of the truffle.

Here you can see one with a nice small foot, and one with a big one that I tried to leave on there. There’s even a little swirl that says maybe the temper wasn’t so good when I did that one. Its a little tricky to get alot off without letting the centers (which were at room temp for this) squish into the fork tines. Since the couverture was too thick for this, the truffles ended up with kinda large feet and had lumpy tops.

Lastly, after they had hardened, I filled a plastic bag with couverture and put a #2 pastry frosting bag tip on it (you can get these cheapo pastry bag setups anywhere and all you want are the tips, not the bag), and used that to put stripes on the truffles.

Sorry for the bad pic on the striping process. It was hard to hold the bag and take the picture at the same time. Sometimes there will be a lump that blocks the tip and you have to get a toothpick to poke it out of there. DO NOT TRY TO SUCK IT OUT. That’s really rude, no matter how tempting it is.

Here’s what they look like when they are all done. All in all, it took about 3 hours of actual work to do this batch of 100. And hour to make the centers, and maybe 2 to dip and decorate them. Plus the setup time for the temperer (I don’t count the melting time because I was running. :) ).

This entry was posted on Friday, December 30th, 2005 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Chocolate Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.