Chocolate...chocolate...chocolate...

Okay, stop hey guys Salut! This is Alex. So today I want to make my own chocolate bar. They look beautiful

They look very graphical and also they make great gifts. They look graphical?

I'm definitely weird! Of course making my own chocolate bar should be pretty easy

This is baking chocolate basic but... Reliable. I'm gonna melt it and hopefully I should come up with a beautiful chocolate bar

-sighs- This is so wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to start!

Soft - background music

I've got a soft texture. There's no sheen on this. It's melting very rapidly in my hands

And then of course there is this

Funny bending situation. Okay, that's

It's not super appetizing to be honest, I'm still gonna give it a try just for science

Of course for science. It's waxy ??? Greasy, sticky. Very soft to the bite..

Yeah, so not SUPER pleasent

But to be honest this was expected since I wanted to prove my point using this alpha or gamma crystallized form

-Chuckles-

Theory

Chocolate I mean the great chocolate we know is one of the crystallized form of cocoa butter.

Indeed, cocoa butter is polymorph. The molecule is inside, the fat molecules also called

triglyceride can arrange in many different ways

six, in fact.

Well, don't worry, it's just for showing up that I'm using... Each of those a crystallized form has its own specific

melting point. Different tasting characteristics as well. Like for example, the first two they are too soft crumbly

They almost grainy and they have visible traces of Blume. 3 and 4, they are a bit better in the sense that they are a bit

firmer, but they are lacking the audible snap

so particular to chocolate and also the sheen that is so beautiful on the surface of chocolate and that's why we favor

number 5 which has all those tasty characteristics unlike Beta #1

which is also very firm but melts way too slowly. So I know it all sounds very

theoretical at the moment, but I've got a super practical example

In fact, you remember that time when you left

you know that chocolate bar in the sun to melt? Put it back in the fridge and everything is gonna be back to normal!

Life is gonna be great again, and then you tasted it then...

life sucked!

At that moment you experienced what was the taste of a crystallized form number #1, #2 or maybe #3 ?

That's why we need to go for a form number five, which is great but can only be made through a specific process called...

Tempering. And that's exactly what we're gonna do right now

I've got a bit of a situation here, since I wanted to make you a double boiler or a... Ohh );

I guess it's a pretty accurate representation of life. Not exactly what you expected. But uh should be fine

50 degrees Celsius is the temperature I'm aiming at. OK, so everything is clean

Hold on a second

Ouaisss! (Yeah!)

30 degrees

50 degrees

70 degrees

hm... 45 degrees.. ah man! It's getting cold

So to temper chocolate you've got a few options but all of them have to do with time

temperature and movement. The one I'm gonna use right now is the most classic one. It's like the O.G.

chocolate tempering technique. You're supposed to pour the hot chocolate on a marble

marble marble

You know what spoiler alert, I don't think that marble...marble is so important. I think like stainless steel should be just fine

and yet this is the first time I'm

tempering chocolate so so so I'm scared as ...

I feel very alone at the moment

I'm gonna pour it on the table

and start moving with those new tools of the trade of a proper

french patissier. A chinese cleaver and a BBQ.. you just want to put 2/3 that beautiful

melted liquid

A quick temperature check: 36. I'm trying to bring it down to 28 degrees Celsius

28.5... okay time to put it back in the bowl along with the initial third.

I am now at 33 degrees Celsius, which is

exactly what I wanted to achieve

I'm also surprised about this to be honest. That temperature curve is responsible for bringing the cocoa butter into the perfect

crystallized form. I should be pouring this into a mold. Perhaps the most precious tip of this whole adventure

is to make the molds in advance

So that's basically how you're supposed to temper chocolate:

by tabling it. The whole table is a mess at the moment

but at least there's nothing left to do apart from leaving this to cool at room

temperature, so super slow until it completely sets.

So this one is fairly easy for me as I'm a big user

Of audible in the first place now to be honest, like the very core principle of an audiobook just fits my lifestyle very well

I'm always on the move. I've been having a lot recently

I'm always cooking or doing the groceries and just

Knowing that I can put those dead times to good uses is great

So the book I'm listening to at the moment is called The Obstacle is the way by an Ryan Holiday

and it's a practical introduction to stoicism and also how to

Turn difficulties or obstacles into opportunities

if you go to audible.com slash French Guy Cooking you can get three months of audible for

695 a month ok back to chocolate

OK back to chocolate

Right. So after cooling the whole thing down. This is my batch number to the one I made

ah merde.. ah, I've definitely got a better shine especially on the side that was exposed to

aluminium, I'm now gonna give it a snap and see if I can hear something

It's better, not perfect. It's not bendy anymore.

So definitely firmer to the bite, not grainy, which is good

It's not bad! However,

I feel like the tabling

process or method just allows too much room for error. Now of course, I'm not saying that the tabling method doesn't work

I'm just saying that it, you know it's just easy to mess up and and it's extremely messy on top of that. Luckily for us

I mentioned there are plenty ways you could temper chocolate and one of them is allegedly super simple

But I wanted to show you the classic first

It's called the seeding method and it basically puts to good use a property of crystals

Crystallization tends to happen following any

pattern already in place

Which means that in that puddle of hot melted chocolate if we were to introduce some stable beta crystals

then the rest of the mass would basically follow the

pattern we just introduced so they would become a beta crystals as well

themselves

themselves as well

You get the point?

Rights I've got 75% of my chocolate melting at the moment, but I kept

25% on the side. I'm gonna use them to seed this part

I just have to cool things down a bit more rapidly. I've switched to a bowl of just, you know, reasonably cold water

33

You can definitely feel that the the mixture is getting thicker and thicker as we're getting closer to

32 or 31 degrees Celsius. Yeah, I'm gonna perform a test if you did your job correctly, that should set within a few minutes

You see it's only been like three or four minutes and it's not sticky anymore, which means

Yes!

Okay!

Of course I definitely gonna improve this in the future, but for now, this will do

Because I had some tempered chocolate leftovers

I also spread some super thin on this parchment paper just to see if I get any result this way as well

So I think this chocolate is fully set

Probably a bit thick, smooth, not grainy at all. I managed to get down to the

crystallized form of cocoa butter molecules that I wanted.

I managed to do it

Ouaiss !!

Now of course with the success come a few challenges otherwise it would be too simple

Let's show if you can catch them but they got a few bubbles inside. The taste is not amazing.

I know why

I know why.. Of course, I know it. I've been neglecting the commodity the raw material I've been using so far

This is just baking chocolate. Have you ever tasted baking chocolate?

It's not great. I strongly suspect my problems to be all connected

The fluidity in chocolate is related to the percentage of cocoa butter inside and basically the better the chocolate be higher

Those percentages are and of course with a greater fluidity

You've got less bubble since they can come up to the surface and just pop instead of just being trapped inside

while the chocolate is setting so I need to get my hands on better product. Luckily for us

I've been doing some groundwork and I've got something

I booked myself

Some

Premium chocolate chips to be more specific. This is not baking chocolate. This is called .

I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope to enjoyed the chocolaty journey

I find it to be delightful to be honest

If you did then please give it a big thumbs up like it share it spread it like butter everywhere

and of course subscribe to the channel because in the next episode we're obviously gonna make some

better chocolate

Take care, bye bye, salut!

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