36877
>> Amy Draves: Thanks so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm
really pleased today to welcome the founder of Seattle's own on Theo
Chocolate, Joe Whinney, and his lead chocolatier, Steve Popplewell, to the
Microsoft Research visiting speaker series. They are here to discuss the
company and their recent cookbook. It's a fascinating story of how North
American -- North America's first organic and fair trade chocolate factory
came to be and why they're so passionate about how their chocolate is made.
Please join me in giving them a very warm welcome.
[Applause]
>> Joe Whinney: Hi. Can you hear me okay? So welcome and thank you so much
for having us. My name is Joe and I'm the founder of Theo and I'm going to
tell you a few stories about the company and starting the company and Steve
is our lead chocolatier.
>> Steve Popplewell:
Hi.
>> Joe Whinney: So did you get to have some chocolate before the -- before
the event? Okay. So those are all Steve's creations. And while I'm
chatting a little bit, Steve's going to start cooking and making some ganache
and move on to hand-dipping chocolate that we'll also get to eat. And he'll
be telling you and explaining to you what he's doing as well. But during our
talk and chocolate making presentation, if you have any questions, please
ask. We love conversation and much rather with a group this size, be in
dialog with you than just stand up here and talk about chocolate the entire
time. So if you have questions, just let me know. So how many people have
been to Theo before? Wow, thank you. Thank you very much. I guess I can't
make anything up then. And have you taken the factory tour? Awesome.
That's great. Thank you for doing that. You know, I got into chocolate a
little more than 25 years ago and I was -- I went to high school, I dropped
out, I was senior class president, didn't go to college, and decided I wanted
to have an adventure. And so I bought up a beat up old sailboat we a friend
of mine and went sailing. Headed for the southern coast of Belize because
this is in the late '80s early '90s. At the time it was very, very remote
and has the second largest barrier reef in the world with the mountains, the
tropical rain forest mountains come right down to the ocean and I thought
this would be an amazing place to have an adventure. So off we went. And
will after sailing around the islands -- and the boot had no motor, no
electronics. We were literally navigating by the stars as best we could.
The fact that we lived through all of that was really the feat of that time
in my life. But I fell in love with that part of the world and so I
volunteered for a small conservation foundation that was doing two things.
They were collecting plants from that part of the rain forest because it was
threatened by logging concessions. And the foundation was also working with
indigenous mines understanding how they were interacting with their
environment in positive ways, truly sustainable because at that time, the
communities in southern Belize were primarily subsistence. And I just had a
strong back and I wanted to volume here and I wanted to give back. So my
very first job, they handed me this rise -- old rise sack that had car seat
belts. Remember the kind you have to sort of put around your waste. And
shoulder straps and a shotgun and said go with these guys and help them
harvest their cocoa. Now, I grew up in northeast Philly, and you know, I
thought I mean, maybe cocoa or chocolate came from Switzerland, maybe. I
know that I stole it from my brother on Halloween and it was brown and cheap
and suite and I loved it. So they hand me this shotgun. I thought, well,
what do I do? Do I shoot the cocoa? I mean, how is this really going to
work? So off I went and from for those of you, anybody been to a cocoa form
or a place like that before? So cocoa is a really beautiful tree. It's
typically about the size of an Apple tree if you can imagine that. And the
pods which are like small footballs, sort of a cross between a small football
and a pumpkin or a gourd. If you did the factory tour, you might have seen
some. They grow right off the trunk of the tree. And they're an under story
crop in the rain forest and so they really do well with a high canopy above
them. And these cocoa farms that I was on at the time were well over a
hundred years old which is unique in modern agriculture with this large
canopy tree and these rain forest trees with giant buttresses, it was a
little bit like out of Dr. Seuss. And so as a kid with no experience before,
having no real experience in -- certainly in rain forests and harvesting
cocoa, my mind was blown. And my job was to pick up the pods after they were
cut from the tree. So the farmers would go around with a pole that had a
long knife on it to cut the pods off and it was pretty hilly and the pods
would just roll everywhere. So I was running around as fast as I could to
gather up these pods and I went to reach for one and there was this huge
snake that just went right by where my hand was. And I was just curious and
I asked the foreman of the crew, this guy Chapin, I said, Chapin, what kind
of snake is this? And he just was like a cartoon, like eyes got huge, he's
like, get the gun, boy, get the gun. I was like, oh, okay.
[Laughter]
>> Joe Whinney: Now I know what the gun was for finally. And it was -turned out it was a fer-de-lance. What's called a yellow jaw, which is one
of the most dangerous snakes in Central America because it's venomous, but
it's -- it hunts in pairs, it's territorial, and it's very aggressive. Most
snakes that I've encountered in the rain forest, and I've traveled throughout
Latin America and Africa, they don't care about you. These snakes are very
aggressive. So harvesting cocoa turned into this adventure and I had no idea
what really went into a chocolate bar at this time. The economic reality of
the farmers was increasingly poor. Over the course of three years of doing
this work, as a cash economy encroached, what I saw were these same farmers
who were subsistence and knew how to work with their environment in
incredibly positive ways were starting to make decisions that were not in the
interests of their landscape but certainly interest in getting as much cash
as quickly as they could and those decisions had a negative impact that was
amazing to see. And so I thought, well, if they could just make a little bit
more money for their crop and grow it in a stainable way, then they could
afford healthcare for their family, they could afford the school fees that
they now had. The environment would be healthy, everything would be fine.
And this was around 1991, '92. And at the time the entire organic food
market was about a billion dollars. And I thought, well, that's huge.
Everyone is going to want organic chocolate. So I contacted all the
chocolate manufacturers. One of them said we're interested. I brought in
the first container of organic cocoa beans into North America in 1994 and
through the '90s, grew this business by developing raw material supply of
cocoa beans and selling chocolate to other brands like Newman's Own,
Cascading Farm and Whole Foods and a wide variety of others. By the way,
Steve, how are we doing?
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Yeah?
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Oh, good.
Yeah.
What will you be doing first?
I'm just curious.
>> Steve Popplewell: I'm going to demonstrate how to make a mint ganache.
And then how to hand dip them in chocolate.
>> Joe Whinney:
And we're going to eat those, right?
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
All right.
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
You can even try hand dipping if you want.
If they want to.
If they want to.
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Okay.
Oh, everybody gets to try that?
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
We're going to eat them, yeah.
Sure.
All right.
>> Steve Popplewell:
All right.
Why not?
>> Joe Whinney: So after doing this for several years of developing the
organic market in North America, it was clear to me that in order to deliver
on the mission that I had which was to bring value back to farmers so that
they could invest in their landscapes while feeding their families and having
a high quality of life, I needed to build a brand that was -- and also have
vertical manufacturing so that we can keep more the margin and that margin
goes into our raw material price obviously compensating the farmer. And
that's where Theo came from. So in 2004, Debra and I -- for those of you
that have the book or read the book, there's a little bit of our story in the
beginning. It's a he-said/she-said or a she-said/he-said. Debra, who
couldn't make it today and she is sorry. She wasn't feeling well. Debra is
my ex-wife and we split up before moving out here from the East Coast. And
so Theo sometimes is a little bit like a reality TV show.
[Laughter]
>> Joe Whinney: But we were obviously meant to be together, just not as a
married couple. So we worked through a lot of things personally to work
together because Debra is an incredible, incredible person and really
responsible for so much of the success that we've had. And will so in that
book, we tell the story about the -- what we went through to sort of -- our
paths kind of joining and then moving to Seattle to create Theo. And as
mentioned at the beginning, we are the first organic and fair trade chocolate
maker, bean to bar in the country. And this concept of bean to bar is kind
of important to us. It's used often time to sort of describe chocolate maker
and manufacturer who really is handling the raw material so that you can
trust where that's coming from. For us, that model is important because of
the economics of it, right? I mean, for those of you that have an interest
in food economics or stainable agriculture, really, the driver for the
decisions that farmers make is often it's economic pressure that they have,
the downward pressure or price typically. And if we have control over that,
then we're in a better position to create the change that we want to create.
So fast forward, well, to 2009. So we started in 2005, made our first
chocolate for sale in February of 2006, so it's our ten-year anniversary this
year, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to do the book. And 2009, I
made my first trip to the eastern Congo, Eastern Democratic Republic of
Congo. And for those of you that don't know, eastern Congo is the site of
the worst you humanitarian tragedy since World War II. Five million people
killed because of war and disease and it's consistently at the bottom of
economics, of any economic indicators. It's one of the worst countries to be
in if you're a woman. Rape is something that's used as a form of
intimidation and there's a lot of challenges. And you can imagine that this
is not a place that most businesses will go and choose to source half of
their raw material supply. Today, more than half of our cocoa is coming from
eastern Congo. And the reason that eastern Congo is so important to us, not
only is the quality of the cocoa fabulous, but the impact that we're having
there is dramatic. So from our first visit in late 2009 until today, we're
now I can't go for more than 850 tons of cocoa a year which is impacting more
than 5000 families. And Theo, it's interesting to me, and I realize I should
step back. Chocolate is, and for those of you that don't know, the supply
chain of chocolate has been a very, very difficult one for most of the
farmers growing cocoa and you can tell what my orientation is. This is the
world that I've come from. Working in this environment for more than
25 years. But the economic devastation, social devastation that the cocoa
industry has had, especially on cocoa farmers in West Africa, is so
incongruous to me because this is the raw material that's used to make
something that we share with people we love. We give this as a form of
celebration. It's one of the most beautiful foods, as Steve will be
demonstrating very shortly, that I think is made on the planet today. And I
believe and we believe at Theo that everything that goes into that product
should have a positive impact, that everyone should be feeling the love all
the way through. And so for us today to have such success in eastern Congo
is really a demonstration ultimately of what it is that we set out to do to
create this change, to have a vehicle where we can engage consumers through a
beautiful product and at the end of the day, I want you to buy Theo because
you enjoy the product and if you feel -- if it makes any difference at all
that you're having a positive impact, that's great. But I want you to buy it
because it tastes so good. So to that end, Steve, do you want to give us an
update on where you're at?
>> Steve Popplewell: Absolutely. So as Joe may have mentioned before, I'm
demoing a ganache today. So what you just ate has two components. It has
the filling, which is the ganache. And the couverture is the coating. The
chocolate coating, the chocolate shell. So to make the interior of that,
first, you've got to decide what you want to make it out of. In this case,
we're doing mint. So I just chopped up some fresh mint leaf, steeped it in
some cream and honey here. Honey is great for ganache. You wouldn't want to
use sugar or anything like that. It will taste very granular. So a nice
invert sugar like honey, any kind of -- you can use brown rice syrup, agave,
anything like that. So I chopped the mint. Steeped it for -- you steep it
for about a half an hour. Strain the mint leaves with some kind of a chinois
or cheesecloth or whatever you have on hand. This is something you can do at
home with really rudimentary equipment. As you can see, I don't even have
electricity up here. So doing it old school because I just want to show you
how simple it is.
>> Joe Whinney:
Is this in the book, Steve?
>> Steve Popplewell: It sure is. Yeah. There might be some different
equipment that's in the book, but this is the most basic. So now that I've
strained out my mint leaves, I have mint flavored cream here. Cream and
honey. I'm going to heat this up to just a bare simmer. Okay. The thing
about ganache is you get your cream too hot, it's going to separate. It's
going to be a separated mess. If anyone has ever made a ganache, because it
has a lot of butter, it has a lot of fat, and all that fat and butter doesn't
like combining with the chocolate, it doesn't want to stay in place. So the
butter will kind of float to the surface if you get your cream too hot. So
if you're using a probe thermometer, 145 degrees is perfect. If you can get
your cream and honey to 145 degrees Fahrenheit, it's just hot enough to melt
out your chopped chocolate but not so hot that it's going to throw it out of
temper. Okay? Does that make sense? And I'll go over what that means,
tempering, if anyone's not familiar with that term. So got it to about that.
I don't have a thermometer up here. But I'm going to do it, like I said, I'm
going to do it old school, just to a bare simmer, if you don't have a
thermometer. Really easy. Pour it over your chopped chocolate. This is
actually milk and dark chocolate. It's similar to the recipe that's in the
book. Okay. I'm going to stir that around, next I'm going to whisk it.
Now, you can -- it's actually a lot easier if you have a really nice handheld
immersion blender that you would use for salad dressing or something like
that. This is kind of an industrial one, but they sell smaller ones that you
can use. If anyone has any questions, shout it out, totally fine. But I'm
going to use a whisk. You can do that too, again, not using electricity
today. Just going for it. So I'm just going to whisk that. Okay. And it
looks like I may not have gotten my cream hot enough. But that's totally
fine. Do a little troubleshooting here. So since I'm not using a probe
thermometer, this is a thing that you might run into. You can just dump a
little back into your pot and you may not even have to turn the heat on.
Okay. You might just have enough residual heat in your pot already. The
temperature is very, very, very important when you're making ganache. It's
the most important thing. If your temperature is too low, you're going to
have issues. If it's too hot, you're going to have separation issues.
Butter is going to separate out. The cream is going to separate out. It's
going to look like just a broken mess, like a salad dressing when the oil and
everything separates out. Right? It's kind of like that. So I'm going to
stir that around a little bit. Get it nice and hot. Or warm, I should say.
So it's important to chop your chocolate. You need to have chocolate that's
small enough in size to melt out. Otherwise you're going to have a ganache
with a bunch of chocolate chips in it, which might be fine if that's what
you're going for, but not necessarily. Okay. There we go. That looks good.
Dump this back in. This good troubleshooting. So if you get your ganache
too hot and it looks like a separated mess, just stick it in the fridge for a
little bit. Ten minutes or so. Let it relax. Or you can just let it sit at
room temperature. Let it come down. And then just keep whisking or
immersion blending works really well. Over if you have a food processor, you
can put chopped chocolate in your food processor and pour your cream into it.
Blast it. That's actually the most effective way. So you can see my
chocolate chunks are starting to melt out. Very nice. So this is the
ganache. Again, this is going to be our interior. And now I'm hand piping
these guys. And then we're going to dip them. Okay. With our couverture,
with our chocolate. So this is my little tub of chocolate here. I'm going
to give you a quick little demo on tempering chocolate and talk about that,
why that's so important. Has anyone ever tempered chocolate before or
attempted to temper chocolate? Yeah? Successfully? Yeah? Awesome. So a
word about our chocolate. We are a soy-free facility. We don't use any kind
of binding agents in our chocolate. Soy is typically used as a binding agent
to keep the cocoa butter kind of locked in. What's nice about our chocolate
is that people that think they're allergic to chocolate are sometimes just
allergic to soy so they can actually eat our chocolate. It's kind of hard to
come by. Soy-free chocolate is kind of hard to come by. But the upside to,
you know, the best thing about that is you're getting pure chocolate. You're
not getting any sort of chocolate that has additives or anything like that.
So this is looking pretty good. I'm going to start adding my butter. It's
also important to add butter that's room temperature so that it will melt
out. Okay. Very important. Kind of add it gradually. Now, as you can see
here, I have my pre-piped truffles. Beautiful. See how they really hold
their shape? Once the chocolate solidifies, once the chocolate kind of
crystallizes, I mean, you can handle them, you can pick them up. They're not
like -- the texture is going to be really velvety and smooth. And you can
handle them. So these are what we're going to be dipping. Stir that butter
in. I think it's still a little too hot. It's very thick but it looks nice.
Lovely. I'm going to get it just a little warmer. Now, this is risky,
because you can also burn your ganache very easily. So be careful. Use
medium heat. If you have to add a little bit more ganache back into your
pot, be careful. Be very careful. [Indiscernible] just a little bit.
>> Joe Whinney:
chocolate?
Steve, is dark chocolate different to handle than milk
>> Steve Popplewell: Yeah. So milk chocolate, if you're making a ganache
that's just milk chocolate, the consistency of your ganache is going to be a
little softer. If you're using a white chocolate, it's going to behave a
little differently. Basically it's just all about temperature. Say you're
using a -- I don't know, a 45 percent milk chocolate filling. You're going
to make just a milk chocolate ganache. The temperature that you're going to
take your cream to is going to be a little lower. Like 140 degrees instead
of 145 because the darker the chocolate is, the higher the temperature has to
be in order for it to melt, to come into temper. So if you're using a
mixture like this, there is about a 2-to-1, I think, to milk and dark. So
this looks really good. It looks like it's come together. So something to
keep in mind, the higher the percentage of chocolate, this is a 70 percent
chocolate, the more natural cocoa better there's going to be in your
chocolate. So that's going to affect texture. It's going to affect flavor.
It's going to affect the way the chocolate behaves. Especially when you are
tempering.
>> Joe Whinney: And so the percentage, when you see a percentage on the
cocoa, on a chocolate bar, that is the amount by weight the cocoa-based
products in that.
>> Steve Popplewell:
Right.
>> Joe Whinney: So it could be a combination what's called cocoa master
chocolate liquor, which is roasted and ground cocoa beans.
>> Steve Popplewell:
This looks great.
>> Joe Whinney: Also combined with cocoa butter. Some manufacturers even
put cocoa powder. The cocoa mass, which is a roasted ground cocoa beans,
is -- half of that is fat cocoa butter. The other half is solid or cocoa
powder. So you can separate the solids and the fat that make cocoa butter
and cocoa powder. So the higher the percentage, typically the more cocoa
butter in total would be in there because of what's naturally occurring in
the mass as well as maybe some added butter. Yes?
>> Steve Popplewell: Right. And so like the 70 percent, for example, that's
70 percent. The other percentage would be like refined sugar with a milk
chocolate -- our milk chocolate is actually a pretty dark milk chocolate.
It's 45 percent. So the other ratio of ingredients is milk powder and sugar.
So the higher the percentage, the more chocolate you're actually getting. If
that makes sense. Can anyone guess what the percentage of white chocolate
is?
>>
Zero.
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Zero.
Well, yes.
[Laughter]
>> Steve Popplewell:
Weigh in on that.
>> Joe Whinney: Well, what's interesting is if you include cocoa butter,
then it could be as high as 30 ->> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Oh, that's true.
-- or higher.
>> Steve Popplewell:
That's true.
>> Joe Whinney: Because white chocolate is cocoa butter, sugar, and milk
powder typically.
>> Steve Popplewell:
Oh, this is great.
>> Joe Whinney: And so that's why it starts to get -- companies only use the
cocoa bean, the full cocoa bean as a percentage. Others include the fat as
well.
>> Steve Popplewell: So you can see my ganache is ready to go. There is no
separation whatsoever. It's nice velvety and smooth. So your ganache is
going to separate, you're going to know right away. All that butter is going
to be sitting in a pool right on the surface and it will not combine until
the temperature comes down. Okay. So you can just let it sit for a while
and then stir it together gradually and it will come together. Or you can
stick it in the fridge. But if you stick it in the fridge, you risk-taking
it too low and then you can't work with it. It will end up being stiff. So,
hey, Joe, you want to give me a hand real quick.
>> Joe Whinney:
Yeah.
Totally.
>> Steve Popplewell: Now we're going to pipe our ganache. This is what
we're going to be dipping. Just hold that open. And I'm going to put this
in a bag. Now who -- would anyone like to try piping some ganache today?
Anyone want to like participate? Because I love audience participation
personally.
>> Joe Whinney:
This is so fun.
>> Steve Popplewell:
>>
Isn't it?
That's ganache?
>> Steve Popplewell:
here.
>> Joe Whinney:
I mean, this is a really, really well tempered ganache
Come on in.
>> Steve Popplewell: This is good.
to set up really well.
>>
It's going
[Indiscernible] get close to the chocolate.
>> Steve Popplewell:
>>
It's got really nice body.
Does anyone --
[Indiscernible]?
>> Steve Popplewell:
up and ->> Joe Whinney:
I got one bag, but you can certainly come
Do you want me to move this out of the way, Steve?
>> Steve Popplewell:
need to snip my bag.
>> Joe Whinney:
Of course.
Sure.
And I forgot to bring a pair of scissors.
I
Want a knife?
>> Steve Popplewell: I got a knife here. I got a little pair of scissors on
my knife, that might work just -- let's see. I always have this handy. All
right. So now, you got to keep in mind, you want to make a nice good sized
truffle because these are going to go into chocolate, okay? So you don't
want anything too small. You could lose it. Because you're going to dip it
straight into the chocolate and you want to have it, you know, have some
volume. Okay? So you're just going to take it and do these like little like
chocolate kisses, just like that. Okay? See how that just kind of holds its
shape? That's a good sign. If it were too hot, or there were some weird
things going on, it would just kind of squish out. So this is really, really
well mixed. It looks good. So go ahead. Give it a shot. Give it, you
know, and I -- half-dollar size piece. Yeah. There you go. Get it right on
the paper. Don't hold it up too high. There you go.
>>
Otherwise it will start drying in the air?
>> Steve Popplewell:
[Laughter]
No.
It's just not as neat.
>> Steve Popplewell: It's not as clean. So you can just set it like down on
the paper and kind of let it -- there you go. That's good. See how it kind
of holds its shape a little better? You don't get these little squigglies.
Yeah. Good.
>>
Anybody else?
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Got plenty to try here.
Bravo.
>> Steve Popplewell:
Nice.
[Applause]
>> Steve Popplewell:
>>
Nice, very good.
[Indiscernible].
>> Steve Popplewell: Okay. So this is just a trick to get people to do my
work for me, by the way. Kidding.
[Laughter]
>> Steve Popplewell: So the next step, after you have successfully made a
ganache, you ideally would like these to kind of set overnight to fully
crystallize, okay? They're going to be soft for quite a while. You could
set them in the fridge for a little while. If you do refrigerate them and
you're not going to let them set at room temperature, if you do refrigerate
them, let them come back up to room temperature before you dip or the
couverture is going to crack. If your ganache is too cold, the chocolate
will just contract and it will crack. Still perfectly edible, but they might
not last as long, they might not look as pretty. Something to keep in mind.
Any kind of temperature difference is going to cause issues with your
couverture, your coating.
>>
Do you care about the height?
Or I don't --
>> Steve Popplewell: That's fine. That's totally fine. I was talking like
you wouldn't want a chocolate chip-sized piece. You know what I mean? Yeah.
So that's good. Yeah. Great. Anyone else? Yeah. Do it. That looks good.
I have my 70 percent -- now, this is just straight-up chocolate. This is
going to be our couverture. This is going to be our coating. This is what
we're going to be dipping with. Does that make sense? This is not a
ganache. This is just 70 percent chocolate. Okay? So I'm going to be
tempering my chocolate today on this little granite slab that I brought from
home. Anybody, if you don't have granite tabletops at home, just go out to
like a stone yard and get yourself a granite slab. It is awesome to have
this at home. I mean, it's great. You can really impress people too.
>>
Would soapstone work?
>> Steve Popplewell: Soapstone is -- yeah, I mean, it should be fine. As
long as it has a polished surface. Soapstone won't stay as cold but it would
probably work. It's a softer stone. So you might risk breaking pieces of it
off, but probably be fine.
>>
What about gloss surfaces?
>>Steve Popplewell:
>>
What's that?
What about gloss surfaces?
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Gloss surfaces?
Glass?
>> Steve Popplewell: Oh, glass. I've never tempered on glass. I don't
know. My instinct would say that it wouldn't work too well. Glass -- the
reason why marble and granite work so well is it kind of keeps it, maintains
a cold temperature, ambient temperature of the room. So this was in my car
for a little while and then I sanitized it. So it's kind of -- it's still
holding the cold temperature that my car was at. Does that make sense? So
you could even put it outside for a minute if your kitchen and hot, bring it
in, and it will stay cold for a long time. Even if the room is warm. That's
why it works so -- especially, particularly marble. Marble works best.
Marble will maintain the ambient temperature of whatever environment it's in
for the longest. So I'm pouring out quite a bit. As a rule of thumb, about
two-thirds of whatever volume you're tempering would go on your surface and
then the one-third would stay in the container. So basic, what we're doing
here is if you have ever seen a chocolate bar that has like a white haze on
the surface or a truffle for that matter, that is the cocoa butter rising to
the surface. And that happens when there is a temperature fluctuation in the
chocolate that the cocoa butter wants to separate out, like the fat, like a
peanut butter, you know. The oil separates out.
>> Joe Whinney:
[Indiscernible]?
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Pardon?
Can I put this here?
>> Steve Popplewell:
Sure.
Absolutely.
[Laughter]
>> Steve Popplewell: So basically, all this is is a sort of controlled
cooling process in order to keep the cocoa butter in the chocolate instead of
rising to the surface so that when we dip, our chocolates will set up quickly
and they'll look beautiful. They'll look shiny. So the shine and the snap
that chocolate has is a property of the cocoa butter. There's several
different crystalline structures that cocoa butter has and there's only two
of them that are desirable really for tempering. So does that make sense
though? Tempering sounds a little weird like you’re strengthening steel or
something like that, but I equate it more to like it's a crystalline
structure, it's like when water cools, it starts to form a crystalline
structure and it firms up. That's what chocolate does. It firms up so that
basically, what we want do here is we want to take this down to about
86 degrees Fahrenheit and that is going to ensure that all that cocoa butter
stays put instead of rising to the surface.
>>
Why do you reserve some?
>> Steve Popplewell: Oh, the reason do I that is because we want this
chocolate to stay liquid long enough to work with it. We want it to be
liquid and in temper. So I keep some of it warm in the container and this is
typical of any kind of chocolate that you would work with. You want to keep
some of it warm so that when I add this back into it, this is going to start
getting firmer and the viscosity is going to decrease. It's going to start
getting a little chunky. And then I'm going to dump it back into my warm
chocolate, stir it all together, and hopefully that's going to create the
exact perfect uniform temperature throughout my whole batch of chocolate.
And that way it will stay liquid as well longer.
>>
[Indiscernible] cooling some of --
>> Steve Popplewell: I'm just cooling it off on the surface of the marble.
So I'm moving it around the surface of the marble so all of the chocolate
gets contact with the surface, with the granite in this case. And that is
just cooling the chocolate in a controlled way. You can do this several -- I
mean, you don't necessarily need a marble surface to do this. You could -say you have three bars of chocolate. You could take two bars, chop them up
and then take one bar and melt it down and use it as a seed, right? So you
just take those chunks and put it in there. Oh, that's reverse. I'm sorry.
You want to melt two bars down, take one bar, chop it up, and then slowly add
that into your hot chocolate and that will bring the temperature down
gradually as you stir. You could use like an ice bath. You know, put your
hot chocolate in an ice bath and stir it until the temperature comes down to
86. There are several different methods. Any way that you could just -- but
the main thing is you want to keep it moving. So ->> Joe Whinney:
over the table.
But there's something so much fun about just pour it all
>> Steve Popplewell:
Yeah right.
So I've been asked --
[Laughter]
>> Steve Popplewell: Yeah, exactly. I've been asked in classes before,
well, if it's just a temperature issue, why don't you just let it sit until
it reaches 86? That's not going to do anything. You have to actively move
it. You have to encourage those crystalline structures to start forming. So
let's say I wanted this to come into temper, I'm like I'll just wait until it
comes down to 86 because right now it's at about 110 probably.
>> Joe Whinney:
Do you want it?
>> Steve Popplewell: Yeah. So you can see all the difference in viscosity
here. If you just waited for this to come down to 86 degrees, that magic
temperature where it will be in temper, if you don't do anything to it, if
you don't move it around, it's not going to do anything. It will stay -- the
crystalline structure will stay in the same state unless you manipulate it.
Does that make sense? So you can see here, my chocolate is starting to get a
little chunkier. And you can see this fancy tool I'm using here is a
five-dollar Home Depot scraping tool, right?
[Laughter]
>> Steve Popplewell: That has a stainless steel, you know, food safe. When
I was at the Callebaut Academy in Chicago several years bag, and after I took
the course, they said, now you're going to need a scraping tool. And we had
this fancy scraping tool that has Callebaut written nicely on the thing and
it was like $35. And this is five bucks. Does the exact same thing. So I'm
just saying, you don't always need fancy equipment to make awesome chocolate.
You can, you know, don't fall for that kind of stuff. Really. I mean, it
doesn't matter. And these are industry standard things like scrapers for
tempering chocolate in the chocolatier world, like everyone uses scrapers do
this. So you can see the difference here in viscosity already. Do you see
that? This is starting to look chunky. This is still very liquid. That's
what we want. So if I do this just right, I'm going to add all this back in
and I'm going to stir it around. All those chunks are going to melt out and
it's going to seed my batch. It's going to lower the temperature of the
whole volume and it's going to create the right crystalline structure in my
entire batch and then we can hand dip these guys. These guys might not be
ready. Oh, they might be actually. They're setting up nicely. So if anyone
is interested in what the temperature is here, I'm taking this down to about
74, 75 degrees. Okay? 76. Somewhere in there. And then I'm going to add
it back into my hot chocolate and hopefully, that's going to bring the
temperature down to 86. Okay. And that's going to create the crystalline
structure that we want. Again, the goal here is to have a couverture, a
surface that's shiny and has snap. If you were just to take one of these and
dip it right now, it would take about an hour to set up and when it did set
up, it would look terrible. It would have all this hazy stuff on this. The
cocoa butter would just rise right to the surface. Here we go. This looks
good. I think this is there. Again, I'm not using a thermometer. I'm doing
this old school. I never use thermometers in the kitchen. Or very rarely.
I try to do it by site just because thermometers are a little cumbersome and
time-consuming. But if you're just starting out, I would recommend getting a
nice probe thermometer. They're about 35 bucks. And the temperature is very
precise. So this is a 70 percent chocolate. I'm taking it down to
86 degrees. If you're using percentages of chocolate that are lower, like if
you're tempering milk, the temperature that you're going to take it to is
going to be lower. So milk chocolate will temper at about 84 degrees. White
chocolate, the lowest, being like 83, 84, right in there. So the higher the
percentage of cocoa butter, the higher the temperature it's going to be in
order for it to be in temper. Does that make sense? So if you're using an
85 percent, you'll want to take your chocolate to around 87, 88 degrees.
Okay?
>> Joe Whinney:
and --
And also in the book we do talk a lot about chocolate baking
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
Yes.
Some of this technical information because.
>> Steve Popplewell:
It's a lot.
It's a lot.
>> Joe Whinney: It is, and you can see that Steve does this naturally and is
an amazing chocolatier.
>> Steve Popplewell:
Thank you.
>> Joe Whinney: But once you have those principles, it is -- it's not that
hard do and it's fun to play with and experiment, right?
>> Steve Popplewell: Yeah. Definitely. You just got to understand the
concept. It's just like, you know, like I was explaining, like peanut butter
and things like that. The peanut oil likes to separate out. Like the oils
don't like to stay combined and chocolate is no different. It's just the fat
of the bean. That's the cocoa butter. It wants to come out. So you have to
control and manipulate it in order to keep it in. Otherwise, you're going to
have a gritty, not very good tasting couverture chocolate.
>> So the ones we get for samples earlier, they're all like perfect squares.
I assume the ganache goes in a mold?
>> Steve Popplewell: No. They don't -- well, yeah, actually, that's true.
They do go in a sort of a frame mold. It's not technically like a chocolate
mold. They're like stainless steel frames and they're about an inch high.
So that we can just kind of put the ganache in and we use like a scraping
tool and it's all the same height. You can do that at home. You can take,
instead of piping like we just did here, pour your ganache all into a tray,
take it off that spatula and just kind of smooth it all out and then cut them
by hand into whatever shape you like. You can even use cookie cutters and do
different shapes. Things like that. You can do all -- I mean, the sky's the
limit. Really.
>> Joe Whinney: It's fun to watch in the kitchen when those ganache, when
they're made, they're put into a frame and then there's a large guitar which
are these very thin wires that cut it exactly into those shapes. It's fun.
>> Steve Popplewell:
This chocolate is now in temper.
Okay?
So now --
[Applause]
>> Steve Popplewell: Great. Thank you. I'm going to bring some of this
down here and give a quick little dipping demo. If anybody would like to try
dipping, I would highly recommend it. So now that my chocolate is in temper,
it's going to set up once I start coating these, it will set up very quickly,
within 30 seconds to a minute. Okay. And a good way to test that, just very
quickly, so when I first started, I should have done this before, but you can
take a little piece of parchment paper to test the temper, dip it in there
like that, and if your chocolate is really hot, it will take hours to set up.
Even that little piece. Now that this is in temper, it's going to set up
within I would say 30 seconds. It's going to become rigid and solid. Okay.
And that's a great test. Or you can just kind of put it on your lip. If it
feels cool on your lip, chances are it's good because your lip is like the
thinnest skin. It's the most sensitive to temperature. Right? That's how
the French do it.
>> Joe Whinney:
Or you can just eat it and not worry about the temperature.
>> Steve Popplewell:
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
[Laughter]
>> Steve Popplewell: So, yeah, this looks ready to go. And also you can
kind of tell just by looking at it. The viscosity is a lot lower. Meaning
that it's just thicker looking. It just looks thicker. Yeah. I'm confident
that this is ready to go. So what we're going to do now is I have some
dipping forks here. And a few that we can -- you guys can use. I'm going to
put them down here. Do a quick little demo here. Take my little truffle, my
little interior. Now, you can mold this into a different shape if you like.
If you want it to be a little bit more round, you can kind of do that.
Another fun thing that you can do is you can buy like silicone ice tray
molds, you know, the silicone ones that are floppy. And you can pipe ganache
into those and stick them in the fridge and then you'll have like perfectly
round -- they have ones that are like little round circles and they'll make
them perfectly shaped. That's a fun thing. I do that in my classes at Theo
sometimes. Yeah, this is setting up already. So I'm going to toss it in.
Roll it around a bit. Okay. Pull that out. Now, that exterior is going to
set up pretty quickly. Okay. I mean, really quick. I mean, you know, less
than a minute, like I said. And then it will be ready to eat. You know.
Ideally you'd want it to sit for a couple hours for the chocolate to fully
crystallize. And there you go. Roll it off with your finger. You can
decorate it if you like. You can put maybe candy -- some mint leaves and
sprinkle it on there. Whatever you want to do. You can make little patterns
with your dipping fork. Sky's the limit. Yeah. That looks good.
anyone would like to come up, do a little hand dipping.
>> Joe Whinney:
How do you want to set that up, Steve?
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Joe Whinney:
So if
Right down here.
Can I put this down here?
>> Steve Popplewell: Sure. And I'll be right here too to help out. This is
going to be messy. Is that okay? We're going to get a little messy. All
right. You can just come up. These are a little too soft yet. Put these
back.
[Laughter]
[Chatter]
>> Steve Popplewell:
Oh, everybody wants to do it.
I hope we have enough.
[Laughter]
>>
[Indiscernible].
>> Steve Popplewell:
>>
Toss it in.
There's a lot [indiscernible].
>> Steve Popplewell: I don't have a paper towel. There you go.
little shake. There you go. Just throw it right on the tray.
>>
Give it a
Can I grab one from this side?
>> Steve Popplewell: Sure. And I've got another one here. Can use the same
fork. Wonderful. Let me see your dipping fork there. Wipe that off. Nice.
[Chatter]
>>
Why are you cleaning your fork each time?
>> Steve Popplewell: Oh, that's a good point. Thank you for bringing that
up. Sometimes I take that for granted. So, as you're dipping, wipe off your
fork each and every time after you dip or all this chocolate is going to
start setting up on your dipping fork and then the next one that you dip
won't come off. It will adhere to that chocolate. So each and every time,
wipe it off.
>> [Indiscernible] required or is there something we usually have in the
kitchen that --
>> Steve Popplewell: Oh, forks work too.
They work great. All right. It's setting
one that was dipped is already starting to
ready to eat in a few minutes. How are we
>> Amy Draves:
Oh, we're good.
>> Steve Popplewell:
>> Amy Draves:
Just regular old forks. Yeah.
up. Great. See that? The first
solidify. So these should be
doing on time?
We're good.
Okay.
[Indiscernible].
>> Steve Popplewell:
Got it.
Oh, it's a little two-pronged one.
>> Amy Draves: You guys, since we've moved into demo mode, we're actually
going to shut down the filming. So if we could just say thank you to Joe and
to Steve.
>> Steve Popplewell:
[Applause]
All right.