Sometimes I get asked why a lot of the chocolates on my menu are mainly dark chocolate and whether I offer the same flavour with a white chocolate casing/shell.
For a while, it was a straight no-go from me; white chocolate was more complicated to use, I didn’t understand the fluidity of it, and all I remember from using it as a kid with my mum was that it took AGES to set. She used to make chocolate curls for our birthday cakes, good times!
Not only that but white chocolate, like pastry as my mum always reminds me, does not like heat. So over the summer, particularly with those hot days that we had in the UK, it was one aspect of chocolate-work that I did sparingly.
It took me a while to learn how to temper it properly- tempering being the way you stabilise chocolate through heating and cooling, but I’ll go into that on a future blog. White chocolate has a lower melting point and it takes longer to set.
The type of chocolate I use is Callebaut W2 White Chocolate. It took me a while to get to the point where I could remove the shell from the mould like this. And the way I did it was to apply two layers of chocolate:
First layer with my finger (or a brush, depending on the mould).
Second layer, regular shelling method.
Because this chocolate is quite fluid, it helped with reinforcing the shell as I found it would always be really hard to remove from the mould.
On the other hand, I tried doing this method with dark chocolate and it did not work for me yet. There are so many things that can go wrong with chocolate! It’s all practice, and some things work some days, some don’t.
As for white chocolate work over winter, it’s so amazing to use! With the combination of the drop in temperatures and the sun not shining as much in my parent’s home kitchen, my chocolate is staying in it’s tempered state!
Now will I ever start using milk chocolate? Maybe, in the future! I’m not sure myself why I have avoided it but maybe I should give it a try?!
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