#8 Fine Chocolates, Great Experience

Fine Chocolates, Great Experience by Jean-Pierre Wybauw - Buy @ Amazon

Fine Chocolates, Great Experience
by Jean-Pierre Wybauw (2004)

Gorgeous photo of a soft-centered chocolate truffle.

Ratings: Learn more
Quality: 5/5 – Inspiring, brilliant
Importance: 5/5 – Chocolate bible
Difficulty: 4.5/5 – Pastry professionals
Rarity: 4.5/5 – Very rare, expensive

Today’s Cookbook:
Yesterday we evolved classical French sauce theory into new taxonomies like Dessert and Salsa with cookbook #7 Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making.

Today’s cookbook takes us further into the dense and melty world of dessert taxonomies with Callebaut’s head chocolatier, Belgian chef Jean-Pierre Wybauw and his ultra-rare chocolate bible- cookbook #8 Fine Chocolates, Great Experience.

Glass Baume meter shown with Refractometer (Brix)- both used for determining concentration of sugar syrup- with a conversion chart for degrees Brix to degrees Baume.

Gorgeous Chocolate Technology
What a stunning book- glossy gorgeous photos are used to illustrate chocolate and sugar techniques, dessert ingredients, and over 100 chocolate recipes. Unlike other pastry chefs (Pierre Herme) who are showing off their pastry aesthetic with glossy photos, I get the sense that Wybauw is really showing off pastry technology in general.

Characteristics of dessert ingredients are covered in-depth, as seen in this list comparing the relative sweetness of sugars and other sweeteners used in chocolate making.

Sugars

• 100: Sucrose: Table sugar, not alcohol-soluble
• 30-65: Glucose syrup: Slows crystallization, can increase viscosity
• 30: Dextrose: Reduces sweetness
• 125: Invert Sugar : Keeps centers soft
• Invertase: Enzyme used to split glucose and fructose, softens centers
• Honey: Sensitive to fermentation, contains glucose and fructose
• 130: Fructose: Increases fruit flavor, temperature sensitive
• 27: Lactose: Adds milk aroma
• 50: Sorbitol: Cooling effect, slows crystallization

Complete reference for chocolate tools, including this dipping fork and chocolate melting pan.

Sugar Alcohols

• 60: Mannitol : Vegetable-derived, no aftertaste. Mild Laxative
• 100: Xylitol : Vegetable or fruit-derived, no aftertaste. Mild laxative.
• 45: Isomalt : Beet-extracted, suitable for diabetics, does not carmelize.
• 90: Maltitol: Hydrogenated maltose, temperature stable.
• 40: Lactitol: Hydrogenated milk sugar (lactose).

Artificial Sweeteners

• Acesulfame-K: 200x sucrose sweetness, heat-resistant, suitable for baking
• Cyclamate: 30x sucrose sweetness
• Saccharin: 300-500x sucrose sweetness
• Aspertame: 200x sucrose sweetness, considered harmful

The sweeteners don’t end there: Wybauw also covers familiar and exotic natural sweeteners such as fruits, maple syrup, palm sugar, carob flour, gula djawa (Indonesia), date syrup, jaggery (India), manna sugar (Italy), agave syrup (Mexico) and stevia.

Visually diagnosing common chocolate defects: Dull patches, fat bloom, air bubbles, cracks in moulding.

As a chocolatier’s reference, there is no better book- Wybauw offers diagnoses and solutions for common chocolate defects and discusses how to extend shelf-life with sugar, water and acidity. There are several multi-page tables, for converting from degrees Brix to degrees Beaume, and for illustrating chocolate crystallization during tempering.

Amazing Chocolate Recipes
Stellar, professional chocolate recipes: that’s the main reason to get this book (though the pictures are nice). The second half of the book breaks chocolates and sugars up into the following categories:

• Fillings: Candied fruits, caramel syrups, creams, fondant, and fudge
• Nut Chocolates: Pralines, tuilles
• Butter-centered Chocolates: Butter pralines, butter chocolates, egg creams
• Ganache-centered Chocolates: Cream, butter and chocolate
• Caramels: Butter, nut, honey and chocolate
• Nougat: Soft, hard, fruit, nut, chocolate
• Fruits-in-liqueur: Cherries, pineapple, raisins, pineapple
• Marzipan: Including perzipan (peach or apricot pit-based marzipan)
• Truffles: Piped centers, flavored and rolled in chocolate
• Fruit Dough: Pectin-thickened, pate du fruit

One of many gorgeous photos of truffle balls, accompanying some amazing recipes.

The bulk of the book is a visually stimulating selection of recipes, designed to show off the possibilities of the chocolate and sugar theory put forth in the first half of the book.

Non-professional chefs might be thrown off by the sparse recipe instructions and rarity of ingredients- but if you make the effort to try a few recipes, the worst that can happen is you will be forced to eat the fanciest chocolate mistakes you’ve ever made.

Two page spread dedicated to showing the process for dipping cherry cordials- first in fondant, and second in chocolate.

Conclusion: Chocolate Dreamers Bible
This is an extraordinary cookbook for any pastry chef looking to get some inspiration from Wybauw’s seemingly endless configurations of fundamental chocolate techniques. Learning to improvise at this level is made easier with the gorgeous Food Porn photos and massive amounts of beautifully-presented but poorly-translated chocolate and sugar information.

This striking orange truffle is made from ganache flavored with cointreau extract, dried, and then rolled in flakes of white+dark chocolate.

Open this book to any page and you will come across some great insight into technique and ingredient. On p.156, Wybauw flavors a cream ganache with dried and powdered basil, but makes sure to add near the end and never boil the basil. On p.157, he’s demonstrating the correct technique for removing extra ganache filling from a bullet mold.

Wybauw has other books that are more affordable, but cookbook #8 Fine Chocolates, Great Experience is a unique contribution to the field of desserts. It’s well put together and so complex that it would take a long time for any algorithm to comprehend the many vectors of instructive techniques that are transmitted like the tasty Logos from this chocolate bible.

Pistachio Marzipan Chocolate Recipe
This is a great professional-quality recipe, and the book is full of them- but you often have to deal with strangely translated English (“Remove centre from the cutter. Blend the softened butter with the centre.”).

Arabe is a butter-based chocolate, flavored with marzipan, pistachios, Passoa liqueur, white+milk chocolate, and honey- and finally molded within dark chocolate.

Arabe

100 g pistachios
100 g marzipan
100 g Passoa liqueur (passionfruit and citrus)
30 g sorbitol
200 g liquid honey
300 g butter
400 g white chocolate
400 g milk chocolate

1. Shell and grind pistachios to a powder in food processor.
2. Mix ground pistachios with marzipan and Passoa liqueur.
3. Add sorbitol and honey, beat into smooth creamy consistency.
4. Add and beat in softened butter, fold in the chocolate.
5. Cover molds with dark chocolate, allow to solidify. Add chocolate and nut mixture and allow to stiffen. Cap off with more dark chocolate.

Professional (hard-to-find) ingredients weighed in metric? We are in Fancy Recipe-land.