The Culinary Tales Week 22: I Dream of Chocolate

July 21, 2014

 

The week’s menu called for Opera Cake and Sachertorte, as well as the second of our mystery box challenges. We also got up close and personal with chocolate: making truffles and tempering chocolate. And after going through the tempering process, I have a newfound respect for all kinds of chocolate – even the cheap ones.

 

 

Opera Cake, created at the Paris Opera House for its chi-chi patrons, is a coffee-infused triple-layered bit of panache and elegance. It was served during intermission, and the heavy dose of caffeine was meant to keep the patrons awake during the second act.

 

 

Opera cake consists of three layers of joconde (a sponge cake which incorporates almond meal), each layer soaked with a coffee simple syrup to keep it moist. Sandwiched between the bottom and middle layers of cake is whipped chocolate ganache, between the middle and top layers of cake is coffee butercream. A thin layer of ganache is spread over the top layer and the cake is set overnight.

 

 

Now, mind you, there was hardly a recipe we finished in one day. Anything that had two or three components took days to complete. A cake usually wasn’t assembled the same day it was baked. After baking, we wanted it to cool adequately: the first cooldown from the bake then it was refrigerated because we wanted the cake cold and firm for easy slicing (so the slicing usually happened on day two.)

 

 

Then there were the various components, and depending on the product or complexity, might have taken all of day two or the rest of the week. Ganache was the easiest of fillings because all that was required was to heat up cream, pour over chocolate and mix. Of course, you also want to make ganache the same day you present because refrigeration kills its sheen.

 

 

Buttercream can be tricky to make, as proven by the Dobos Torte incident (the one that had me on my knees in tears) because this requires heating sugar to what´s called the “softball” stage: sugar, water and corn syrup heated until the mixture reaches 240 degrees Fahrenheit. You carefully drizzle this down the side of the mixing bowl (in which egg yolks should have already been whipped to what´s called a ribbon stage) while whipping the contents of the bowl. If you are over or under the 240 mark, the cream will melt, as what happened with my Dobos. Properly heated and mixed, the cream should hold its volume.

 

 

We started to assemble both the Opera and Sacher cakes in one night. The joconde was baked in a half sheet pan, so it was thin and was supposed to barely have color (what the chefs instructed to be a golden brown. My golden brown was a little too mulatto and chef thought it wouldn´t be a bad idea to do it over.)

 

 

However, it turned out I caramelized the sugar for my buttercream. There, paddling in a sea of egg yolky mud was a glob of hardened sugar. So I tossed out the whole thing and started from scratch. Because I had to do the buttercream over, I didn´t have time to re-do the cake, which meant that it was too dry and wasn´t going to soak up enough of the coffee simple syrup. Which was fine by me at this point, I just want to get the sonofabitch done.

 

 

The sachertorte, the national dessert of Austria, required far less work, needing only a little bit of trimming off the top, slicing in half and spreading apricot jam for filling.

 

 

The rest of the finishing – the glazing – was also done on day two and was a simple process of melting chocolate and butter and pouring over the cakes. The hardest part about the task was readying them for presentation.

 

 

For the Opera cake, we had to slice eight 2×2-inch squares with “L’Opera” piped prettily on EACH piece, then garnished with a speck of gold flex, which is an edible 18k gold paper. Then we scored 12 units on the Sacher, with one slice served on a plate and “Sacher” piped on each slice. After a rough start, I got the piping down, and turned in the best pipe-writing job I’d done all baking-season-long.

 

 

Now tempering chocolate – not be confused with “tempering” in savory cooking in which mixtures of varying temperatures, usually involving egg, are carefully mixed together to avoid cooking the egg – is a process of heating chocolate to 113-115 F then bringing the temp down (about 82-85 degrees) by constant agitation (stirring with a spatula until your arms fall off – a lot like Hollandaise, but worse) then bringing up to working temp (88-90 degrees, depending on the type). There are several ways to temper chocolate and this particular approach was the “seeding method.”

 

 

Tempering gives chocolate strength, snap and shine. Properly tempered chocolate should snap and not be soft.

 

For truffles, I chose to make dark chocolate and milk chocolate hazelnut.

 

 

I successfully tempered for the first part of the exercise (half my truffles had soft shells) but by the time I got the hang of covering the bastards and neatly placing them down to set, I had un-tempered the chocolate. As if tempering wasn’t hard enough, it was another challenge just to make them look NICE. Dipping in chocolate was one thing, doing it neatly was another, as I struggled to slide the coated truffles of the fork while not making them look – literally – like shit.

 

 

To end the week, we had another mystery box challenge and this time I got apple, Dobos sponge cake, creme patissiere (pastry cream) and hazelnuts. I decided to layer up three rounds of cake with wine-poached apple slices and pastry cream (which did not set on time), and topped it with a crunchy layer of baked hazelnuts and brown sugar. For my sauces I went with a port wine gastrique and a caramel sauce. Both sauces turned out too sweet and needed some kind of acid to balance out. It was a better-looking plate than the first challenge, but executed poorly.

 

 

But I had a lot of chocolate to snack on. And that was the best consolation of all.

 

 

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