Recently, I had the craving to make some chocolate truffles.  With chocolate, it's hard to make just a little, so I went through 8 pounds of chocolate.  When planning, I checked around to make sure dark chocolate would be the prime chocolate, and it turned out that only one person wanted milk chocolate.  This did give me a chance to make milk chocolate truffles for the first time.

I started with a mix of Trader Joes large chocolate bars (72%) and some Calebut chocolate chunks that I had from buying back in Feburary and stored in a cool, dark, sealed bin for emergencies.

Dark Chocolate Truffle Base
For every 8 ounces of dark chocolate, I used 8 ounces of heavy cream.  I created 2 pound batches (32 oz), or rather, slightly extra because the Trader Joes bars were over 16 oz per bar.
Step 1) I chopped the chocolate into small bits and put them into a large bowl.
Step 2) I heated the heavy cream until it was simmering but not boiling.
Step 3) I poured the cream over the chocolate and let it sit for a few seconds and started stirring and folding with a silicone spatula.


Milk chocolate truffle base
I used 24 oz chocolate and 8 oz cream for this one and used the same methods as the dark chocolate truffles.


For the first batch, I used 4 oz of Grand Mariner and 4 oz of Cointreau' and several (I didn't measure oddly enough, I think it was 4) teaspoons of cinnamon.  This just wasn't orange enough, so for a second batch I added half a teaspoon of orange extract to get a bolder orange candy flavor.  

The third batch used 4 oz of peppermint schnapps.  I would have preferred a mix of peppermint schnapps and extract because like the first batch, the flavor was not prominent enough.

The fourth batch used a combination of cinnamon, 2 tablespoons honey (which was heated with the cream), 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, cayenne pepper and ancho pepper.  I believe I used approximately 4 teaspoons of cayenne, 4 teaspoons of ancho and 4 teaspoons of cinnamon.

The mixtures were then covered and left to cool for a few hours at room temperature, or in a cold environment (the fridge, or this time of year, outside in 32 degree F weather).  I also tried pouring a few batches into ziploc bags and cooling.

After the chocolate had cooled to the point of being malleable without flowing, I scooped small balls (1 tablespoon, or 1 inch diameter) using a cookie scoop and deposited them on parchment paper.  The ones in bags were easier, because I snipped off a corner of the bag, and piped out the chocolate into small piles and eventually, gave up and just piped it out in long logs.  I let these cool a bit as well.

When the chocolate was slightly more firm, I covered my hands in gloves and rolled the chocolate into balls. The logs were sliced with a sharp knife and then rolled into balls.  The heat of a persons hands will make these melt a little and form, but also makes the chocolate a little too warm to work with, so these cooled as well.

Finally, they were rolled in cocoa powder, or in the case of the orange cinnamon truffles, a mix of cinnamon and cocoa powder.  They could also have been dipped in tempered chocolate, but I chose not to do that this time.

They were then separated into bags and given away for people to eat.  It appears people loved them, and some wound up eating 8 a night.  I ruined many a diet these past few days.

People liked the stronger orange flavored truffles and many loved the pepper truffles.  They weren't spicy up front, but would leave a lingering burn after being eaten, usually in the throat.  Some people who would eat theirs slower would feel it in their mouth.

In retrospect, the pepper should have steeped in the cream for a while to really get the pepper to release into the cream and bring forth a more forward pepper taste.

I recommend people use a truffle or three in hot milk to make a hot chocolate.

I only made one batch of milk chocolate truffles, orange-cinnamon.  The difference with this one, is that it uses less cream due to the existing milk content.

I expect to get another truffle craving in February and perhaps try white chocolate truffles for a few people.

It's been half a year and surprisingly, I haven't really done too many projects related to anything gluten free.  In fact, my meals have been very simple and somewhat scary in their repetitiveness.  In a large part, it's been, baked chicken with some sort of seasoning, some rice and sauteed vegetable.  I haven't been drinking a lot of beer either.  In fact, it took until the week after thanksgiving to finally give some away.

Back in July, I made another two batches of Orange Coriander beer and then, didn't touch it for months and didn't even write about it.  I kegged one, and stuck it into the fridge for months, the other sat in the primary fermenter (a big bucket) until a week or two ago.  I gave away several gallons, emptying the keg, and refilled it with the other orange coriander.  An interesting result was that both had lost nearly all their orange and coriander flavor, but had also lost a lot of it's sorghum flavor.  I also put on one of the spiced pumpkin beers from last year.  No trace of spices whatsoever, but again, no off flavors of sorghum.  I'm considering that a good idea for extracts is to make a generic beer base, and then a few months later adding flavoring components and then later kegging it.  This is of course assuming that I, or others, will be drinking it within a reasonable amount of time.

I've barely had any of the sangria mentioned in the last post, I believe I've given away maybe a gallon's worth and had a few glasses on my own during the summer.  It actually turned out quite well, not as sugary/syrupy/cloyingly sweet as I would have expected.  The downside was that I really did not do a side by side test with a batch that I didn't modify.  I expect that someday, when I find more drinkers, I'll do a side by side and see who likes which versions.   And yes... in 6 months, I still have 3-4 gallons of sangria remaining.

I *still* have the cranberry mead from last year sitting in a carboy in the spare bathtub.  I will soon be kegging this, after I've washed out the beer fridge, the moisture and temperature causes mold to grow and I still need to modify to include better airflow and less clutter.

Once the tub is clear, I expect to set up a multi-tiered spraying assembly along with some form (probably ceramic) heat lamps so I can try sprouting some sorghum this way.  The problem is that I don't quite know what the temperature will get up to with heatlamps and how many I would need.  Troubling since due to some car payments, I haven't been able to buy the equipment anyways.  (The car has actually been one of the reasons I haven't been doing as many projects).

In the past week or two, I've had a craving for truffles, so I made several batches, which I will explain in the next post, along with what I think I would do differently next time.

I started a wine kit a month and a half ago and had decided that since the previous two kits that I have done turned out too sweet by following the directions, that I would try modifying the process.  Ordinarily, wine kits are designed to follow the specific steps.  I think that for most kits, this would be true.

There are some kits, usually with the term "mist" involved, that are designed to be sweeter and have different flavors than normal wine.  Apparently, back in the day of the 80's, there was something called a wine cooler.  These used to be made with real wine and were diluted with various fruit juices and water to the equivalent of a 3-6% drink.  At some point, the tax rate on wine greatly increased and because beer was taxed so low, businesses used barley to base this type of drink on.  Now they are known as malt-based beverage, or malternatives.  Some well known ones are Smirnoff Ice and mike's hard (lemonade).

Of course, because they are made with barley malt, this means that they're off limits to those of us with celiac's or have a gluten intolerance.  This is where these winekits are useful.  They can ideally make a fruity, somewhat sweet drink that isn't too expensive.  Some examples of standard types would be like a white zinfandel, or a sangria, but these kits go beyond that by mixing various flavors to make a cranberry red wine, or a tropical fruit blush wine.  There's also a new line that mimics traditional bar drinks like the cosmopolitan, pina colada, and margarita.  I'm not quite sure what I make of those, and how those could have any benefit over making it from spirits.  It only takes a few seconds to make a mixed drink, perhaps longer if you don't have the bottles handy.

Wine cooler kits (mist/breeze wines), do have an advantage to taking a wine and mixing it with fruit and juices.  Ordinarily, to make a wine cooler, you need to choose a wine, out of the very many types wine, choose the juices that you wish to mix with them, and then figure out the quantities of each.  For example, taking a rioja or temperanillo, or a syrah or other types of earthy red wine, some fruit (limes, lemons, oranges, apples), sugar, some spirits like cognac or orange liquor and mixing it all into a pitcher where it sits overnight.  It's hard to have the foresight to have all the ingredients necessary sometimes, plus the expectation to make it the prior day.  Wouldn't it be easier to have it on tap?

Unfortunately, in making a sangria, I couldn't compare a version that stuck with the original instructions, and only could compare to two Winexpert kits that I had previously made.  Those had been too sweet and I often mixed it with inexpensive wine to cut down the sweetness.  When choosing, I had strongly considered doing one of these two to compare, but with my drinkers liking sangria during the summer, I felt it was a good decision.

I decided on RJ Spagnols Seville Orange Sangria and started it per the instructions with the bag of grape concentrate, water, yeast, and I added half of the post-ferment sweetener (the Orange flavoring).  I also added a touch of tart cherry concentrate as well.  I let this ferment normally, racked it into a carboy with the sulfites to prevent further fermentation and added the remaining sweetener.  After letting this clear, I racked it into a keg and the next day had a taste test.

It was agreed that it was drinkable, quite good and not too sweet.  The orange stood out and there was a hint of cherry from the cherry addition.  I would like to try one of the prior kits done in a similar fashion, to see how it really compares.

These are likely to be the only type of kits that I would consider modifying by adding some of the flavored sweetener to the initial fermentation, and the addition of concentrates.  It would be more difficult to try to modify a kit that normally creates a pinot noir, chardonnay or reisling.  The primary modifications would be the timing and amount of oak flavoring.  Fruit concentrates may be interesting, but it would also risk a kit that takes anywhere from six months to two years after bottling (or kegging) to find out as well as four to ten weeks to ferment, whereas these mist/breeze kits are ready within 4 weeks from the initial fermentation.
Cost is also a factor.  The wines that can take several years before drinking (but of a good quality) costs in the range of $US150-170.  The lighter kits cost from $US50-70.  Granted, the alcohol% is 12% vs 6.5%, but it's easier to experiment with something whose results are pretty quick, rather than take the chance of having something come out okay several years later.


Wine kits:
Winexpert
RJ Spagnols

Tax season was a bear this year so I didn't get to work on any projects, but nearing the end of it, I had been researching more and more about malting my own sorghum.  I had actually started researching a few years ago, but really ramped it up in the past month and finally made the attempt.

I won't go into the failure of the first attempt, but I will say that 48 hours into the process I knew something was wrong and had to start over.

What followed was a multistep process first steeping the grain, germinating the grain and then drying the grain following updated processes modified to what I could possibly do.

Step 1:  Sorting the grain.

After receiving the grain, I picked out approximate 2 pounds of sorghum and tried to pick out broken and odd looking grains.  I expect that a series of graded sifters would work better for this, but it's not likely something that I will have handy.  Broken grain, stones, twigs,  bugs.  These would not malt and could be quite detrimental to the process.  Thankfully, because the sorghum purchased from Pleasant Hill Grain was triple cleaned, all I had to deal with was the occasional broken grain.



Step 2:  Steeping the grain

Once I measured out my 900g's of sorghum, I did an initial wash, using the same metal bowl, filling it with water and running my fingers vigorously through the grain to clear any husks and floating non-viable seeds.  I scheduled out a soak/air dry schedule of 6 hours soak in 30 degrees C water, 3 hours air dry for 45 hours, plus a final higher temperature soak at 40 degrees for 6 more hours.
I soaked using a .1% alkaline solution.  Ideally, I would have been using sodium hydroxide (NaOH).  What I had to use instead was sodium carbonate(Na2CO3), derived from sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) by heating baking soda in the oven at 300 degrees for about 20 minutes.  I think I could have found the right time vs temperature formula for that though.  A 1% solution is 1g/100g water (and 1g water = 1ml water), so what I used was 1g/1L of water.  I used 4 liters of water per soak period.
In a comparison between a non-alkaline soak vs a alkaline soak, the alkaline soak showed the brownish result, either a reaction from the soda, or something being drawn from the grain.
*Note, ideally, after the final 40 degree C steep, I would have sterilized the grain with a 1% solution for a few minutes.

After the soak, the small chits (sprouts) are starting to grow.  (Image taken from a viability test.)

Step 3: Germinating the grain

I used my oven as a germinator, sterilizing it first by running the clean cycle a day before.  I spread the grain on a screen and used a plant heater to keep the oven at 40C, an ultrasonic fogger to keep 90-100% humidity and an air pump to keep new air circulating into the oven to prevent stagnation.  Germinating grain does use up oxygen, and it's been studied that the soak water also has oxygen taken from it, though aerating the soak water showed that grain sprouts too soon for malting.

Unseen in the photo was that I moved the airstone and heat pad under the bottom rack, moved the grain to the bottom rack and put a bowl and fogger above it.

Despite the high humidity, higher than what is used for other grains, sorghum quickly loses water, so its necessary to spray the sorghum once or twice daily, as well as to rotate and stir the grain to keep it from matting.

Germination day 4

Germination day two.

It took much, much longer than I had planned to just empty a container so that I could put the spiced beer into a total of 3 kegs.  This past weekend, I finally drew the final glass of beer from my orange-coriander beer.  With three empty kegs, one from Thanksgiving, one that I had to dump, and finally this one. I made sure to clean and sterilize the kegs and run the cleaner through the outlet on each of them.

It was an unfortunate turn of events for the one keg I had to dump out, and if it happens again, I will have to completely replace parts of it, since the beer had turned to vinegar with odd things in it.  I never figured out what it was, either.

I filled two of the kegs to the top, and put the rest of the beer into the third keg.  The third keg being the one that had issues last time.  This way, if I lose anything, I would only lose 2-3 gallons of beer.  The other two kegs were filled to have 4.5-5 gallons in them and I carbonated them all to at least 12psi.  I may consider going higher once I get a better test.

I taste tested it today, and it's very much like the one I had at Thanksgiving.  It's a little out of date since it is a spiced beer, but it's not one that I want to try to keep until next winter.  I will taste it again tomorrow to define the taste, since it is likely to not taste the same once I give it time to settle and to let the any yeast settle out.

Once the carboys were washed and sterilized, I then decided to rack the cranberry mead.   Apparently I didn't use enough water because there was 1/2 a gallon of space in the carboy that I had to use the plain mead I made last July to finish filling the carboy to the top.  

Another oddity persisted, and that seems to be that I either brought a lot of yeast, or I brought unfermented honey over to the carboy.  The liquid was pretty viscous at the end and it could be from either situation.  However, the measurement taken shows that the racked liquid before addition was 1.018.  I'll taste test this tomorrow, since I put the glass into the fridge to try to drop the yeast out.  I may have to find a different clarifier, and I may also have to find out if it's really sugar that is remaining.