Wanted to make chocolate covered strawberries for my better half for Mother’s Day tomorrow. Last couple times I tried this I failed miserably. I decided to do some research on the subject. I’m sure this is not new to most of you but it was new to me. I learned you need to temper the chocolate before you dip your strawberries.
Watching videos on YouTube I thought this looks like it’s a bit too difficult for me to try. (I have tendencies to not pay close attention to measurements and temperatures when cooking, that’s probably why I have issues baking). I then came across a video or two using sous vide to temper chocolate and I thought that’s seems easy and it was.
One was using the sous vide tub as your double boiler but that seemed to take too long and I know I would have got water in my chocolate and screwed it all up. The other technique was to just seal them in a vacuum seal bag an chuck them in the water. This seemed right up my alley. Simple with a small chance of failure.
Found some times and temperatures on the old inter web and off I went. I was using milk chocolate so I used the following temperatures and times:
115° for 15 minutes then 78° for 15 minutes then 86° for the last 15 minutes. To get the water down to 78° I just removed about 3 cups of water from my vessel and added in 3 cups of ice. It took about 5 minutes to get to 78°.
I found the following temperatures for dark chocolate:
120° for 15 minutes then 80° for 15 minutes then 88° for the last 15 minutes.
There were times and temperatures for white chocolate but that stuff is disgusting and I’ll never need to melt it. 😆
When all was said and done I removed the bag from the water, dried it off extremely well and snipped the corner and squeezed the chocolate into a small diameter juice glass. It flowed extremely well and the strawberries dipped nicely. After the first 4 strawberries that I dipped I microwaved the chocolate for 10 seconds, dipped the next 4 and then microwaved again for another 10 seconds and then dipped the last 4.
The strawberries look good and the chocolate tasted great when I sampled some after I let it harden.
I’ve now learned a new trick with my sous vide. Probably never use the double boiler method to melt chocolate again.
The upper left strawberry was the last one I dipped. I was running out of chocolate and the chocolate probably needed heated back up a bit.
Watching videos on YouTube I thought this looks like it’s a bit too difficult for me to try. (I have tendencies to not pay close attention to measurements and temperatures when cooking, that’s probably why I have issues baking). I then came across a video or two using sous vide to temper chocolate and I thought that’s seems easy and it was.
One was using the sous vide tub as your double boiler but that seemed to take too long and I know I would have got water in my chocolate and screwed it all up. The other technique was to just seal them in a vacuum seal bag an chuck them in the water. This seemed right up my alley. Simple with a small chance of failure.
Found some times and temperatures on the old inter web and off I went. I was using milk chocolate so I used the following temperatures and times:
115° for 15 minutes then 78° for 15 minutes then 86° for the last 15 minutes. To get the water down to 78° I just removed about 3 cups of water from my vessel and added in 3 cups of ice. It took about 5 minutes to get to 78°.
I found the following temperatures for dark chocolate:
120° for 15 minutes then 80° for 15 minutes then 88° for the last 15 minutes.
There were times and temperatures for white chocolate but that stuff is disgusting and I’ll never need to melt it. 😆
When all was said and done I removed the bag from the water, dried it off extremely well and snipped the corner and squeezed the chocolate into a small diameter juice glass. It flowed extremely well and the strawberries dipped nicely. After the first 4 strawberries that I dipped I microwaved the chocolate for 10 seconds, dipped the next 4 and then microwaved again for another 10 seconds and then dipped the last 4.
The strawberries look good and the chocolate tasted great when I sampled some after I let it harden.
I’ve now learned a new trick with my sous vide. Probably never use the double boiler method to melt chocolate again.
The upper left strawberry was the last one I dipped. I was running out of chocolate and the chocolate probably needed heated back up a bit.
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