2.17.26 | Failure, After Failure, After Failure

Son of a bitch! Why won't this chocolate set up?!

We've been working on expanding our repertoire lately, creating new recipes and pairing new flavor combinations. It can be a bit frustrating. It can also be rewarding: creating a new solid recipe to add to the Big Blue Recipe Book in the kitchen is always nice. The book is divided into headings like Bread Things, Charcuterie/Pickles, Sauce Work, Sweets, Fixin’s, [Name Redacted], Drinkies, and Spice Blends. The Big Blue Recipe Book started out nice enough, with printed laminated sheets in alphabetical order. Over the years it has become a mishmash of notebook paper, dog-eared pages, that one recipe that someone spilled soy sauce all over and is barely legible and pretty much any scrap of paper we can scribble on. When you have a recipe that just works, write it down and add it to the book.

Creating something new can be a real beast, one which I have been failing to tame. I checked and double checked my ratio of cream to chocolate, I've got my spices toasted and citrus peeled, the sugar and cream steaming away, hovering somewhere around 160 degrees, I’ve weighed out my chocolate, I’ve steeped my spices, and I’ve made my ganache. Into the mold it goes and then overnight in the fridge to set up. I've crossed my “t's” and dotted my lowercase “j's,” I'm sure it's all going to work out, I mean what's the worst that could happen? … Right? …Right?

Nope! Son of a bitch! Time to start over … again.

Why isn't this recipe turning out?! It's the same recipe every time. I have weighed and reweighed the ingredients, checked my math and my ratio, and this recipe should be producing a beautiful Goldilocks-perfect, dense-but-spoon-able, chocolate crémeux. Somehow this batch is too thin, the one before was too thick, and after multiple attempts, not one batch has turned out similar to the one before. How am I supposed to make adjustments when each one gives me a wildly different result? At this rate this recipe is never making it into the good book.

Lying awake at night with a head full of swirling chocolate, staring out my bedroom window at the night sky filled with dancing pods of star anise, an orange rind of the morning sun slowly rising through the cinnamon stick forest, sugar drops of dew evaporating off the window and … Huzzah! Evaporation!

I fling on my coat and hat and head into work. I light the fires, put the pot on the stove, measure out my sugar and cream, bring it up to a low simmer. Remove the pot from the heat and allow the mix to steep. After the allotted time, I strain the creamy concoction and reweigh it. Sure enough, I’ve lost almost 200 grams of liquid to evaporation. Meaning my liquid-to-chocolate ratio is off and it has been off by varying amounts each time. Sometimes I’ve used a high-sided, smaller radius pot, but this time I used a rondo, a wider, short-sided pot. Each vessel allows for different amounts of evaporation. Son of a bitch! I figured it out!

After almost 30 years in the industry you'd think I would have learned to work smarter, not harder, but not so far. A good recipe isn't any old cheap date. It costs time, money, frustration, and grumpy chefs. They all carry a toll that someone somewhere has paid, and these last few weeks I've been paying my tolls. The sugar coffers are full.

At the end of the day, though, I am happy with the results. Truthfully, I am also fairly happy during the failure processes as well. It doesn't feel like it at the time, I don't act like it in the moment, the rest of the staff sees it all over my face, but none of it hurts so bad that I stop doing it. I keep doing it and have done it for years. What can I say, I may be a bit of a masochist for a good sweets recipe.

Plus now after all is said and done, I've added a new recipe card to the Big Blue Book.

—Matt