Back to School: making chocolates in Melbourne
I'd always wanted to learn how to make chocolates and confections, even buying a big, expensive book from Amazon once. Since making candy is so theory and technique heavy, I quickly got bored reading the book, and it gathered dust on the floor next to my bed. So when I saw the opportunity to pay someone to explain at least the chocolate part to me, I jumped to sign up!
The Savour Chocolate and Patisserie School in Melbourne offers four levels of Chocolates and Pralines, and I signed up for a 2-day level 1 course. Unlike the other cooking classes I've taken, which are geared towards amateur home cooks or just tourists interested in a certain cuisine, this class was for both interested amateurs as well as people interested in becoming chocolate-makers. My classmates included a couple chefs, one of whom flew in for the class. With this as background, it shouldn't have surprised me that this would be the toughest, most challenging cooking class I've taken!
Our teacher was Paul, who had an addictive, dry sense of humor. Like I would just wait for him to poke fun at me in some way. Here he is demonstrating how crystals in the chocolate form (seriously, with chocolate, it's all about the crystals, aka tempering). At the same time, he's giving one of his "looks" at a classmate who just asked a silly question.
In addition to learning the theory of crystallization, we also practiced tempering the chocolate a lot, and also tasted different kinds of base chocolate.
One of the most interesting parts of the class for me was to find out how a lot of fancy chocolates get the effects that they do. Like the colorful patterns on top of the chocolate - it's just from a transfer paper with fat-soluble pigments. Be sure to put the transfer sheet on top of the hand-dipped chocolate right after it comes out of the liquid chocolate.
Or how chocolates get that swirly pattern on top. It's just a layer of different colored chocolate, before you put a second layer of chocolate on top, acting as the "real" shell holding the filling in. Here's one of my molds with a swirly pattern, waiting to cool down so I can put on the second layer. It turned out nice and shiny!
Here's another one of my molded chocolates (had a pear ganache inside). I was proud of these, since the teacher told us this mold was the hardest to do, since it had sharp edges and corners!
These were two hectic, full days: scheduled for 7 hours with a 25-30 min lunch break, they ended up taking closer to 8 hours. I had that constant "keep your head above the water" feeling that I haven't had since I left the working world. At the end of the 2 days, we got to take home all of the chocolates that the class made in total. At the top you can see three chickens that I made using molds. Note that the middle two boxes have TWO layers of chocolate! What am I going to do with all of these before I leave the country in a few days??
Overall, I was really pleased by this chocolate making class. So intense, so different from my previous cooking classes, it was a great way to spend two days. It might seem weird to come to Melbourne to learn how to make chocolates, but having been here a few days already, it actually makes sense to me. Melbourne people love high culture, fashion, style, good eating. Not surprising that the first candy school I've come across is located in this great city.
