Chocolate Wine, Millionaire Shortbread
Specialty Equipment: centrifuge, water bath, pH meter
Specialty Ingredients: whey powder, glucose, gold powder
Days: 2
Dish as in The Fat Duck:
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Look at this baby. It’s a Dewar flask with liquid nitrogen! I’ve been searching for liquid nitrogen for ages, calling restaurants and cookery schools, to ask if they used liquid nitrogen and if I could possibly visit them to complete two recipes from the book. Every request was turned down with either a ‘no’ or a ‘we don’t use that stuff’. I got to talk about it with my dad, and what do you know, the solution to my problem was close to home all along. He has contacts at the University of Utrecht, who use liquid nitrogen by the truckload. It was absolutely no problem to pick some up. Funny how some things play out.
A (possible) problem is the type of Dewar flask the liquid nitrogen is stored in (not one for long term storage) and its ability to ‘hold on to’ the liquid nitrogen. It was picked up Wednesday and I’m planning on using it Saturday to make the lime mouse and bacon & egg ice cream recipes with some friends, so I hope it will make it until then. Fingers crossed.
Not really related to liquid nitrogen, but related to the search of ingredients, does anyone have any knowledge on procuring fresh hearts of palm? I’ve found some suppliers in the States and contacted them, but didn’t get any responses. Has anyone ever bought hearts of palm and/or knows where you can get some?
Anyway, on with the dish at hand. Chocolate Wine and Millionaire Shortbread. I started with the wine part of the dish, consisting of Maury or Banyuls wine, Valrhona milk chocolate and skimmed milk. After combining the chocolate and wine you have to put it in a centrifuge to separate the solids from the liquid and toss the former. I could’ve contacted labs, but I must say even I’m not that crazy. In the end I settled on clarifying the chocolate mixture to get rid of the solids. There is definitely some flavor loss, but it’s way better than the loss of my bank account by buying a centrifuge.
Egg whites holding on to stuff.
The millionaire shortbread is a small 3-layer cake. The base is occupied by shortbread, salted butter caramel takes centre stage, chocolate and fleur de sel tops it all (I left out the coating of the salt crystals with gold powder). Layer 1 is straightforward. Layer 2 as well, although requiring more attention. Layer 3 is a bitch. It involves my biggest frustration of this book, working with chocolate. It’s safe to say the chocolate preparations gave me the most headaches and resulted all, with a few exceptions (components of dishes), in failure. Today was no different.
I tried to temper the chocolate by using my rice cooker, bringing the chocolate up and down in temperature in a controlled bath, but it turned out worst than every other attempt. After making the recipes from this book I’m more than happy to leave chocolate concoctions to professionals and only make the occasional safe chocolate cake.
Chocolate before it turned to shit.
To build the shortcake the recipe instructs to cut the layers individually in rectangles instead of stacking the layers on top of another and then cut it in rectangles. I found it incredibly difficult to cut every piece in exactly the same size, especially the caramel, which stretched out when handling it instead of giving a clear snap. When making this recipe you could try to stack the shortbread (when it comes out of the oven and is still warm) and caramel, and then cut it in rectangles to avoid handling the caramel on its own.
With the shortbread ready I heated the chocolate wine and frothed it with a milk frother. The instructions state to add whey powder to the wine to give it a silky texture and probably also help with the foam (there is a note in the instructions that whey powder is responsible for milk’s ability to foam). I thought whey powder shouldn’t be too hard to find in a dairy saturated country as the Netherlands. Wrong. The closest thing I found were whey powder mixes in bodybuilding shops, but there was, with no exception, all kinds of stuff added to the mixes including artificial flavorings. I added a bit of soy lecithin in the absence of whey powder to help with the aeration of the wine.
The shortbreads were far from perfect, but the photo above is not all flattering. Here’s a better one.
Chocolate wine is great. Really loved it. As for the millionaire shortbread, what can go wrong with shortbread, caramel and chocolate?
Great stuff – I’ve been leafing through my own copy of the cookbook, and I’m in literal awe of your determination to make it through. This is amazing stuff, and whilst I commiserate with your inability to manipulate chocolate, you can rest assured that you are my absolute hero for actually doing this.
The Fat Duck Cookbook is a thing of beauty, but it has strange powers to draw a human being into a seductive madness of temperature baths and leather essence. Thank god you succumbed – it was either you or me… 🙂
Thanks for the words Mandy.
Glad I prevented you from going through the book, I may have saved a life, because I’m starting to loose it, haha.
Did you make any recipes?
“Chocolate before it turned to shit.” …..That quote made me lol in the office just now , youre a funny guy.
Looking forward to the weekends efforts next…Go for it
Oh and thanks for adding my link , dont know what ill attempt from hestons book next though.
cheers
Alan
I’ve been waiting for this recipe to come up as Millionaires shortbread is a favourite. It’s also one of the things I’ve attempted from the Fat Duck.
This was my first attempt
http://sybarwand.blogspot.com/2010/04/millionaires-shortbread.html
Lack of sous-vide system & your earlier comments about chocolate had me pretty worried so I did a fair bit of additional reading & found this :- http://www.cookingforengineers.com/article/155/Tempering-Chocolate
My chocolate worked out well enough for me & my taste testers, and had all the hall marks of tempered chocolate (glossy with a sharp snap).
I’m also interested to see you also had issues with the caramel, the clean up in my kitchen was ummm involved 🙂
Your chocolate looks good man. The shortbread is good isn’t it? I had the same issues you described with the caramel.
I’ve read the article and it seems Heston uses a mix of both methods. You have to bring the chocolate to 53°C, then seed it like your method, bring it to 28°C and then up again to 32°C. The next time I could skip the 28°C and just keep it at 32°C.
The thing that makes it really difficult is the amount of chocolate I use. When using Valrhona or in this case Lindt (which needed to be used) I don’t work with large amounts, so it is really hard to control.
I’m thinking of making the aerated chocolates again, because I can’t stand it the aeration failed twice (I even have a freaking vacuum machine!), so I might try tempering one last time.
Tempering chocolate can definitely be a pain, especially when you’re working with small quantities. Working with large quantities is a lot easier, and once it’s tempered you can always set it aside and re-use it later!
As for clarifying the chocolate wine, did you consider using gelatin clarification or agar clarification (see my blog post http://www.kayahara.ca/2010/10/filtering-liquids-with-gelatin/) instead of the traditional egg-white method? It should result in less flavour loss, and is a lot easier.
He Matthew, yeah I did. A lot of stocks of The Big Fat Duck Cookbook have to go through an ice filtration process, but I wanted the chocolate wine finished, and not have to wait for it to freeze and thaw.
I did however read an article of Dave Arnold in which he deals with ‘quick agar filtration’. That might have been the best solution, but my mind was unwiling to check it out in full detail.
http://www.cookingissues.com/2009/07/14/agar-clarification-made-stupid-simple-best-technique-yet/
&
http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/07/20/simple-agar-clarification-1-year-anniversary-plus-a-rundown-of-current-clarification-techniques/
I like the idea of using gelatin or agar clarification as a substitute to an expensive centrifuge. It opens a whole lot of possibilities.
The disadvantage of agar is that you have to boil the mix for 2-3 minutes, which might be a problem with certain ingredients, like the chocolate in this dish.
In the past when I have needed a centrifuge I used a bicycle on it’s side and rotated the pedals by hand, whilst moving up the gears. If you attach the vessel full of liquid you wish centrifuged to the outer rim of the rear wheel, you will find that the spinning wheel in high gear makes a decent centrifuge replacement.
doris
Won’t you be twisting your arm off, hehe? The recipe states to spin it for 10 minutes (in a high speed centrifuge).
Thanks for your response – you asked if I’d cooked anything. Well, no – but I’m building up to it! I have acquired a sugar thermometer, a digital thermometer, and some gold powder, and I’m just waiting for some scales that are precise enough to measure the vanilla seeds. I’ve got glucose, 70% chocolate, and a will to succeed… millionaire’s shortcake, here I come!
Thanks for inspiring me. I shouldn’t have needed that much after paying for the bloody book, but there you go… 🙂
P.S. Doris has the right attitude, if you ask me. Where would we be without wild experimentation?
He Mandy, cool, let me know how it works out.
P.S. I also think Doris has the right attitude, it’s about the same attitude with which I started and kept up this blog. It’s just that the wine has to spin at 4000rpm (67 per second!), and the diameter of a wheel probably makes a big difference, but can you keep it up to spin it manually and can you generate enough g force?
Hi,
Whats the recipe to make the chocolate wine.
thank you
regards,
denis
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1427&bih=1209&q=%22chocolate+wine%22+AND+%22heston+blumenthal%22&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
Hi, i am planning to make Heston’s millionaire shortbread from his book ”Heston’s Fantastical Feasts” and the recipe for the salted caramel requires glucose, Im not sure if this is liquid glucose or solid glucose.
If you could give me some advice, that will be great.
BTW Im 15 !
Hi Craig, good luck with the recipe. I know there’s a difference between liquid and solid glucose (in the cookbook there is a distinction between ‘glucose’ and ‘glucose syrup’), but have always used glucose syrup. Worked out fine. For some reason I could never force myself to look beyond glucose syrup.
Funny how the salted butter caramel for the millionaire shortbread calls for “glucose” as opposed to “glucose syrup”. A version of the salted butter caramel used to be used in the bacon-and-egg ice cream recipe (though no longer part of that recipe now) and glucose syrup was used there in equal proportions to the sugar and milk, just like “glucose” as mentioned was in equal proportions as well. Either should work equally well- keep in mind the function of the glucose is to prevent the sugar from crystallizing, rather than to add sweetness. Either the syrup or pure glucose do that equally well. The water content of the glucose (syrup) shouldn’t matter too much either because the high temperatures at which you’ll be working make most of it evaporate anyway. The water content of glucose syrup is pretty low to begin with anyway; most likely under 10%.