Chocolates & Confections Week 7

Chocolates & Confections Week 7

This week, we made what's called "crystalline confections". Basically they're sugar-based confections that have a melt-in-your-mouth quality to it (unlike something chewy like taffy). So like fudge and pralines.
Project for today: chocolate fudge, penuche (brown sugar fudge, popular in East Coast), and pralines (from New Orleans). I made the pralines, since I love pecans :)

Pralines from New Orleans (pronounced prah-leens from Naw-leens) are delicious confections made from brown and white sugar, cream, milk, and butter. The mixture is cooked to 230F...

Right now, it's at 221F. Once we reach 230F, we dump in the toasted pecans all at once.

Notice that the display on my digital thermometer looks a little berserk. Yes, even though these are designed to read up to 450F, it doesn't seem to handle intense heat too well for a prolonged period of time. Once the pecans are added, it has to be cooked to 237F.
Then we leave it alone until it's 212F. We then stir it until nice and creamy.

Naw-leen's Praw-leens, portioned out onto parchment. Once this cools, it sets up, so it can be picked up and munched on.

My teammates made chocolate fudge and penuche.
The sugar mixture is cooked, then poured onto a granit slab, and remaining ingredients are allowed to sit on it. The fudge needs to cool before mixing everything in...but the person making it waited too long and the mixture hardened before everything got incorporated into it.

She was about to toss it, but I decided to give it one more shot by stretching and pulling it like a taffy--lo and behold, it DID turn into a taffy. Moral of the story: don't give up.
Penuche, a brown sugar fudge, is tabled and can be molded. Here we used some hardware shelving to assemble a mold.

We let it set, then slice them into bite-size pieces.

I love the texture, but they're too sweet for me. I think I'll roll them up and dip them in bittersweet chocolate--kind of like butterscotch buckeyes.