Having your room temperature at 68 degrees F is the ideal. I would suggest trying again, let the chocolate set with the room at that temperature, and see if that takes care of the problem.
We're visiting family and friends this weekend and both a visit to the TSA website and a phone call are not leaving me any clearer on how I should packge the truffles I'm planning to bring along for the least amount of fuss. Does anyone have a recent experience to share?
Thanks for asking the question. Reading the various answers has given me a lot to think about. Just last night I was saying to my husband "I just want to make the chocolates! I'm only selling them because I don't want to eat them all and you can't make just one truffle. I don't want to think about the business stuff--I want someone else to think about it for me and if they say I need to make x amount of this and x amount of that, that's fine, I just don't want to think about it!" But really, right now it's all me, so I guess I don't have that luxury.
400 in one 8-hour day including making ganache sounds absolutely miraculous! How do you manage? I don't even make my ganache the same day, though I do scoop and roll the same day I dip. I've been analyzing my time to try to figure out where it's all going, how I can get more done in the same amount of time. Please tell me more!
You say you're slow, but it looks like my average is 120, so my hat's off to you!
Just dipping or the whole shebang from scooping, rolling, etc.? And would you already have your chocolate tempered and ready to go or not? By writing down the time I start and stop each task and then dividing by the number of truffles, I came up with an average of about 30 seconds to dip each truffle. I also learned that I had to stop what I was doing and re-warm my chocolate about every hour. Plus there is some setup time, since I'm working out of my home kitchen. It could be realistic for me to have scooped and rolled the day before, but I'd still have to temper the chocolate that day. So let's say out of an 8-hour day I'd have to subtract about 2 hours for setup/cleaning, and packing upall the truffles at the end of the day. Then subtract another hour and a half to temper the chocolate, that leaves me with 5 1/2 hours to work in. I'd also spend about 5 minutes out of each hour, conservatively, re-warming my chocolate, so let's just cut that back to 5 hours because it's an easier number for me to work with. 5 hours x 60 minutes per hour x 2 truffles per minute comes out to 600. In some universe where someone else is tempering my chocolate and setting up my kitchen and all I have to do is stand there and dip for8 hours, I guess it would be 960. Now, if I was starting from having to scoop and roll ganache, each ganache ball takes me an average of 45 seconds to scoop and roll. So if I take that 5 hour time to work in and each truffle needs 1 minute and 15 seconds of my time then I could do 240+ (cause less dipping time means less times I need to stop and rewarm). And all of these estimates would only apply if I were using a single type of ganache (so I didn't have to stop and wash my scoop--because I only have one) and dipping in just 1 type of chocolate. I haven't established yet what a typical workday is for me. I worked for about 10 hours on Tuesday and only made 161 truffles because I was using 4 different ganaches, a pureed fruit filling, and making a little truffle mortarboard and doing some writing with a syringe.
Someone please tell me I'm not the only person analyzing their time in the kitchen?
ETA: And I also need time to bring all my stuff into the kitchen, remove all my stuff from the kitchen at the end of the day, and photograph the truffles.
Cool, so the raspberry reduction, as of yesterday at least, consists of an entire bag of frozen raspberries, which is a little over 3 cups according to the package, dumped directly into a saucepan from frozen. I let it cook down until it loses that "wet" look, about an hour to an hour and a half. After that, let it cool enough to throw in the food processor or blender, and finally strain to get most of the seeds out.
The ganache recipe is:
1/2c heavy cream
1T unsalted soft butter
20 oz white chocolate
1/4c of the raspberry reduction
1 oz (by weight) freeze dried raspberries
I tend to go heavy on the chocolate with white chocolate ganaches, cause I like the firmness.
I know it's been a long time since you posted this, and It's about 2:30 am here, so if I see a response later today when I'm fully awakethat you're still interested, I'll give you more details. For now, let me say I've been making a really good raspberry ganache in white chocolate and I do it primarily by making a pureed raspberry reduction, reducing down to 1/4 the original volume of the puree. I typically start this with frozen raspberries. The consistency I end up with is something of a sticky paste. I also, because I'm able to get it, add some freeze dried powdered raspberries to the puree before I reduce and also to the ganache itself. Let me know if you want recipes.
