I had the honor of getting to spend this week training under Chef Philippe Vancayseele, an outstanding chef, master chocolatier and Callebaut chocolate ambassador. Chef Philippe was very patient, very informative and very funny…but he pulls no punches. On the first day, we received a quick kitchen tutorial and jumped right into creation of ten (10) different ganache recipes to be slabbed/enrobed or piped into molds.
In the picture to the left, Chef is demonstrating some technique while talking about some of the flavor combinations that we are working with. Speaking of flavor, we made some outstanding pralines this week including Raisins/juniper berries/port, orientsal sesame, saffron/black currant and coconut caramel. I will post some pictures in the next post.
To the right is the Callebaut academy kitchen, with five(5) working granite slabs on top of refrigerators that really provided ten(10) workstations not including Chef’s table up front. The kitchen was really packed with equipment including every hand tool, numerous scales, a robo-coupe, induction cooktops and 3 tempering machines (see below).
Top left: Chocolate World automatic tempering machine with enrober. Bottom left: Mol d’Art 50kg tempering machine. Bottom right: Selmi Plus automatic tempering machine. I would take any of these but the automatic machines, with vibration tables and enrobers were fantastic..just expensive (altogether the Chocolate world or Selmi machine is close to $20,000 euro).
Day 1 at the Academy was great. More posts coming.
Chris
