Pralines

In my Tuesday morning class, we made a variety of pralines. Using milk chocolate, we mass produced almond pralines, cashew pralines, and peanut pralines. It was a vital lesson in the production of nut clusters.

For each, we toasted the nuts first to bring out their natural flavors. We then coated them in a sugar syrup to help sweeten them. After tempering chocolate, we coated all of the nuts with chocolate and then had to work quickly as a group to portion out the nut clusters on various sheet pans.

Our last task for the day was to make Paillette Feuilletines. These are a similar process to nut clusters but are made from a wheat wafer that is broken into pieces. Alone, these wafers taste a bit to me like an ice cream cone.

This class is a serious lesson in production. Over the past two weeks, we've worked in groups to mass produce a large quantity of these chocolate products, which are used at campus events or sold at the weekly retail bake sale. This class really forces me to work quickly and efficiently all the time. And for whatever reason, we are always scrambling around at the end of the day to clean up and put the product away. I again failed to take a minute to snap some photos so hopefully this week I can do so.