Making Artisan Chocolates by Andrew Garrison Shotts Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Making Artisan Chocolates
Book Review: Simple techniques with ideas
Summary: 5 Stars
I like this book. I have made truffles before but not with the right tools or with tempered chocolates. Shotts shows you how to do all of this. I enjoy the photos and descriptions of techniques. I'm going to try to make a few of his recipes this weekend. If you love chocolate and always wanted to make your own this book is an asset to your collection.Book Review: Review title
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a good book with good recipes and tons of extremely specific information regarding technique and materials, though it's a little light on theory. My one complaint is that it's frequently very difficult to figure out what exactly is being pictured in the color plates as there are very few captions or labels on them.
And one quick tip: you should probably allocate at least $200 for practice ingredients when trying out some of the more colorful recipes for the first time. 90% of them will probably end up in the disposal.
A second quick tip for those of you who will be pulling out your hair trying to find the "G Pectin" some of the recipes call for; you can buy it here: [...] or rather you could if Amazon would actually let me include a URL to a site they don't own in a review.
Chef
Rubber
Dot
Com
Book Review: One of the best chocolate books
Summary: 5 Stars
This outstanding chocolate book deserves a privileged place in every chocolatier's library. It is extremely informative, well written, and very user friendly. The recipes are so enticing that you'll want to drop everything and get started making each and every one.Book Review: Excellent book
Summary: 5 Stars
If you have ever worked through a long difficult candy receipe only to have it inexplicably fail--this is a good book for you.
The great strength of Making Artisan Chocolates is in the specificity of the directions. Making candy is unlike most kinds of cooking in that there is almost no room for error. Many candy receipes fail because they give general instructions with the idea that the cook knows how the candy is supposed to look, or feel at a given stage.
Instead of trusting that his reader is experienced, Shotts gives specific instructions, right down to which brand of chocolate will temper at which temperature. He charts guidelines for compatible ingredients and kinds of chocolate.
Thanks to Andrew Shotts I made my first successful chocolates last weekend. They were the best my family had ever tasted, and they looked gorgeous!
Book Review: Finally, an inexpensive book on making chocolates the professional and modern way
Summary: 5 Stars
Andrew Shotts is as good of an author as he is a pastry chef (he was named Pastry Arts and Design top10 some year or other). This is a great book, aimed at intermediate or higher pastry chefs. This book does require some specialized equipment to do the fancier techniques (dipping fork, molds, transfer sheets). But even without any specialized equipment, you can make any of the chocolate candies in the book.
Contents include the following topics: chocolate basics and flavor pairings, including pairings with traditional flavors and non-traditional spices. About ~35 chocolate recipes. Recipes include standard classics like classic dark, classic milk, hazelnut praline. Recipes also include classic flavors (but maybe not classic pairings) like peanut butter+jam, and banana caramel. Finally there are non-traditional spice pairings like habanero+peanut butter, raspberry-wasabi, and mango-mint-coriander.
Techniques are where I think the book really shines. The book has excellent pictures and descriptions of making truffles, making molded chocolates, and making hand-dipped chocolates. Shotts shows the technique of airbrushing as well as how to use transfer sheets and luster or razzle dust. He does a good job of scaling down the equipment for the non professional. For instance when showing hand-dipped chocolates, he uses a baking pan + saran wrap + knife instead of sheet + frame + cutting guitar. After reading this book, you can go into any chocolate shop and say "I know how they did that technique". Surprisingly, Shotts never mentions tempering machines.
Finally, there is a book that shows all the techniques that professionals use. I don't have to pull out my issue of "Pastry Arts and Design" from 3 years ago or wait for a particular Food network espisode to come on. I have this book now. I love the range of recipes - not too classic, but not too experimental either. For those interested, there is a nice table of taste pairings for nontraditional spice flavors. The last wonderful thing is the price: usually you have to pay professional prices ($100-$250) for books that show professional techniques and recipes. Not so here.
Compared to others: "Fine Chocolates" by Wybauw is a great book with great tips on tempering how to correct molding mistakes. It's a lot more $$ (~$65 on Amazon, used to have to buy it elsewhere for $100) and is aimed at the more advanced chocolatier. This book is better than either of the Ecole Lenotre books.