What is couverture chocolate?

Chocolate and white chocolate to be used in candy making are designated ‘couverture’ chocolate. Couverture chocolate contains a relatively high proportion of cocoa solids and cocoa butter as compare with other ingredients.

The cocoa butter melts and dissipates at a low temperature, giving it a beautiful mouthfeel as well as giving shine, gloss and snap to chocolate.

The extra cocoa butter makes the melted couverture chocolate very fluid and easy to work with. Most professional chefs use couverture. It is the perfect chocolate to use for dipping truffles and candies and for molding because it makes a thin coating and it’s also great to use for baking.

Couverture chocolate must be tempered to stabilize the emulsification of cocoa solids and butterfat before it is used for dipping or molding.

Tempering gives chocolate a glossy sheen and allows it to set up quickly. Tempering process enables chocolate to be stores at room temperature for longer without loss of texture or flavor.
What is couverture chocolate?

Ingredients for making fondants

Fondant, a mixture do sucrose, corn syrup and water, is a simple candy. Fondant used extensively in the candy and baking industry, the additive used is invert sugar.

When making fondant, accurately measuring the ingredients is important because changing their ratios greatly affects the texture of the fondant.

Ingredients: ½ cup softened butter, ½ cup corn syrup, ½ teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and 2 cups confectioner’s sugar (shifted).

The process of making fondant consists of cooking a mixture of the ingredients, cooling to 38° C to 54 ° C, then agitating it until it crystallizes.

In the baking industry, fondant is used in the preparation of high quality icings. It imparts humectants qualities to the icings, but at the same time, it provides a highly desirable sheen or luster to the finished products.

Adding flavoring to fondant can help make an otherwise bland icing a little more palatable. Adding color to it makes the cake more vibrant and visually interesting.
Ingredients for making fondants

Banana sauce

Though banana sauce can be easily found at Asian markets, the sauce can be easily made at home without all the artificial colors and flavors.

In the Philippines, bananas are used to produce ketchup in a commercial scale. Banana sauce resembles tomato ketchup in appearance but not in flavor.

Banana cultivar was blanched, peeled, mashed and cooked with spices and vinegar to yield banana sauce with favorable acceptability. The product is stable for almost a year.

Banana sauce looks just like regular sauce or ketchup and is made from bananas, tomatoes, sugar, vinegar and spices. It has a sweet and sour taste and doesn’t taste like bananas at all.

Though naturally a brownish-blonde hue, the newly created banana sauce was dyed a bright red to resemble the old standard.  Banana sauce became popular in the Philippines as tomato ketchup was in United States.

Banana sauce is cheaper than tomato sauce in the Philippines and is also commonly found in Hawaii and the West Indies. It is often used as a dip for fried chicken hotdogs and other fired dishes.
Banana sauce