Ice cream is fascinating, chocolate candy is boring... who knew?

When I signed up for pastry school and looked over the schedule, two classes stuck out as the ones I was most eager to learn: Chocolate candy and breads.

The two weeks of chocolate candy class ended today, and I'm glad it's over. Chocolate candy is fussy, tedious, repetetive, messy, and just a pain in the ass. Now I know why you need to charge $2 for 20 cents worth of chocolate to make a profit selling chocolate candy.

That's not to say I don't like chocolate. I still love to eat it. I still want to learn more about how to work with it and how to pair chocolate with other flavors. What I know now is that I wouldn't want to be a chocolatier, at least until I somehow had the money to buy all the equipment and/or employees to do the enrobing, molding, piping, and packaging for me.

On the other hand, ice cream is not something I was particularly interested in before the ice cream/sorbet class. I never realized how much scientific knowledge is required to create a good ice cream recipe. Getting the recipe to the right balance of solids, fats, water, air, stabilizers and sweetness is surprisingly complex. So many factors affect the taste, texture and consistency, including the size of the ice crystals. As I pointed out in my previous post, even the formula some professional chefs use to balance IC/sorbet recipes is obviously flawed.