Return to Chocolate and Sugar
March 15th, 2006
Today in the factory, JP and Neil were busy making ice cream in preparation for the St. Patricks day crowds-to-be in the shops. Since they needed some help, and I’m happy for any excuse to procrastinate from paperwork and administration, I went making hot chocolate.
Going through the process yet again, I thought I’d add that if you want to make our hot chocolate, (or the chocolate sauce recipe), make sure you follow the instructions about heating the milk and adding it to the melted chocolate. It really is the only way to get a good emulsion, and your sauce or hot chocolate will be smooth, glossy and professional-looking.
For anyone interested, I learned almost everything I know about chocolate by taking the chocolate course offered by Valrhona (courtesy of our distributor Odaios), and there are many worse ways to spend a few days!
Finally, with the news of the closing of the Mallow sugar plant, it occurs to me that it would be a great business opportunity for someone to buy the plant and make organic sugar. Keep the jobs, keep the farmers happy, and go some way to redressing the huge organic trade deficit in this country. It would be one less thing we would have to import!
Technorati tags: sugar, sauce, recipe, chocolate, ice cream, Ireland
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March 20th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Great suggestion Keiran. There has to be a market for beet sugar in my humble opinion as I’ve always far preferred it to cane sugar. If it’s more expensive to produce, then it has to be positioned differently in the market. The organic angle is a way to do that and kill a lot of birds with one stone.
March 20th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Yes, yes, yes! The various agencies are full of suggestions about getting out of sugar beet and growing rape for energy, but can’t they see the technology is there and organics is a huge growth market?
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:58 am
I don’t know very much about sugar beet but the processing of it does seem to involve tons of energy and the use of chemicals. Is it possible to process it (as opposed to grow it) organically?
Sugar Beet
March 22nd, 2006 at 2:35 pm
I don’t know much about it either. I looked up one website on processing and it seemed to be about pressing to get the juice and using a centerfuge to extract, which all seems pretty natural. There is organic sugar out there, so it must be possible!