Piri Piri Pralines

OK, so I'm not an expert at handling chocolate and I only have access to cheap silicone molds, but is it possible to make decent chocolates despite these restrictions? Simple answer - yes! Of course, it will not be as fantastic a result as if an expert does it, but I think it's good enough to offer to friends while it is also really fun to experiment with your own praline flavors. For this recipe I chose to use some dried piri piri chilis that I grew last season which I then ground down to a fine powder. I think the result was really good and the praline has a little kick, but not too much.

The hard part of this recipe is the tempering of the chocolate. Actually, it is a conceptually simple process, but it can also go wrong in a number of ways. In short, you heat the chocolate so it melts in 3 different phases and temperatures one after the other. Here I use my sous vide machine to be able to control the temperature in the different steps, but there are other methods such as using a marble slab and seeding. Since I already have a sous vide machine, the steps are simplified a bit because I can trust that the temperature of the water is correct, but I also have to make sure that no water comes in contact with the chocolate.

I use a chocolate that is easy to find here in Sweden and that contains 54% cocoa because I think it gives a good result without costing too much. If you want the luxury of it, you can instead buy Valrhona chocolate, which is more expensive, but also really tasty. The temperatures in the different steps depend on which chocolate you use and for the chocolate I use here I found that 46°C -> 27°C -> 32°C worked fine. So my process for tempering chocolate with the sous vide machine ended up like this:

• Heat the water in the sous vide machine 46°C.
• Place the chocolate in a zip-lock bag and place the bag in the water. Pick it up a few times and squeeze the bag so the chocolate mixes.
• If there is air in the bag, open it carefully and release it. Make sure that no water gets into the bag when doing this though.
• I left the chocolate in this temperature for about 10-15 minutes.
• Then I set the temperature to 27 degrees and poured on a large amount of cold water to bring the temperature down quickly.
• After a few minutes I set the temperature to 32°C. At this step I pick up the bag once a minute and squeeze it a little. 5-10 minutes.
• The chocolate is now ready to use. I pick up the bag and dry it thoroughly - there should be no water close to the chocolate.
• I then cut a small hole in one corner of the bag and use it to fill the molds.

In addition to this, just make sure that the chocolate has time to solidify between the different steps. You can put the molds in the fridge for shorter periods to speed up certain steps.

Since I only have cheaper silicone molds instead of real hard molds, I had to adapt some steps a bit. I've written a bit about it here. Instead of letting the chocolate flow by itself and filling the molds, it worked quite well to use a toothpick to smear the chocolate lightly on the sides of the inside of the molds. There are also problems with lifting the silicone molds if you need to move them in and out of the fridge as the mold deforms easy. A simple solution is to use a stable cutting board on which the molds stand. With this, it is also possible to gently tap the molds against the table to spread the chocolate evenly without destroying the praline shells. I also could not scrape off extra chocolate as the molds are not stable enough to handle it so the bottom of the pralines was not completely smooth, but I choose to just accept that for who even thinks about that? :)