Chocolate Truffles and Ganache to Die For
There is a real secret to making the world’s finest truffles and ganache which I’d like all of you to learn as I vow this simple method will forever change the way you make these items. First, allow me to share why a change in your current method is warranted, especially in that the world’s cookbook authors and culinary schools are universally oblivious to the problems with ganache.
If you have worked with chocolate in the past you are probably familiar with the dreaded term “seizing”. When tiny droplets of water are mixed with chocolate the consequence is pure devastation. Your expensive Swiss-made couverture, processed from select Peruvian cocoa beans, is reduced in an instant to a tar-like glob of grainy refuse.
What happened was water molecules bonded with some of the cocoa molecules, but not all of them. Those cocoa molecules not bound to water now bind to one another, producing an instantaneous reaction guaranteed to ruin the rest of your day.
In truth, chocolate can absorb water well, but only if enough water is added to cover all cocoa molecules instead of only a few. While a few drops of water will cause your chocolate to seize, more water will yield a rich chocolate sauce completely free of lumps! I believe the ratio is at least one tablespoon of water per cup of chocolate… that is how much water must be added to avoid seizure.
Ganache (and truffles) are made by mixing cream with chocolate, and cream is mostly water. If you follow any one of the billions of recipes on the Net or the instructions of your culinary school teachers you are actually inviting seizure. The reason is that every single one of these resources ask you to heat the cream and add it to a bowl of chopped chocolate, allowing the cream’s residual heat to melt the chocolate!
That is as wrong as wrong can be! If you pour a pint of heavy cream into a pint of chocolate, the pour may take a full 2-seconds to complete. In those initial seconds or fractions of seconds you are adding too small an amount of water to insure thorough emulsification! Time and again, over and over, your ganache and truffles will have tiny lumps in them… because your method caused a brief seizure in the seconds prior to emulsification.
I beg you to please heed my counsel! No matter what you have been told to the contrary, add the chopped chocolate to the heated cream, all at once! Never the other way around! In this way all the chocolate is instantly submerged in water and seizure does not have time to occur.
Further, consider that egg yolks are used in baking to provide a velvety richness to the product? Therefore, add/temper a few egg yolks (Roughly 5 egg yolks per pound of chocolate.)to your heated cream, using a liaison to prevent curdling, before adding the chocolate. Their effect will add a velvety texture to your ganache and your truffles you never knew could be possible!
This simple adjustment will leave you with your head banging against the wall as to why no one ever shared this with you before!
A medium ganache is usually equal parts cream and chocolate, by weight. A soft ganache has a bit more cream and that is made for icing (when cooled it is whipped in a mixer with the whisk attachment until frothy and smooth). A hard ganache is used for truffles and has slightly less cream then medium ganache.
Houdini's Kitchen 