Recipe: 00079 Title : Truffles Author: Sean Eric Fagan Date : May 1995 _________________________________________________________________________ This is the basic chocolate truffle recipe I use; it can be varied to suit, and I'll give some examples. First, a truffle (as I mean it) consists of two parts: the center (or ganache), and the coating. Depending on the size and flavor of the ganache, the coating can provide extra taste, or be "merely" decorous. (You could also double- or triple- coat the ganache, or make the coating as thin as possible.) The ganache should be prepared first. It is, essentially, an equal mixture of chocolate and cream, cooked and reduced a bit. (Note that white chocolate is *different*. I'd use closer to 60% white chocolate, 40% cream, or maybe even 75-25, with a white chocolate ganache. White chocolate is hard to do right, though, and may take lots of experimentation.) To make a simple ganache: Cut 10oz bittersweet chocolate (I use Ghiradelli chocolate bars, available in most supermarkets) into small pieces, about the size of small or medium chocolate chips. (You can use 10oz of chocoalte chips, if you can find a flavor and brand that you like. Since I like to use bittersweet chocolate, and most chocolate chips are semisweet, I usually end up chopping my own.) In a large enough saucepan, place the chocolate pieces and one and a half to two cups of heavy whipping cream. Cook the cream and chocolate at a low-to-medium heat, stirring as necessary (remember, cream can burn), until it boils. Let it boil for a short while; if you used more cream, you may want it to reduce a bit. (The more cream-to-chocolate you have, the softer the ganache will be; the more chocolate-to-cream you have, the harder and richer it will be. This is one of the variations you can make. Use more cream for "melt in your mouth" ganache, and more chocolate for stuff that will keep you awake and wired for hours ;).) Pour the mixture through a strainer into a large enough bowl; place the bowl in the refrigerator for a few hours, or overnight. When the mixture has hardened as much as it will (it will still be very soft, of course, but it will be malleable), scoop it in small, spoon-sized pieces, and roll them in your hands until round. Use lots of paper-towels or napkins -- when your hands have melted chocolate on them, it is much harder to roll! Place the balls on a cookiesheet covered with wax paper, and, when finished, place the cookiesheet in the freezer (or, if not going to finish the truffles immediately, in the refrigerator; they can stay that way overnight without harm). To make a simple, tempered coating: Take two pounds of semi-sweet chocolate (yes, two *pounds*); cut into *largish* chunks. You can use chocolate chips for this, but the larger the chunks, the better (to a point). Place one and a half pounds of the chocolate into a large cooking dish; also place in two to four tablespoons of lard (crisco, for example, works quite well). This is to thin out the chocolate a bit, but you don't want to have too much. Slowly heat and stir the chocolate until fully melted. At that point, remove from the heat, and put in some of the unmelted chocolate. The point here is to temper the chocolate by cooling it down quickly. (For small enough amounts of chocolate, you could also temper it by sticking the pan in cold water, but when dealing with large amounts, that approach is considerably harder.) The large chunks will melt; in so doing, they will cool down the rest of the chocolate. (This is why the chunks should be largish: small pieces will melt more easily, and you want to use as much of the energy as possible.) Keep adding chocolate and stirring until the melted chocolate is slightly below body temperature -- putting a bit on your upper lip and having it feel only slightly warm is a good test. Another test is to briefly stick a knife into the melted chocolate, and take it out; it should "dry" quickly, looking somewhat dull. N.B.: if you use white chocolate, use less lard, and, again, be more careful. White chocolate burns easily. At this point, you're now ready to dip the truffles; this is the easiest part: Take the cookiesheet of centers, and place it next to pan with the melted coating. Coat each one by droping it into the coating mixture, and moving it around with a fork. When fully coated, take it out with the fork, and drop it onto a waxpaper- covered pan (or plate, or whatever). You may need to reheat the coating up a bit from time to time; this is okay -- the nice thing about largely-unmixed chocolate is that you can reheat it again without problem. It may take a few tries to get the truffles coming out right, both ganache and coatings. You can vary the recipe in many ways. Examples: add some liqueur (Grand Marnier, for example) to the ganache while you're preparing it; you can also add other flavors; I am partial to orange extract or banana flavoring coat the centers in two phases: in the first phase, spread some coating in your palms, and roll the centers between your hands, covering them with a very thin coating. Cool them off (either in a refrigerator or a freezer), and then proceed with the coating as described above. The truffles will be less warped by the dipping. This is very messy, and not much worth it in my opinion, except: you can make the coatings different. For example, I've made a white-chocolate coating for the thin, inner one, and a semi-sweet coating for the outer. make two coating mixtures, one of white chocolate, one of some dark chocolate; in a third bowl, pour some of each and swirl them around (but do not mix). When you dip the centers, you will then get a swirled effect. Again: it may take a few tries, but the recipes are fairly simple, and you can always eat the failures. After a while, you should have a feel for how the chocolate works, and then you can experiment more. Enjoy! -=-=-=-=-=- _________________________________________________________________________