[Sca-cooks] Favorite chocolate truffle recipe?
Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius at verizon.net
Sat Dec 20 09:07:56 PST 2003
Hullo, the list!
I'm in a slight predicament (and if this is the worst that I can say,
I must be doing fairly well). I got out my copy of the Larousse
Gastronomique to find the chocolate truffle recipe I used a couple of
years ago, and of the three or four listed, none of them look really
familiar to me. I'm leaning in the direction of the cream truffle
recipe (as opposed to the one that is specifically a truffle with
butter recipe, or the one that calls for paprika and prunes -- it's
gotta be better than it sounds, no?). Even the truffle with cream
recipe isn't exactly like what I remember doing, but I remember using
one of those as a basis. I used either the cream or the butter
recipe, and then flavored it with a champagne reduction (basically a
bottle of champagne simmered down to about 1/4 cup), which turned out
to produce a rather remarkable champagne truffle. It was cheap
champagne, too ;-).
Basically we're looking at some combination of dark, bittersweet
(sometimes even unsweetened) chocolate melted with butter, or
butter/cream and/or egg yolks, with or without extra sugar or
flavorings or internal garnishes like the aforementioned prunes in
Armagnac, rolled into balls and then rolled in cocoa or ground
chocolate.
Very serious chocaholic fix, with commercial versions being hugely
expensive for good ones, but still not really doing justice to the
genre. They don't keep really well, either, so I would view these as
more under the jurisdiction of the pastry chef than the confectioner:
make up a batch of the stuff, then roll and coat immediately prior to
serving, seems to be the best plan, unless you coat them with
chocolate couverture, which is cheating, since they then no longer
resemble truffles.
Unless I can come up with a better plan, I think I'm gonna go with
the one that calls for butter, cream, and yolks, and add the
champagne reduction to that. I think maybe I used that one, and
omitted the coffee that that recipe calls for, substituting the
champagne instead.
So, does anyone have a favorite, pretty generic chocolate truffle
recipe? I also looked at ganache recipes, because I know there's a
school that says truffles are just balls of ganache; I don't really
ascribe to this myself; it seems like kind of a cheat to me.
The less hardcore chocolate people are getting an augmentation of
chocolate-covered marzipan, and the ultra-weenies (myself included)
can have theirs covered with milk chocolate (you godda problum wid
dat, choco-snobs???)
Many thanks for info, advice, opinions, etc. And a happy whichever,
if any, Holiday you celebrate...
Adamantius
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