A Weekend Treat - Chocolate Ganache

Tonight, as a weekend treat, we made chocolate ganache. It's a really fun, easy thing to do, and if you've never done it before, do give it a go ! It's a good thing to do with any quality leftover chocolate (Lindt eggs ?), and the finished ganache will keep in the fridge for at least a couple of weeks. We use it as chocolate sauce over icecream or cakes, and as hot chocolate mix.

The proportions I use are based on Ming Tsai's recipe, but I leave out all the ancillary stuff, and just use cream and chocolate.

3 cups heavy (whipping) cream
1 pound bittersweet chocolate, either callet form or finely chopped

Couldn't be easier - in a saucepan, heat the cream to boiling. Put the chocolate in a mixing bowl, and pour over the hot cream. Stir gently with a whisk until smooth - this can take a few minutes, so don't rush it. Don't whisk it hard - you don't want to beat air into it. At first it will look like it's not combining, but soon you'll have a velvety chocolate liquid.

Pour the mix into containers and store in the fridge, where it will set to the texture of cream cheese.

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Here are some of Ming Tsai's suggestions of what you can use ganache for :

Ganache also makes a great chocolate sauce for ice cream. Just heat the ganache over boiling water until it’s pourable.

For a quick, delicious chocolate mousse, fold whipped cream into ganache. The greater proportion of ganache to cream, the more intensely chocolate the result.

Use warm ganache as a dip for fruit such as strawberries or orange segments.

To make the ultimate hot chocolate, heat heavy cream and add as much ganache as you like.

We make our hot chocolate by mixing a heaped desertspoonful of ganache in a cup of hot milk. And we often play around with mixes of different chocolates in the ganache - mixing milk and bittersweet, depending on what we have at the time. Today's ganache had Callebaut 54% callets and some Callebaut Cuba 70% thrown in to make it a bit darker. We made a double batch of the recipe, and took little tubs around to the neighbours - it's a very nice thing to share !

Have a great weekend everyone !

Celia

Girlfriend, you are a bad influence. Now I want this for breakfast.

But you forgot to list my favorite way to use it. Eaten straight off the spoon!

Y'all sure are making it difficult for me to stick with my weight-loss goals.
My resistance to chocolate is almost nil anyway.

We love love love ganache.

My wife made some party treats with it a few weeks back. Somehow or another, we ended up with a box of Payday nut bars - that's 36 bars, and given that it isn't one of my favorite candy varieties, they weren't moving. Cindy cut each bar in thirds, and dipped them in ganache, and then froze them. We put them out on a platter along with the coffee and cake.

All gone!

Did you eat them with a knife and fork, Mr. Pitt?

But Cynthia, if you make some ganache, you'll have a little tub in the fridge for a week or so, and be able to have delicious hot chocolate spiced with a little chilli powder every night !

Yes, unfortunately, straight off the spoon is the best way for the taste buds, if not for the weight. These proportions make a very runny ganache which doesn't set hard in the fridge. That makes it great for sauces and hot chocolate drinks and eating, but not so great for icing or truffle centres. You need more chocolate and less cream for those applications.

Did you eat them with a knife and fork, Mr. Pitt?

Good one. Glad to see you're on the ball.....though in the original episode, weren't they Snickers bars?
Damn, now I'm going to have to go waste some more time googling it.

It was Snickers, but still...

Ming Tsai was right ! We needed a last minute dessert (friends have just announced they're arriving with Greek takeaway), so we tried whipping the last of the cream and mixing in a generous amount of ganache. This makes a wickedly good chocolate mousse, without the angst of a raw egg. It's very dark and very rich, so we're serving it in little expresso cups.

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I could eat that! It looks fantastic, Celia.