GanacheWhen I was in cooking school, I loved showing off my newly acquired culinary skills in front of my sisters. One winter break, my sister Laurie was baking a birthday cake for a friend in my mothers wood-paneled Brooklyn kitchen. Being a typical culinary student, I was appalled to see her reach for a can of ready-made frosting. Why dont you just make ganache? I asked in my best I-know- something- that-you-dont-know tone. Whats that? she asked. Seizing the opportunity to impress my sister with a basic pastry technique, I looked around the kitchen for chocolate and cream. I heated the cream in the microwave and poured it over the chocolate. From those humble ingredients emerged a luxurious, decadent frosting. She was amazed. What sounded exotic and mysterious was so easy that even her sister could do it!While it does sound exotic, basic ganache is made with just two ingredients: chocolate and cream. By varying techniques and tweaking ingredients, you can turn basic ganache into a truffle, a glaze, a frosting, a mousse, a tart, a warm drink, or a frozen pop. Adjusting the proportion of chocolate and cream changes the density of the finished product. More cream makes it thinner and lighter and more chocolate makes it thicker and denser. You can also manipulate ganache by changing its temperature. It becomes thinner as it heats and thicker as it cools. The idea of mixing two ingredients seems simple. But mixing chocolate and cream is equivalent to mixing oil and water, which cant normally be done. This process of mixing two unmixable ingredients is called emulsification. Remember the school science fair? Wasnt there always a kid with an oil and water display? Hed plop some oil into the water, but instead of dissolving, it would float to the top. What that kid didnt know is that oil and water actually can be mixed, with a little help from heat and agitation. The emulsification that results in ganache combines the fat in chocolate (cocoa butter) with the water in cream. To accomplish this, you must first liquefy the fat. Hot cream is combined with the chocolate, melting the fat into liquid form. Stirring breaks down the fat into microscopic droplets, small enough to be suspended within the water. Whipping and heavy cream may be used interchangeably to make ganache. They differ in the amount of butterfat they contain. As a general rule, the higher the fat content of the cream, the richer the finished ganache will be.Temperature is an important factor in the emulsification of ganache. If the temperature is not controlled carefully, the result will not be smooth. The optimal emulsification temperature for ganache is 90 to 110F. If the temperature rises above 110F, the cocoa butter gets too hot. Droplets of fat will pool together and rise to the surface, separating from the mixture. When this occurs, the ganache is referred to as broken. Ganache can also be lumpy if the chocolate is not chopped into very fine pieces before being combined Excerpted from The Secrets of Baking: Simple Techniques for Sophisticated Desserts by Sherry Yard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
