Water Truffles Go Boozy!
Playing with Chocolate
I started off wanting to make vegan truffles because I end up cooking for West Coasters a lot. Truffles, little chocolate bombs of delight, are simple. They are a ganache, rolled in cocoa powder, and that’s it. A ganache is a chocolate paste made with cream and whatever else you want to throw in it — simple, tasty, but not good for vegans or lactose intolerant.
One of the first things you learn about chocolate is that it seizes in water and that ruins everything, possibly in the universe. Just a few drops of water can make chocolate go sticky, grainy, and crazytime useless. But, half the recipes have you adding cream and butter as soon as you melt things, both of which contain plenty of water. So what gives?
Parts of chocolate are hydrophilic: the little sugar crystals, parts are hydrophobic: the cocoa butter. The cocoa powder is neutral about the whole water thing. Lecithin (the mysterious chemical ingredient to all chocolate bars) is the likes-everyone emulsifier, standing there like Rodney King looking at the rest of the ingredients saying “Can’t we just all get along?”
The fix to seizing chocolate isn’t to throw the whole thing across the kitchen and scream KHAAAAAAN! I know, I’ve tried it. Instead, you have to add more water.
The original chocolate is an emulsion based on solid fat crystals that can lock out water. Then you melt it, and it’s based on a liquid fat emulsion. When you add water, everything goes haywire. But keep adding water and beating it with a fork, and it returns to an emulsion, this time based on the water, not the fat. Fooducation has a very good explanation of this process on down to pretty drawings of the molecules in action. A water based ganache is every bit as creamy as its cream based cousin, and if anything, slightly more chocolaty.
Within moments of my first water ganache I asked one of humanity’s most enduring questions: Can I do this with booze?
Oh yes, yes you can.
In this case I’ve picked four liquors to make four kinds of dark chocolate truffle, as a Christmas gift to a lactose-intolerant friend. I actually needed slightly more than pictured above, but not too much. I tend to measure truffles by the ‘that looks about right’ method.
You will need chocolate, cocoa powder, a microwave, water, the booze, and a willingness to get dirty hands.
If you noticed my total lack of amounts, that’s on purpose. This is a feel-as-you-go recipe. Don’t worry too much about making mistakes, as even your mistakes are usually delicious.
First you have to melt the chocolate. Many recipes will talk about gentle double boiling or warming over a mild heat and watching carefully, all of which is annoying and hard and ends in tears. We’ll be microwaving our chocolate in 15 second increments.
The only enemy to perfect microwave melted chocolate is the siren’s call of the minute plus button. Ignore this easy button and its terrible lies. Put in 15 seconds, stir your chocolate with a fork, put in for 15 more seconds, keep stirring, until it’s all uniformly melted.
Next you’ll want to warm the booze. I put it all in the microwave at once, which was stupid, because it meant I had one that was the right temperature and three that had to be microwaved again. Ten seconds is often fine.
In general, you want chocolate and whatever you are mixing into it to be what I think of as ‘hot tub warm’. Nice to the touch, but you wouldn’t want to leave a child in it for more than a few minutes. This is around 104 f, 40 c. Feel free to measure it all with a thermometer, then stop because that takes too much time, and you have to just do this. Stop procrastinating.
Dump your finger or so of warm booze in and start going to town with that fork.
After your chocolate seizes keep putting in warm alcohol (or warm water, if you don’t want the booze taste to be too strong) and keep mixing with your fork until, as if by magic…
Once all your ganaches are smooth and silky, try them and make sure you like the balance of the chocolate and alcohol, because obviously you’re going to stick this in your mouth at this point no matter what I say.
Cover your little dishes of boozy joy and let them set up in the fridge for at least an hour, more for bigger batches.
From here the process from ganache to truffle is traditional, get it out of the bowl, roll it into a ball in your hand, drop it into cocoa powder, tap it on a plate to let the extra cocoa powder fall away.
I made color-coded little booze packs!
We tried them out. They were wonderful, vegan, wheat, dairy, mercury, etc free, and still full of sin. The absinthe truffles are particularly special, even to most people who don’t like anise.
One person complained that the Laphroaig truffles were a little too strong, but I don’t really understand those words when put together that way.
