Adventures in chocolate truffle making, Part I

I’ve always loved making things. One of the things I want to focus on during my sabbatical is revisiting my love of making, of creating things for the fun of it.

Growing up, we had a book on our shelf called The Chocolate Lover’s Cook Book. One summer, once a week I selected a recipe from the book and my dad and I would make it together. We did this almost every Sunday that summer as a way to spend quality time together. One recipe was for a Chocolate Box dessert. It involved making a chocolate cake, cutting it into small squares, surrounding the squares of cake with squares of chocolates to make a box, and then filling the box with piped whipped cream and a cherry to finish. It was a very sophisticated dessert in my grade school mind, and I still remember that Sunday well, some 23 years later.

As an adult, artisan chocolate truffles are fascinating to me, and they definitely qualify as sophisticated. I received a box of Christopher Elbow chocolates as a gift a few years back, and I was awestruck. Each piece was like a tiny work of art – glossy, colorful, highly decorated. And they taste as good as they look – a crisp shell of smooth chocolate gives way to a deliciously flavorful soft filling in the center. I’m actually not the biggest chocolate person, but these fancy artisan truffles still tempt me.

I’ve had some flavor combination ideas floating in my head for a while, and I wanted to learn to make my own artisan truffles. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made truffles before, the scooped and hand-rolled in cocoa powder/sprinkles version of “homemade truffles.” But I wanted to take it to the next level – the glossy colorful shell, soft filling, expensive chocolate version! But I was also intimidated. Thanks to shows like The Great British Baking Show (ugh isn’t this show the best?!) I know that chocolate – real chocolate – must be “tempered” in order to achieve that trademark shiny finish and snap found in fancy chocolatier shops. You can’t just melt chocolate and use it willy-nilly. I have learned this from experience.

When my dad and I made those chocolate boxes all those years ago, I was in charge of melting the chocolate in the microwave, and pouring it out onto a sheet of wax paper to let it cool before my dad scored and cut it into squares. One batch of chocolate squares came out strange – the chocolate was no longer shiny. It was dull and cloudy, and instead of snapping cleanly through with a knife when my dad cut it, it was too soft and the edges had a rough and powdery finish. I realized that I melted it too long in the microwave – it got too hot. This was my first experience with the science of tempering chocolate – I didn’t know it then, but what happened was that I had heated the chocolate out of temper. All the beta crystals, the ones responsible for the gloss and snap of finished chocolate, had been knocked out of alignment with the high heat. Boo.

Since that fateful day as a kid making chocolate boxes, I have had a few dalliances in the chocolate making world. While I was in law school, cake pops showed up on the scene. Everyone was into cake pops, even Starbucks got in on the action (I think nowadays Starbucks is the only place that still gives a shit about cake pops). I got in on the trend, and made some festively decorated cake pops for special occasions. For these cake pops, I worked with compound chocolate – chocolate that has been processed with vegetable fats, and doesn’t contain the high cocoa butter content found in real chocolate. This makes it easy to work with, there is no need to temper the chocolate, just melt and go. The added oils helps achieve that glossy sheen with minimal fuss.

But compound chocolate doesn’t pack the same punch. It’s convenient and looks great, but the mouthfeel is lacking. It doesn’t melt in the mouth the way that real chocolate does. Real chocolate, the good kind, starts to dissolve instantly on the tongue. Moreover, the flavor is muted in compound chocolate. There is no richness, no nuance, no depth. There is no comparison between compound chocolate and high quality, real couverture chocolate.

For that real shit, you gotta break out the thermometer and get precise with it. To temper dark chocolate, you melt the chocolate to ~115F, then bring it down to ~82-84F in order for those crystals to re-align, then bring it back up to 88 – 90F (the “ideal” working temperature). Milk chocolate and white chocolate require slightly lower temperatures for tempering.

Tempering real chocolate is finnicky, but worth it.

This week, I decided to roll up my sleeves and finally make fancy homemade chocolate truffles, with real chocolate. I was gonna get over my tempering trepidation and make the thing! I hit up Spun Sugar in Berkeley to buy high quality couverture chocolate and pure 100% cocoa butter (to color and use for decoration). I purchased nice molds with fun shapes from Amazon, and went to Berkeley Bowl to get my supplies for the ganache filling.

For the flavor profile of my first handmade truffles, I was inspired by my favorite Salt & Straw Ice Cream flavor – Arbequina Olive Oil. The ice cream is rich and decadent, and the grassy and floral flavors of the olive oil shine through. It’s one of my favorite ice creams in the world.

For my personal twist on this inspiration, I decided to make Belgian dark chocolate truffles filled with a olive oil and sea salt ganache. I used Cobrancosa olive oil which hails from Portugal. This olive oil has a complex flavor – grassy, creamy, herbaceous, with a strong peppery finish. It’s a robust olive oil that I felt would hold its own against chocolate. For the sea salt, I used Halen Môn sea salt from the Isle of Anglesey. It’s the fancy salt I have on hand, I got it from Trader Joe’s a while back. It’s beautifully flakey, not that it matters so much for the current application!

I made the olive oil and sea salt ganache first, to allow time for it to cool back to room temperature before piping into the truffles.

I heated the cream with some light muscovado sugar, and then poured it over the chocolate and sea salt. Once the chocolate and cream were fully incorporated into a smooth velvet, I slowly drizzled in the olive oil.

Leaving the ganache to sit and cool before scooping it into a piping bag, I turned next to the business of decoration.

Carefully heating small batches of cocoa butter and mixing it with fat soluble food coloring, I got my Jackson Pollock on. Splatter everywhere! For yesterday’s batch, my first batch, I used aqua and yellow. For today’s batch, my second batch, I used aqua and violet.

After my splatter art was set in the molds, I was ready to start tempering my chocolate.

Not gonna lie, I was nervous.

Yesterday, I used the classic double boiler method to melt down my chocolate. Today, I used the microwave method. Both days I used the seeding method to temper my chocolate.

To learn more about tempering methods, see this very informative video: https://youtu.be/z1dHYZgko_k

Melting chocolate in a double boiler is the classic method for a reason. It gives you a lot of control over your chocolate, and you can remove the bowl from heat as frequently as necessary to prevent overheating. The risk lies in the steam from the boiling water – if any water gets into your chocolate, the chocolate will seize up and be ruined. You also have to keep a close eye on it at all times, stir constantly, and do frequent temperature checks.

Yesterday, I chopped up a pound of Guittard bittersweet couverture chocolate with a knife to melt in the double boiler. It tempered beautifully, and at 89F it was very fluid and easy to work with in the mold.

Today, I worked with a pound of Callebaut belgian 60/40 dark chocolate callets. I melted them in a silicone bowl in the microwave, and the callets were convenient to work with. I didn’t need to spend a lot of forearm strength to chop up the chocolate, and seeding with the callets was a breeze. However, I had a hard time melting it in the microwave and keeping the chocolate workable at 89F – it was much less fluid than yesterday’s Guittard chocolate.

I’m going to keep experimenting with both methods of tempering. Right now, I prefer the double boiler method, it was easier to melt the seeded chocolate and still keep the temperature below the danger zone of destroying crystals.

I poured a layer of tempered chocolate over my decorated molds, and after letting it set for a few moments, poured and scraped off the excess. Now I had some shells to work with! It was time to fill them with ganache. Using a piping bag, I filled the shells 3/4 full.

Then, after bringing the tempered chocolate back up to working temperature, I poured on another layer to seal the ganache into the centers of my truffles. Another scrape with my bench scraper, and they were ready to pop in the fridge for a final set!

Because my chocolate was properly tempered, the truffles released from the molds easily, after a satisfying smack against my countertop. I heaved a sigh of relief! The truffles were gorgeously glossy, just like I intended!

Yesterday’s truffles had some QC issues. I hadn’t set the aqua and yellow colored cocoa butter correctly, so many of my truffles had bits of rough exposed chocolate from where the cocoa butter stuck to the mold and peeled off of the tempered chocolate.

Today, I made sure to set my violet and aqua colored cocoa butter carefully, so the batch came out pretty even! Practice makes perfect better.

Another improvement: today’s truffles have a much thinner shell. Yesterday, I wasn’t as careful with the pouring and scraping of my initial layer of tempered chocolate, which meant that the truffles had a thick shell of chocolate surrounding the ganache. This made for a more rustic quality, not bad, but not what I was aiming for. I wanted a thin layer of chocolate shell that cracks easily when one bites in, leading to an instant explosion of flavor from the ganache. Today’s truffles hit that mark! Woo!

On the downside, because today’s chocolate was less fluid and thus more difficult to work with, the bottom of today’s truffles are rough looking. Yesterdays’s truffles have a beautiful smooth cap of chocolate on the bottom, thanks to the high fluidity of the chocolate I was working with. Ah well. Can’t win them all.

How do they taste? Fantastic! The smooth thin shell of dark Belgian chocolate snaps satisfyingly between the teeth and begins to melt instantly as the ganache floods your mouth with flavor. The filling is still very chocolate-forward, but has a nice herbaceous earthiness thanks to the olive oil. The sea salt is not very prominent, I may have to tweak the proportions a bit for my next iteration!

Thanks for joining me for Part I of my chocolate truffle making adventure! For Part II, I will be exploring a different type of chocolate and different flavor filling, as well as a different decoration technique! I have some fun boxes and wrapping for my chocolates, so I am hoping to make up some truffle variety boxes for my friends and family as gifts.

We are attending an engagement party this weekend, and I am saving my most beautiful truffles to put in a box as a gift for the happy couple.

Will has also implored me to give away most of the chocolates I have made, because he says that otherwise he’ll end up eating them all. They are pretty damn tasty if I do say so myself.