Ganache · GF (an ode to cream)Tweet

I hadn’t intended to include a ganache recipe, ganache is more ratio than recipe: equal parts cream and chocolate, some vanilla and a pinch of salt thrown in for bonus points. But I had several people e-mail me to ask for it, so here it is.

I figure if you know how to make ganache you’re not reading this. If you don’t know how to make ganache, then we’ve probably got a lot to talk about.

Yeah. There is a lot to say about cream and chocolate.

First of all. Cream. I’m not gonna lie, I think off brand grocery store cream is just as good as Land-o-Lakes, so if it came down to it, I’d buy the off brand and spend whatever I saved on better chocolate.

However, if you can get a hold of fresh, non-homogenized, low-temp pasteurized (or raw!) cream, you owe it to yourself to make ganache with it just once. In Kentucky, JD Country Milk is widely available at farmers’ markets and coops, but wherever you live there is surely a dairy selling some cream worth seeking out.

This kind of cream is nothing short of life changing. It’s non-homogenized, so the neck of the glass bottle will be thoroughly blocked by a delicious clot of butter so dense that you could hold the bottle upside down and not spill a drop. Once you actually excavate the butter-clump (ideally to spread on a halved baguette with a little smear of apricot jam…), you’ll find the cream is thicker than ceiling paint, a dreamy off white color, and nothing like any cream you’ve ever had before. It’ll go all weird in your coffee, breaking up into milk and butter, but don’t be scared. Just stir it up.

Uh, sorry. So anyhow, ganache. Once, before you die, make ganache out of fresh cream. If you can’t use great cream, be sure to use great chocolate, never chocolate chips. They may seem convenient, but they’re chock full of stabilizers to help them hold their tear drop shape while baking. Chocolate chips are also usually a bit acidic; this is meant to help their flavor shine through the heavy, fatty cookie dough. It ends up tasting pretty harsh in ganache.

You can use milk or dark chocolate to make ganache; you’ll need an extra pinch of salt to round out the sweetness of milk chocolate. You can make white chocolate ganache too, but it tends to be a little thinner so it takes a bit less cream. I’ll save that for another post.

Ganache
1/2 vanilla bean, split and scraped
8 ounces cream (use unsweetened coconut milk for vegan/dairy free)
8 ounces chocolate, chopped
1/8 tsp (pinch) kosher salt

Bring the cream to a boil with the vanilla bean, shut off the heat, and allow it to steep for an hour. (If time and money are of the essence, skip the bean and whisk in a 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract at the end.)

After the cream and vanilla have steeped, remove the bean. Be sure to rescue all the vanilla-y cream from inside the bean and return it to the pot. Now bring the cream to a boil again, breaking up any skin that has formed on the surface.

Set the cream off the heat and add in the chocolate and pinch of salt, whisking until smooth. I don’t believe in pouring the cream over the chocolate. I think some people just want you to get a lot of bowls dirty…

(If, for whatever reason, and I’m not asking any questions or judging, you’re using kinda crappy chocolate, a 1/4 tsp of espresso powder goes a long way in rounding out the flavor of bad chocolate…Not that I’m endorsing that, or suggesting you’re that sort of person, or that I’ve ever done that before. I’m just saying.)

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Any questions?