Tuesday, Mar 29th, 2016
My latest installation for Lucky Peach’s Pastry School is about ganache, the chocolatey backbone to so many pastry techniques. Read about the not-so-simple mixture of cream and milk, and try your hand with the three recipes I’ve written, firm ganache for truffles, medium all-purpose ganache for frostings and fillings, and thin ganache for glazes and sauces.
Ganache and I go back to my freshman year of high school. My early interest in baking was encouraged by Marcel Desaulniers’s Death by Chocolate Cakes, and, armed with Baker’s brand chocolate and my mother’s Sunbeam mixer, I dove in headfirst. I whipped up dark chocolate cakes and covered them with a shiny chocolate-and-cream-concoction called ganache. With half a year of high school Spanish under my belt, I guessed at the pronunciation of French words in the recipes, and assumed the word ganache rhymed with apache. I continued to proudly make guh-nat-chee throughout high school, rolling it into truffles, drizzling it on my dilapidated attempts at crepes, and covering those deadly chocolate cakes.
Ganache is one of the easiest—but easiest to mess up—recipes in the fundamental pastry canon. At its simplest, ganache is no more than a velvety paste of chopped chocolate mixed with hot cream that will solidify when chilled. And, for the most part, it really is that easy. If you’re lucky, you could go your entire ganache-making life never knowing what a pain in the butt ganache can be.
When ganache does fail, it’s a runaway train of seized grainy chocolate or a curdled and oily disaster. It can happen with a recipe you’ve used a thousand times—even the best ganache recipes split—and the failure is usually caused by technique.
Look a little closer at ganache…………. Here at Lucky Peach! Click through to read the full article.
Or head straight to these recipes…