Anatomy of a Chocolate Truffle

Delicious home-made chocolate truffles in a variety of flavors, all stemming from one simple recipe.

First you'll learn how to make a classic dark chocolate truffle (Steps 1-10):

• Chocolate ganache filling (Steps 1-5)
• Chocolate coating (Steps 6 & 7)
• Decoration (Steps 8 & 9)
• Storage (Step 10)

Then, you can get creative by adding different ingredients to the basic prototype:

• Rosemary & Sea Salt (Step 11)
• Chocolate & Pecan Cheesecake (Step 12)
• Lemon & Black Pepper (Step 13)
• Gingerbread (Step 14)
• NEW! Port or Chardonnay Valentine's Truffles (Step 15)
• NEW! Peanut Butter and Chocolate (Step 16)
• NEW! Jasmine Tea and Honey (Step 17)
• NEW! Cardamom and Masala (Step 18)

Step 1 Ganache: Introduction and Ingredients

Ganache is the yummy, creamy center of a truffle that usually tastes like something or other.

Steps 1-5 give instructions for making the ganache.

The following ingredients are used in a basic chocolate ganche. The amounts here are enough for roughly 12 truffle centers.

Ingredients

• 1/4 Cup Whipping cream
• 1 Tbsp Butter
• 1/2 tsp Sugar syrup
• 4 oz (110 g) Finely-chopped chocolate

What is whipping cream?
Cream with greater than 30% fat can be whipped. Wikipedia

What is sugar syrup?
Sugar syrup is used to keep the center creamy and light. Any sugar syrup will work! Corn syrup (Karo, in the US), golden syrup (UK), Stroop (a sugar syrup in the Netherlands), even molasses (treacle), will work. A basic sugar syrup is made by boiling 3 parts sugar with 1 part water.

What is chocolate?
Hershey's chocolate will not work in this recipe because the cocoa butter content is not high enough. You don't have to go completely high-end, but try to find something with 50% cocoa or higher. These truffles used 68% dark chocolate candy bars that were a generic supermarket brand.

Comments

[rustybender]

You have converted me into a truffle makiong fanatic. I've made these the last two weekends and am probably going to make some more this weekend. Smoked Sea-Salt Truffles are my new favorite. Does anyone have any advice on working with White-Chocolate. I find it much more difficult to work with than dark chocolate. When it melts it is much thicker and stickier and my truffles look ugly because the coating is so uneven. Of course they still taste awesome!

[AMAZONIAbydjljwilliams]

Look for an Australian product called Copha..adding a small amount for this to white chocolate makes it much easier to work with, and doesn't affect taste or appearance. Its a vegetable shortening made from coconut oil.
Try Wholefoods in the States

[medisin]

Yep, white chocolate is kind of evil to work with. You could try grating it and rolling truffles in it instead of melting it. But you'd need to pick them up with chopsticks to avoid getting melty finger marks all over them. Also tried using a melon scooping thingy and it doesn't really help. The truffles stick to it and their shape gets ruined trying to detach them. Oops! If anyone knows how to get them properly round without them sticking to stuff, I'd love to know. Can you make them in a mould or anything? Anyway, thanks for this - fantastic instructions, I'm all inspired to start making loads of yummy chocolates now!

[AMAZONIAbydjljwilliams]

You could ook for a potato mash serving scoop with a 1.5 teaspoon capacity.
It has the typical ice-cream release function like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Norpro-Stainless-Steel-Scoop-Teaspoon/dp/B00004UE83

[man ray]

wax paper nothing sticks to it

[ian]

Thanks for reporting your results! Smoked Sea-Salt sounds great! Perhaps (I'm not sure) you could add more cream and/or butter to the white chocolate to make creamier. Are you using it on the inside,outside, or both?

[rustybender]

I was using it as the outside coating only. I've been experimenting with melting different types of chocolate, and it seems the lower the cocoa content, the stickier it is to work with. Since white chocolate has no cocoa, I guess it makes sense it would be extremely sticky. I made Kahlua truffles this weekend...Oh yes!

[crazyaboutbeads]

In step 17, you use honey as a sugar syrup substitute. Can that be done for any of the other truffle recipes, or is the honey flavor too strong?

Love this instructable! I'm planning on using it to make truffles for my grandpa. He's a chocolate addict. :)

[shortone]

http://www.instructables.com/id/Gifts-For-Guys/

Put you in my gift guide for guys! Just thought I'd let you know :)

[thecrafto]

ziet er lekker uit!!!

[Cardinal Fang]

Try this with lime instead of lemon, and with a tiny bit of chilli instead of the pepper.

[Cardinal Fang]

I'm going to add a reminder to people here not to let any water get into your melted chocolate or it clumps and is useless.

[peteleeb39]

Just add shots of alcohol until it thins out again. If you add liquor though, keep in mind the added sugar.

[lizziet117]

I have a dorky question... how long does it take to make these?...

[Lucius the Eternal]

At this step my ganache had the consistancy of the lindor truffles after the second 15 minute cooling period... Is this a bad thing? and if it is what should I do to fix it for the next batch?

[Cardinal Fang]

Had a go at Cardamom and Masala ones today - then realised I only had cardamon! Found it works best with white chocolate - something about the extra sweetness of white chocolate goes the best with the cardamon taste.

[{tauney}]

I decided that this Valentine's day, instead of going out and spending money, my boyfriend and I would spend the day cooking together. He was super hungover from the previous night's escapades (too many double-gin-and-tonics) but we still managed to make around 50 truffles using your recipe. We made Earl Gray, garam masala and cardamom, rosemary and sea salt, and Mexican chocolate (chili powder and cinnamon). They are amazing! I realized when we were coating them that I should have bought coating chocolate wafers, since they form a thinner shell and melt to a finer consistency, but other than that---
Om-nom-nom!

[PilgrimPriest]

I just used this recipe to make Chocolate Raspberry Habanero Truffles and Chocolate Rum Truffles. Delicious! They turned out wonderfully!

[tevdaman15]

I say! this is IN GENIUS!!!

[kai.h]

I finally got around to making these and they were very tasty. When I make them again, I'm going to go with the metric version of the recipe given in the comments above - 1kg chocolate, 1 litre cream, 100g butter and scale it down; 100g chocolate, 100ml cream, 10g butter. The first batch I made, once I mixed the chocolate and the cream together at the start, after a very short time stirring it, it really separated. I had clumps of chocolate in a thick, oily liquid. I was pretty put off by this, but as it still tasted pretty yummy, I proceeded... I uses 86% dark chocolate and cream that was around 30-35% fat. I mixed and mixed in the vain hope that it would emulsify again, but it didn't. Once I split the mixture into two halves and added 2 Tablespoons of Honey Vodka to one and 2T of Cointreau to the other, they immediately emulsified and all was good with the world again. With the chilling and mixing, I should have left it at two chilling cycles, on the third it crumbled into a dry powder texture and wouldn't hold together very well. Not to be put off, I moulded them into lumps and covered them in chocolate. They still tasted pretty yummy. I'm hoping that increasing the cream relative to the chocolate for the next round will keep them more like a creamy ganache.

[shortone]

THE BEST FLAVOR COMBO EVER! Follow the steps for the green tea and honey, but use earl grey tea and add a bunch of vanilla (preferably the seeds from a vanilla bean) skip the honey This is my new favorite flavor of chocolate ever invented. :D thanks for the instructable! Oh, and a great way to decorate this kind is to mix vanilla bean seeds into white chocolate and put a dollop of it on top of each truffle. :) TRY IT! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!

[SoapyHollow]

Oh my goodness. It is quite possible that I love you for this. Thanks for a brilliantly well explained instructable. I've made truffles, but they never quite turned out right. I'm looking forward to trying your methodology this weekend!

[Nunavutnewsrules]

lol this reminded me of the classic scwetty balls SNL skit. that one is a classic

[Mikechoco]

I run over this web site j-adorechocolate, yummy staff

[jotos]

Jasmijn thee en bijenhoning xD

[tozankyaku]

okay... how does the savory pepper do in the sweet mixture? what the flavor like?

[PKM]

I recently discovered lemon and black pepper flavour white chocolate- I'm not normally a great fan of white chocolate but it is possibly the best chocolate I've ever tasted, ever. Too much would obviously not be a good thing, but in moderation it's like salt on strawberries- a little bit of savoury brings out the flavour of a sweet food without making it cloying.

[doublefry]

very well done instructable. obviously took some time for you to test out all of these truffles. i think i'll try the peanut butter truffles.

[flio191]

thanks, i made these for my gf on valentines day :{D these were amazing, especially with an almost pure cocoa hard cover for the sweet milk chocolate gouache.

[flio191]

lol, correction, *ganache*

[Dim-1]

GREAT INSTRUCTABLE!!! Awesome pictures, it looks so fun. I think lemon-pepper sounds very interesting.

[shortone]

mmm yum! amazing recipe! i did find, however, that i didn't have to chill and mix as many times as the recipe called for...maybe my fridge is colder or something... anyways, another GREAT combination (in my humble opinion) is raspberry cheesecake...i added a big spoon (about 2- 2 1/2 tbs) of cream cheese and another slightly smaller spoonful of seedless raspberry jam to the ganache and they turned out very tasty! that is a somewhat more traditional flavor for anyone who's a little chicken.... also, chocolate hazelnut combination is good too. AMAZING INSTRUCTABLE!!!

[scawley82]

You can also use chop sticks to dip the centers. I find that if you freeze the centers for about 1/2 an hour it really helps.

[eric4435]

looks delicious, but doesnt the lemon and black pepper one taste kind of weird, it doesn't seem to be the type of thing you would put in chocolate. Great instructable btw.

[Shifrin]

Now for you and me (two chefs) this is simple... but your guests will think it is amazing! :-) favorited! -Alex

[jessyratfink]

Mmmm, truffles. I'm hungry for chocolate for I searched for it on here. Now I'm even more hungry. :P

[mutt256]

looks yummy... ...yum...

[phenoptix]

While I was cheffing I was given a similar recipe to follow in imperial measurements, though without the sugar syrup. I found it was far easier to memorise the metric measurements of 1kg of cholocate, 1 litre of double cream and 100g of butter, it's far easier to scale up and down then too! (makes a few more than 12 truffles though!!)

[clarke]

When I used the proportions in the instructable, the ganache came out crumbly, dry and hard to form. I re-melted the ganache, doubled the cream (by scalding and adding another 1/4 cup) so the proportions were like phenoptix's, and used wintertime room temp (64F) instead of a fridge and they came out perfect. These were fun to make and highly appreciated as a gift.

[shutdown_exploded]

that's not proportionate to the quantities used here, not that his are any more correct than yours