Chef André Gamard is back in the kitchen!
It's always a good day when André is in the farm kitchen. Today he showed some of the Schoppee crew how he makes the new Valentine's day truffles. From start to finish we had a blast, and ate way too much chocolate. We were also all reminded of André's incredible skills in the kitchen. This stuff is not easy!
The process starts by tempering the chocolate. Basically, you very precisely heat and cool the chocolate to stabilize it so your end product is beautiful and shiny. Its harder than it looks! André of course makes it look easy but the rest of us struggled to execute the tasks fast enough for the chocolate to come out right.
Next we prep the forms. André showed us how to make a variety of shapes and sizes but for the most part we stuck with the oblong forms you see in our Valentine's day truffles. These forms also allowed us to insert sheets covered with shea butter and color for a little added Valentine's flair. When the warm chocolate hits the sheets inside the forms the color is transferred to the tops of the truffles and you end up with the beautiful designs for Valentine's day.
Ok, so back to prepping the forms. We place the colored papers in the trays and then put the bottom on (it attaches magnetically). Then we heat the trays briefly with a heat gun and fill them with chocolate. Tap them a bunch to get all the air bubbles out and then off to the fridge for a minute to cool.
Now we take them out of the refrigerator and flip them up side down so the entire core of still warm chocolate pores out and we are left with a hollow shell of delicious dark chocolate which we can fill with whatever we want!
For the purposes of our Valentine's day truffles we are using a combination of chocolate ganache and our new Morello Cherry pâte de fruit. André was nice enough to prep this delicious concoction ahead of time so all we had to do was squeeze it in to the newly made chocolate shells. This also proved to be quite difficult as the mixture is sticky, and firm, and doesn't want to go down in the chocolate forms easily.
Now that the shells are formed and filled we go back to the tempered chocolate to fill in the bottom and complete the encapsulation of the ganache and morello cherry core. Then off to the fridge again to cool a bit further.
After a few minutes we pull the trays back out of the refrigerator and flip them right side up to twist and tap until the truffles fall out! With any luck in our case, or skill in André's, you end up with beautiful and delicious little treats!
Ok to be honest all of them tasted amazing. Most of them looked pretty unimpressive. Not to worry though we ate all the rejects!
It is very clear chocolate making is both a science and an art. We hope you enjoy the video. And don't worry, André made every single little truffle that we are shipping out to our wonderful customers!
Take a look!
