Repairing Ganache

Some of you may recall that last year I had a rather epic fail in my kitchen, when I made an orange white chocolate ganache to fill Easter eggs. I was baffled by it at the time and none of the salvage tips I could find online actually worked well enough for me to use it as planned. This week while continuing my chocolate reading, I found the explanation for what occurred and, more importantly, how to fix this issue in the future. 

According to Greweling, "A ganache that requires the addition of liquid to re-emulsify it is too high in fat. Its formula should therefore be adjusted for future batches" (Chocolates and Confections, p. 95). Now that I think about it, the white chocolate ganache I made, flavoured with orange oil and made with butter in addition to cream, definitely had a higher fat content than is the norm. Adding more cream and more melted white chocolate did nothing to fix the issue because those additions didn't improve the ratio of fat to water. Had I added milk or even water, I might have had a different result and more success in repairing the broken ganache. And when I remade the ganache the following day, I essentially did reformulate the recipe, because I used less butter and more cream, which in turn altered the ratio of fat to water. Heavy cream has a fat content of about 35%, while butter has a fat content of about 80%.  

The idea that a ganache could have too much fat has never been on my radar. Too much water, sure -- that would shorten the shelf-life. But too much fat? 

Usually when we talk about ganache, we talk about ratios of chocolate to cream (or whatever else is being used to soften the chocolate). Milk chocolate requires half as much cream as dark chocolate to achieve the desired effect and white chocolate requires half as much cream as milk chocolate. So the ratios we were taught really weren't expressed in terms of fat content, but in terms of the type of chocolate. When making ganache, it's not uncommon to substitute alcohol, butter, or even water for some or all of the cream, complicating things further. And while I've noticed that alcohol in a ganache causes it to behave differently, I simply attributed it to some characteristic of the alcohol and not specifically a change in the fat to water ratio. 

Once you deviate from a traditional ganache recipe, it seems, you have to pay attention to the fat to water ratio. Lesson learned. 

I also learned another interesting tidbit during this week's reading. Not enough to warrant a blog post, but fascinating nevertheless. I already knew that starch molding is a common method of making fondant, jelly, and cordial centres that are later enrobed in chocolate. I was first introduced to this confectionary technique while watching the YouTube videos of Hercules Candy. You press shapes into cornstarch (or another starch mixture), deposit liquid centres into the wells, leave them to crystallize, and then remove them from the starch mold to be covered in chocolate. But did you know that starch is flammable‽ (Yes, I just used an interrobang. It seems appropriate in this context.) Greweling cautions, "Should a large quantity of [starch] become airborne and be exposed to an open flame, the result could be a flash fire or explosion" (p. 90). 

While I'm all for experiential learning, I'm happy to acquire this knowledge by reading instead!