This marks the first installment of my reports-back on my 2007 holiday truffle making adventure.  Last week, I purchased what has turned out to be my favorite cookbook of 2007—Making Artisan Chocolates, by Andrew Garrison Shotts, photography by Madeline Polss.  Andrew Shotts is an award winning pastry chef/chocolatier and owner/operator of Garrison Confections in Providence, RI.  Madeline Polss is an extremely talented photographer of food and other things, whose Web site contains many beautiful pics.  This book covers everything from details of the cacao tree to advanced techniques for producing professional quality confections at home.

During my previous adventures with chocolate, I employed techniques gleaned from a motley crew of recipes I had found on the Internet.  The truffles turned out OK for the most part.  But it turns out that most of my technique and what I thought I knew about chocolate was wrong.  In the past, for example, I stored my truffles in the fridge, thinking it must be necessary after adding the heavy cream and butter.  Wrong . . . the humid environment of the fridge promotes bacterial growth and the cold temps cause chocolate to "bloom" . . . a white dusty appearance on the surface of chocolate that I used to wonder about when looking at my truffles.  Apparently, care must be taken throughout the truffle making process to keep (bacteria-growth-facilitating) water out of the picture.  This I did not know!  And for this reason, wet ingredients are not suitable for flavoring the ganache of a truffle—examples of ganache ingredients that don't generally work include fresh berries.  Instead, a ganache is typically flavored by infusing the heavy cream with spices or herbs or flavored oils or liquors . . . items that don't bring much (if any) water with them to the party.  The book has given me a good working knowledge base to experiment with flavors without wasting too much time and/or ruining too much chocolate along the way.  I won't blab on any longer about the book.  Bottom line, I learned a whole lot about the hows and the whys of chocolate by reading this book.  And truffle-making marks the entry level of chocolatiering (is that a word?) represented in this book—so there's plenty of room for me to grow into the book as I learn to make other types of hand-dipped and molded chocolates in 2008.  I recommend the book highly.

Based on this newly acquired knowledge, I began my truffle prototyping on Sunday evening by making two ganaches—one based on suggestions from Sue and the Winepimp that I try a coconut-curry truffle, and the other a more traditional dark chocolate ganache dipped in white chocolate and dusted in cocoa powder.  After allowing the ganache to dry over night, I finished the truffles last night.



As for the coconut-curry truffle, I used the lemongrass-coconut recipe from my new book as a starting point and modified it a bit to make a milk chocolate/coconut milk/curry powder infused ganache dipped in white chocolate and coated in toasted shredded coconut.  Out of respect for Chef Shotts (and federal copyright law!), I'm not going to repeat my recipes here because they're so close to the recipes Chef Shotts worked so hard to develop.  Instead, I'll discuss my departures from his recipes and encourage you to buy his book.    I used all of the ingredient measurements suggested by the Chef, but replaced the lemongrass with a tablespoon of curry powder and omitted the Chef's suggested Mojito-flavored liquor altogether.  In hindsight, a think a tablespoon of the curry powder was a bit too much—I'll probably halve the amount in my next batch—it left a bit of a bitter flavor in my mouth.  Also, I wasn't careful enough in my ganache-making . . . I unwisely deviated a bit from the Chef's technique . . . and the coconut curry ganache did not properly emulsify.  Instead of being velvety smooth, it's a bit grainy.  Lesson learned.  All in all, the experiment was encouraging.  With a little improvement, I think this one is a keeper for my holiday gift boxes.

The second truffle was based on Chef Shotts' recipe for a classic dark chocolate truffle.  I had originally planned on making the recipe exactly as it appears in Making Artisan Chocolates, but after tempering the white chocolate for the coconut-curry truffle and having it take much longer than I anticipated, and having a bunch of left-over tempered white chocolate, I decided to dip the dark chocolate ganache in the white chocolate rather than tempering a batch of dark chocolate—and then finish the truffles with a dusting of cocoa powder.  I like this recipe and I actually more-or-less followed it, so the ganache turned out silky smooth—but I have plans to modify this recipe into one of the flavor profiles suggested in the comments posted here, so stay tuned!