How is it done: REALLY round truffles?
Chocolatier comrades-in-arms,
On a trip recently to Chicago, I had the opportunity to sample the
products at Vosges Haut Chocolate, an upscale chocolatier that
specializes in unusual ingredients in their truffles such as spices and
cheese and so on. What impressed me about their products was that they
had perfectly spherical shapes to their truffles.
How do they get such perfectly round shapes? From visual inspection,
the chocolates are not molded: they don't have the high gloss of
molded chocolate, they don't have any seams that I can see, and they
have a flat 'foot', so it appears they are enrobed or dipped. But
they are perfect spheres and very smooth. And the ganache is pretty
soft, which would seem to be difficult to form into spheres.
Can perfect sphere shaped truffles with a soft-ish ganache be done by
hand? Or is this some "trick-of-the-trade" using some kind of mold
system that assures uniformity? It's probably my lack of skill, but I
find I need to use a pretty stiff ganache for hand-rolled-dipped, and
my truffles always have a certain slightly non-spherical quality. I'd
love to be able to do better.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
-Bruce
PS: Yes, I realize I could have just asked the nice woman at the
Vosges counter, but of course it didn't occur to me until I was back
home.
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