Chocolate Truffles

Truffles traditionally only appear in stores around Christmas. This is largely because truffles melt so easily they wouldn’t survive long in most places during July and August. But now you can make them yourself and enjoy them year-round!

OK folks, truffles are NOT Paleo/Primal. Not even close. Even unsweetened, chocolate is still beans.

But even Mark Sisson described chocolate as a “sensible indulgence.” So as long as you don’t OVER indulge...

Ingredients:

   1 cup heavy cream
   4 (1 ounce) squares baking chocolate
   3 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
   Cocoa powder

Some notes on the ingredients:

Use the best local cream you can get your hands on. The stuff from the major dairy factories will work if that’s all you can get, but I use cream from a small local dairy (Shatto) and it is SO much better. It's actually their regular cream, but it's rich enough to qualify as heavy cream for our purposes.

Plain old Baker’s unsweetened baking chocolate is fine. Before adding, break it up, then grind it up in a blender or food processor smaller than the size of the chocolate chips. It just melts easier and more consistently.

For the chocolate chips, I find Hershey’s Special Dark are best. Having lived in San Francisco I tried Ghirardelli bittersweet chips but they just weren’t as good as HSD.

Cocoa powder - again, Hershey’s Special Dark. .
   
Instructions:

Toss all the ingredients in a double boiler and crank up the heat. Once the water is boiling and everything starts to melt, reduce heat to medium - just enough to keep it boiling. Start stirring.

Just keep stirring, just keep stirring, just keep stirring...

You really have to keep an eye on it - if it gets too hot or sits in the boiler too long, it will start oozing butterfat, which looks like oil. You want to avoid that as much as possible. It doesn’t taste bad, but it looks unappealing on the finished product. It cools to look kinda like Crisco instead of chocolate.

Once everything is melted, remove the top pan of your double boiler. How you proceed from here is up to you. You can leave it to cool in the pan and use a melon scoop to make round truffles, but I find that to be a lot of work.

I suppose there are various forms you could pour the chocolate into, but I’ve never tried them.

Here’s what I do:

Place the pan on a towel to dry it off - you don’t want to pour hot water into your truffles!

Have a piece of parchment ready on a large cookie sheet and pour the chocolate mess onto it. Note: if you don't use a large enough piece of parchment on a large enough cookie sheet, you can probably guess what will happen.

At this point, give the pot and your stirring spoon to someone you love to lick. Or you can do it yourself, but it's much nicer to share.

Use a plastic spatula to kind of even out the thickness to a little less than half an inch. Allow to cool. You can actually put it in the refrigerator at this point.

Here’s where it gets messy. From this point forward I find it easiest to use disposable latex (or similar) gloves - the CSI variety - available at most pharmacies and big chain stores that have pharmacies in them. This stuff WILL stick to your hands, but not so much to the gloves.

Once cool, dust the top of the chocolate mass with cocoa powder. Turn it over on the cookie sheet and peel away the parchment. Place the parchment on a flat surface large enough to cut up the chocolate on. I use the kitchen table, but then ours is an old one with an enamel top you can’t damage easily. Return the mass to the parchment, bottom side up, and dust again with cocoa powder.

Use a wheel-type pizza cutter to cut it into the desired size and shape. I use a stainless steel ruler which is 1" wide to both guide my cutter and make the pieces a uniform one inch square. But hey, they’re your truffles - make ‘em whatever size and shape you want! In any case, store them well dusted with cocoa powder, so they don’t all stick together. As I’m cutting them up I put them in a seal-able hard plastic container a few at a time with a sprinkle of cocoa powder each time, then I seal and shake the container vigorously. Once they’re all in the container I add a little more cocoa powder and shake it again. Store in the refrigerator.