Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man fights bravely on against a tide of food. I’m your Gluttonous Gladiator, Jon O’Guin, and today’s Valentine’s Day (or at least it BETTER BE, FUTURE ME), so of course, I’ve come to you with something that you can use to spice up your night. For those who want to jump the gun, and get messy, here’s a link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

A Bitter-sweet Beginning

Firstly, I do want to warn you that today’s recipe takes like, 3 hours. So if you’re relying on it to save the day because you’re getting off work and forgot to do something special…you are already screwed, my dude. I would bail immediately, and go figure out some other way to make it work. You ever buy those fake roses in gas stations? The ones with the Glass tubes? Those are popular.

Some places will even spritz the roses with perfume!

Alright, are the gullible people gone to go buy crack pipes? (That’s what those roses are for, by the way: you’re not buying the flower, you’re buying the glass tube to smoke crack. The perfume spritz is just a cover. Or at least, you used to. That whole thing got revealed back in like, the early 2010’s, so hopefully we cracked down (natch) on that). Good. I like spicing up Valentine’s Day in more ways than one. For those of you who stayed, I do want to note that I didn’t lie to the first group: I merely withheld some important information: today’s recipe DOES take, like, 3 hours…but you don’t have to go all the way, as it were. You can pull out much earlier, and still get satisfying results. I do not know when I will stop making the sex jokes, but I assure you, they are wearing thin on my patience as well.

See, the trick here is these are a very basic form of truffle, that is, essentially, just a coated ball of ganache. Thus, while it will take several hours to set the ganache and form it, you can just use it. Get some Cookies and smear it on top. Or a cake. Drizzle it over ice cream like an insane  hot fudge. Thin it out and make chocolate fondue. Hell, you wanna go with a more mainstream dish, ganache is the chocolate you dip strawberries in. The possibilities here are basically endless.

Infinite options, as long as they’re chocolate.

Further, while today’s recipe is for a Spicy ganache/truffle, you can make a “normal” one by just omitting the spices, or flavor it with different spices. You can add nuts, or liqueur, to get boozy chocolate bites. This is one of those recipes that I consider huge for “grammatical cooking”: once you know that (spoilers) 12 ounces of chocolate and 2/3rds of a cup of heavy cream make a great chocolate sauce,  in around 10 minutes, you can do whatever the hell you want with it. If you want to be super technical, this recipe is a little different from traditional technique, which makes a ganache with either 1 part cream to 1 part chocolate (for more spreadable uses, basically a chocolate glaze (a good ratio to aim for if you’re doing those Fondue/Hot Fudge ideas) or 1 part cream to 2 parts chocolate for making truffles or other firmer applications like adding structural filling to cakes. My family’s  recipe uses… 2 parts chocolate to 0.88 parts cream, meaning our ganache is more solid than typical. (You could go more classic by just using ¾ cup of heavy cream. That is literally the only distinction)

The DOWNSIDE to all this great information is that…well, it kind of burns through the post like Taco Bell through a stoner. I’ve already told you 40% of the ingredients, and offloaded the “what else I can I do with this” revelations. This is normally where I’d launch into a complicated story about the origins and etymology of the dish…but they’re pretty short as well.

A French pastry-chef (and playwright, weirdly) was running his business, when an accident occurred: one of his apprentices accidentally dumped a pot of hot milk onto some chopped chocolate. The apprentice, in a panic, stirred the mixture together, forming a rich chocolate sauce. Sources disagree exactly on what happened next due to overlapping potential explanations: See, ganache was, originally, a French insult. I believe I’ve talked about my love of the word “panache”, drug into English by Edmund Rostund’s Cyrano De Bergerac.

That reminds me, I should at some point support the new one.

Panache means “coolness” or “confidence and style”, or “Swagger”.  Ganache means…the opposite. One translation of the word is “Chump”. A more technical translation would be “jawbone”, in the same way we’d use “numbskull”.  (The two words are, somewhat weirdly, actually not very related other than sounding the same, because France stole them from the same language: Ganache comes from the Italian for “jaw”, and “panache” comes from the Italian for “Feather”. A ‘panache’ was originally those cool feathers you wore on fancy hats or helmets.) Thus, it would be an entirely reasonable thing to snap at an apprentice who just ruined quite a bit of expensive chocolate…but ALSO, remember how I said the guy was a playwright? One of his friends debuted a play that same year titled Les Ganaches. So he might have named it for his friend’s play, a sweet little vaudeville comedy.  Or it could have been a mix of both. The insult reminds him of the play, instant market opportunity, boom.

So, without further ado, let’s get cooking. By which I mean, let’s start suffering.

The Things I Do For Love

Since we’ve established that I’ve got spare room in this post, I do want to spend a bit of time whinging. Beecause whiel this is a very easy recipe, it does contain one of my least favorite steps in popular recipes: chop up the chocolate.

But the chocolate loves you, Jon!

Maybe it’s bad tools, as my family’s knives are almost never sharpened (I mean “I think I spent 10 minutes doing it for some of them around 5 years ago” levels of “never”) but I LOATHE chopping chocolate. Part of it is definitely set-up: I’ve complained before that my family’s counters are like, 2-3 inches too short for me, and the cutting board is a further 2 inches, and is often more than a little wobbly.  This combines with the fact that chocolate is a frustrating level of firmness: it CLEAVES rather than truly ‘cut’, meaning that you have to put in a bunch of effort, and then it’ll basically ‘snap’, meaning you’re suddenly putting in too much effort, and you’ll kind of lurch down to the cutting surface. Kathunk. Kathunk. Kathunk. Over and over. As as you do it, if you’re not wearing gloves the chocolate will start to melt under your hand bracing it for cutting, and thin flecks and slivers that shear off of the cleaving chunks will build up on the knife and the cutting board, and shake off the cutting board to the floor, as you kathunk your way through the rest of the bar.

Go back up and see how clean this portion of the board was before I had to cut the last bar. This is the smears inflicted by chopping ONE THIRD of the chocolate.

I would say the only other task that’s that simple, but that infuriating, is getting the ham out of the Coke every Easter: after the hours of boiling, you need something to grab like, 8 pounds of ham, but the ham has lost most of its structural integrity, and will tear under tongs, bones will slide right out. Like, as cooking goes, it’s like, FIVE minutes of effort, but it’s a grating five.

Once that’s done, though, you basically can’t screw it up. Which is why it’s SO impressive that I almost managed to. See, you’ve only got 5 ingredients:

The whole team is here. Everything is a mess.

That’s the chocolate, the cream, and some cinnamon, chili powder, and cayenne. Cinnamon is one of the most traditional chocolate flavoring components, tracing back to the Aztecs, who did often mix in chiles. All you’ve got to do is add the spices to the cream, and bring it to a simmer over medium heat.

This is pre heating, because it’s more visually interesting. Once incorporated, it’s just like, brownish cream.

The big thing you want to avoid is boiling or scalding the cream. Just keep an eye on it, stirring it frequently. It should only take about 3-5 minutes. Try not to, as I did, get caught up rearranging your spice rack because the current set-up was putting the CAYenne behind the CHILI powder, and CARAWAY before BAY LEAVES. I Spent TWO minutes sorting out shelves, and turned back to find my pot seconds from boiling over. Still, the cream tasted fine, so we added the chopped chocolate and stirred.

Apparently I got Barry Allen to step in and give me a hand with this.

This is the point where, if you want stuff IN the truffles/ganache (the booze, chopped nuts, orange flavor, idk) you should stir it in. As long as your ganache doesn’t ‘break’, you’re fine. If it DOES break, i.e. it seems a little grainy or oily, you can try and fix it by adding mixing the broken mixture into some more warm cream. (like, if you get a heated tablespoon, and start drizzling in while whisking, it should fix itself. (This moment of delicacy is one of the reasons my family just spices the cream and calls it done: less fuss.) Pour it into a glass or plastic bowl, pop it in the fridge, and in a couple hours, you’ll be ready to nut up.

By which I mean that you can coat your truffles, using…basically whatever you think will go well with the chocolate, but my family tends to use cocoa powder or chopped nuts. We sometimes do blitzed up candy canes around Christmas, or powdered sugar, or toasted coconut, like I said, the world is your oyster here. Well, once you get it rolled up.

This doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy to roll into balls.

This is another mildly irritating portion of the process, at least for me: holding the bowl steady while you scoop out balls of chocolate is one of those tasks that I just haven’t built the muscle memory, or even the direct MUSCLES for. (It’s like, a weird interplay of bicep and tricep, depending on the angle) It’s not really ‘hard’, but it’s a little messy. Then you roll them a little to smooth them out, and roll them in whatever coating you’ve got. If you want to be SUPER dedicated, you could coat them in tempered chocolate, which would create a clean-to-hold outer layer that “snaps” when you bite in, but I have watched enough professional chefs struggle to properly temper chocolate that I will gladly just powder or nut with my balls.

Aha, see? The Sex jokes came back right at the end.
That’s about sex, right? We all powder our balls like 18th century wigs before sex?

And that’s all she wrote. Plop those suckers in a little box as a gift, or plate them up for after dinner, and you’ve got a passable surprise, assuming your dinner is at like, 8 or 9 PM. The ganache will melt your mouth, in a very real and literal sense, quite quickly, and the spice will mostly only appear as a kind of tingling burn on the aftertaste. And once you’re comfortable with the cream and chocolate part, you can riff on it in a variety of ways. Even if it’s too late to save your Valentine’s Day, you can maybe recover with some rich and spicy treats tomorrow.

THURSDAY: MAYBE WE TALK CHOCOLATE, MAYBE I MOVE ON TO SOMETHING ELSE.

MONDAY: CURRENT THOUGHTS: SOMETHING ELSE FOR PRESIDENT’S DAY, BLACK TRUFFLE JOOK (STILL HAVEN’T FOUND OUR TRUFFLES THOUGH, OR…I DON’T KNOW. THIS WEEKS SUCKED FOR MENTAL SPACE TO PLAN.

Spicy Ganache Truffles

Makes at least 20 truffles, unless you’re using way too big of a scoop.

Ingredients

                Ganache

12 oz bittersweet or dark chocolate, finely chopped

2/3rd cup heavy cream

¼ tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp chili powder

1/8 tsp cayenne

                Coating

3 tbsps cocoa powder, or ½ cup chopped pistachios, whatever you want for the coating.

Preparation

1. Heat heavy cream and spices in a small saucepan over medium heat, until just simmering. Add the chopped chocolate, and stir constantly until fully incorporated and smooth. You have now made spicy chocolate ganache.

2. To make truffle: move into a bowl or container, and chill 2 hours, until firm. Remove, allow to soften at room temp for 30 minutes to 1 hour, and then, using a melon baller, scoop into balls. Roll in coating of your choice, and serve, or move to an air-tight container for storage. I have no idea how long they keep.