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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Yesterday I had to take a night class..
At La Maison du Chocolat.Life is tough sometimes...
Especially when your first assignment is to taste a perfect La Maison bonbon, filled with the silkiest, smooth, intensely chocolatey ganache. Ganache is that divinely, "infused" chocolate filling in most French bonbons.
La Maison du Chocolat specializes in these precisely made perfect ganache-filled chocolates, infused with flavors of menthe du Maroc, citron d’Andalousie, vanille, or framboise...
Our instructor Michael Olsen, formerly a tea taster and now the guru of the Madison avenue shop, shows us how to make ganache ourselves. Always the boiled light cream is poured into the chocolate (here shavings of a variety of La Maison bars), and never the other way around.
The hot chocolate is whipped and then "infused" with a puree of peche de vigne - a special French peach that only grows in the vineyards.
This tasting dish of the still warm ganache, is really quite small, I promise you.Just a hint of peachiness comes through at the end. The overall mouth feel is luxuriously...what? Words elude me. Heaven on earth?
Michael then shows us how to make an insanely easy chocolate mousse for guests simply by whipping into the ganache some whipped cream and voila! No raw eggs required!
Just a still life of the mousse, the bowl and ready-made ganache La Maison sells...
Remembrances of things past. Of course no one got to lick the bowl at this elegant class...ahem
Another tragedie gone to waste. Although I'm absolutely certain no PB reader has ever been remotely near a chocolate-covered kitchen utensil...
The origin of all this divine chocolate is the homely cocoa bean. In La Maison's case, only the best Criollo, the creme de la creme of beans are used and then extra specially processed for them by top of the line chocolate maker, Valrhona.
Night class ended with a Q & A session - us asking Michael a gazillion chocolate questions. Our take-home assignment was to try out the new special limited edition box of chocolates shown above. Since I'm still hung over from tasting last night's mousse etc., I will wait a bit before I tackle this difficult homework. La Maison has regular chocolate classes anyone can attend.
BONJOUR GANACHE!
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