Flavored Ganaches (Fruit, herb, spice, etc)

[Desiderio]

Thank you Thank you for your answers guys , very very helpfull , as usual

Thank you for the link as well John , maybe ill give the apricot a try then

Edited December 28, 2006 by Desiderio (log)

[mrose]

The trick is not to use too much passion fruit from whatever source you use. The taste can easily become overpowering. It took me a while to get the right proportions so this wouldn't happen or have a strong taste that really lingers. The Alize adds body to the taste without adding strength to the taste. You will have to experiment to get the flavor you want. These hearts do make a big hit for VDay.

Mark

[David J.]

I'm looking for a way to add an intense fruit flavor (raspberry, strawberry, or cherry) to a ganache without adding free water because I'm making a novelty bon-bon with pastry rocks and they will disolve in any moisture.

I started with a 300 grams of basic white chocolate and butter ganache and added 60 grams of ground naturaly flavored hard candy, but that resulted in only a mild flavor while adding a large amount of sugar.

I thought of fruit compound but I'm only creating small batches and don't want to purchase large amounts that won't get used. Is there a way to boil down puree until it contains very little free water without ruining it?

What would you suggest?

[Ke Kau]

David,

Try fruit powders. http://www.remarkablefoods.com/fruit-powders.html The Duby's use a wine powder for one of their ganaches. Let us know how it works.

Shane

[tammylc]

I wonder if you could make your own fruit powder by grinding dehydrated fruit in the food processor? You can get a ton of varieties these days, so this could be a huge boon for flavor development if it works!

[Kerry Beal]

Freeze dried fruits ground make great tasting powders and add no water. Camping places sell them. Here in Canada 'the metropolitan tea company' carries the dried fruits.

[patsikes]

I did not have much luck with freeze dried fruit powders in ganache. Just tasted funny.

Not sure if this would be too much FW also, but you could try soaking your fruit in Everclear for a couple weeks and use that as your flavor base.

[David J.]

Everclear is an interesting idea but I'm not sure that it will work as the highest proof I can buy in Michigan is still 25% water. I also don't want the flavor profile to be strong on alcohol.

My wife has a food dehydrator in the basement that hasn't been used in years but should be in working condition. That will make it cheap and easy to dry some raspberries and powder them in a spice grinder for a test.

I will let you know how it goes.

[tammylc]

Everclear is an interesting idea but I'm not sure that it will work as the highest proof I can buy in Michigan is still 25% water.  I also don't want the flavor profile to be strong on alcohol.

My wife has a food dehydrator in the basement that hasn't been used in years but should be in working condition.  That will make it cheap and easy to dry some raspberries and powder them in a spice grinder for a test.

I will let you know how it goes.

←

Whole Foods or any other natural foods store should have containers of the "Just Fruits" or "Just Veggies" line of dehydrated fruits. They're pretty inexpensive, and certainly less hassle than dehydrating your own, I'd think. You need to get them really really dry to make them powder, and I don't know that a home dehydrator will be up to the challenge...

[ejw50]

Phillipe Padovani (one of the original 12 HRC Hawaiian Regional Chefs in Hawaii and owner of Padovani's wine and restaurant bar) told me he uses sun dried blueberries in his blueberry ganache. The blueberry ganache (along with every other ganache) tasted awesome. They did have a strong blueberry taste. So it seems that could work.

On a related note, what type of luck have the rest of you had in making raspberry ganache? My experience with boiling raspberries is that it kills the flavor. But all of the recipes I see say to boil the raspberries with the cream.

Edited May 30, 2007 by ejw50 (log)

[McAuliflower]

Everclear is an interesting idea but I'm not sure that it will work as the highest proof I can buy in Michigan is still 25% water.  I also don't want the flavor profile to be strong on alcohol.

My wife has a food dehydrator in the basement that hasn't been used in years but should be in working condition.  That will make it cheap and easy to dry some raspberries and powder them in a spice grinder for a test.

I will let you know how it goes.

←

Whole Foods or any other natural foods store should have containers of the "Just Fruits" or "Just Veggies" line of dehydrated fruits. They're pretty inexpensive, and certainly less hassle than dehydrating your own, I'd think. You need to get them really really dry to make them powder, and I don't know that a home dehydrator will be up to the challenge...

←

I've experimented with grinding up the "Just Fruits".

Here's a picture of my balsamic truffle rolled in tempered chocolate and then strawberries:

The drawbacks:

- the powdered strawberries (and raspberries) are very hygroscopic. They turn gummy after one day.

- grinding turns them into just really small particles. They never got small enough for my taste to use inside a truffle. But I wanted them to dissolve to nothing- not liking granular texture in my truffles.

The Benefits:

- the resulting powders are quite beautiful!

I've dreamed of some sort of sugar substitution one could do with the powdered fruits to aid them in being less hygroscopic.

Related to that intense fruit flavor in general. The ideal would be an essential oil that captured the berry essence, as opposed to its leaves and stem. Unfortunately this doesn't exist.

Maybe we could fake a berry essential oil using the dehydrated fruits: soak them in alcohol as suggested and then evaporate off some / most of the alcohol using low temperatures to minimize heat altering the fruit flavors.

How much of a berry's flavors are soluble in fat? Borrowing another method from perfume making- fresh fruit could be immersed in cold cream for weeks to draw its flavors into the fat. Again, having the dried fruits helps minimize adding water to the situation.

Hrmmmmm...

[Tri2Cook]

I don't know if these would help for ganache, haven't tried it. They're not cheap but they pack a lot of flavor in a very small amount so that may help with the moisture problem. If you look through all 7 pages (not sure why they didn't just put them on one page but that's a different topic, "annoying website design"), they have a pretty good selection of flavors.

[Desiderio]

On the raspberry ganache, I know someone here ( I cant remebere the name, but I think is a chocolatier form Germany ) dont boil his fruit puree' at all.I never had any problem making rasberry ganache with raspberries I tryed both , boiling and not , using raspberry flavored liquor .I use organic dehydrated blueberry for my blueberry chocolates , they work great.

[patsikes]

I had purchased a bag of natural powdered dried raspberries and threw most of it out.

No matter what I did, I ended up with a gummy mess. I tried adding it directly to the ganache, steeping it in the cream (like tea), and wetting it with water or everclear.

Not only was the texture off, the flavor was not the best either. To get a tart crisp flavor I was used to getting with fresh raspberry puree you would have to add lemon juice or citric acid.

[David J.]

Thanks for all the feedback on fruit powders. It appears that they aren't going to add the flavor without messing up the texture.

A coworker just suggested fruit essence as well. Since it only requires a few drops it shouldn't increase the water content to the point of setting off all the pastry rocks. She said that they are available at the local Indian Grocery stores which would make it easy to try.

[sugarseattle]

Correct me if I'm just missing the point, but every time I've tried to make fruit "infused" ganache, I've simply replaced some of the cream with fruit puree. It seems like that would not offset the fat balance too much to make the ganache susceptable to melting any sugar that graced its surface?

The fruit powders do look beautiful though. I never really thought about them until reading this post, but ideas are floating in my head right now!

[David J.]

Correct me if I'm just missing the point, but every time I've tried to make fruit "infused" ganache, I've simply replaced some of the cream with fruit puree. It seems like that would not offset the fat balance too much to make the ganache susceptable to melting any sugar that graced its surface?

The fruit powders do look beautiful though. I never really thought about them until reading this post, but ideas are floating in my head right now!

←

It wouldn't necessarily melt a coating, but these bits of sugar are mixed inside the ganache. I tried to make a crunchy praline cream ganache once and found that it melted the sugar bits. I then made a butter ganache and they survived. Even with an all butter ganache I heard a few of the pastry rocks popping so I'm pretty sure that a more moist cream ganache would detonate quite a few.

[Kerry Beal]

Correct me if I'm just missing the point, but every time I've tried to make fruit "infused" ganache, I've simply replaced some of the cream with fruit puree. It seems like that would not offset the fat balance too much to make the ganache susceptable to melting any sugar that graced its surface?

The fruit powders do look beautiful though. I never really thought about them until reading this post, but ideas are floating in my head right now!

←

It wouldn't necessarily melt a coating, but these bits of sugar are mixed inside the ganache. I tried to make a crunchy praline cream ganache once and found that it melted the sugar bits. I then made a butter ganache and they survived. Even with an all butter ganache I heard a few of the pastry rocks popping so I'm pretty sure that a more moist cream ganache would detonate quite a few.

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You are bound to lose a few rocks to the moisture in the butter, because it's about 15 % water (I know you already know this). Do you have access to a butter which has less water, or would you consider using coconut oil as the fat in your ganache? You'd end up with something more like a meltaway center with the coconut oil.

Of course that doesn't help with the initial question, which is the intense fruit flavour.

[David J.]

You are bound to lose a few rocks to the moisture in the butter, because it's about 15 % water (I know you already know this).  Do you have access to a butter which has less water, or would you consider using coconut oil as the fat in your ganache?  You'd end up with something more like a meltaway center with the coconut oil. 

Of course that doesn't help with the initial question, which is the intense fruit flavour.

←

I don't know where to get butter with a lower water percentage, but the loss of a few rocks to the water in the butter isn't a big problem. The amount that I lost was probably a very small percentage of the total and I included enough that there were plenty left over.

So far the experiment has been a success. Some people don't notice the pastry rocks as anything other than "crunchy bits" because they chew them rather than let them melt. Others get a kick out them and I had a report that the daughter of a coworker was spooked by the popping. Everybody liked the basic white chocolate ganache but I'm going to try the fruit essence tomorrow when another coworker is going to bring in some samples for me to try.

[Desiderio]

What about some clarified butter ?I dont know how the consistency would be, I make some chocolates with clarified butter and chocolate in different proportion.

[grahamR]

Could you turn the problem around and coat the rocks with something to keep the water out? Then you could use fresh fruit. Or perhaps make them in two layers, one with the rocks and one with the fruit?

[Kerry Beal]

Could you turn the problem around and coat the rocks with something to keep the water out? Then you could use fresh fruit. Or perhaps make them in two layers, one with the rocks and one with the fruit?

←

Jumping off from this, they don't pop mixed with straight chocolate, so you could do a layer of poprocks in chocolate separate from your fruit center.

Pop rocks make great bark.

[jcho]

Looking online for a less-expensive source of essence, I came across this (http://tabascofoodservice.com/fs_recipe.cfm?ID=839) (Step 6) method for making it. Has anyone tried this? I am wondering how well the raspberry flavor makes it through the red wine, and whether another alcohol might work.

(Sorry--I don't know how to do the 'link' thing everyone does.)

[paulraphael]

I would just use butter and an intensely flavored, well strained fruit coulis (or combination of coulis and liqueur).

This recipe is for a chocolate butter sauce which is ganache-like, but is more versatile and easily flavored. A lower proportion of liquid would let you get the consistency of a ganache filling.

Please post your results ... I'm curious to know.

[eskay]

I don't know much about ganache but I do know a little about solvents and I think it should be theoretically possible to extract essential oils from fruit using something really volatile and then distill it off...I just don't know how to do this in a kitchen setting.

EDIT: Ok, I had a lot more here, and Patrick S quoted some of it, but the more I think about it the less I like the thought, so I'm going to summarize what was here as: definitely a bad idea, the 'fruit essence' mentioned above is probably just that, so that might be your best bet.

Edited July 23, 2007 by eskay (log)