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Fruit Purée in Chocolates


sote23

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Hey escry,

I think that the invertase is working as my truffles last on the shelf an additional two weeks with still soft/moist centers.

I do regret the sweetness change that invertase makes in the white ganache, and with your comment, I may skip it next time.

I have never made my ganaches with anything other than chocolate, cream, and butter (i.e. I have never added corn syrup or invert sugar). So I have never had the opportunity to taste the off balance that sote23 speaks of.

Patrick Sikes

www.MyChocolateJournal.com

A new chocolate review community

PS I Love You Fine Chocolates

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Hey escry,

I think that the invertase is working as my truffles last on the shelf an additional two weeks with still soft/moist centers. 

I do regret the sweetness change that invertase makes in the white ganache, and with your comment, I may skip it next time.

I have never made my ganaches with anything other than chocolate, cream, and butter (i.e. I have never added corn syrup or invert sugar).  So I have never had the opportunity to taste the off balance that sote23 speaks of.

I made 2 ganaches of the same flavor, everything identical, except one i added invert sugar and the other i didn't. the one with the invert sugar tasted completly different.

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I f I may ask what quantity you use of the invert sugar in the ganache , because I have used inverted sugar and I havent notice that much of difference , I mean not that pronounced.

Vanessa

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I have been using invert sugar to extend shelf life and I think it also makes the ganache creamier. It is sweet but I don't find it as sweet as regular sugar. Wouldn't it be possible to add something like cocoa butter to counteract the sweetness impact. Technically, chocolate is just solids in cocoa butter anyway. Adding invert sugar would seem to be a way of "reengineering" the original formula, in a way. I find cocoa butter very bitter...yuck....so it seems in principal it could bring a balance.

I'm very interested in any ideas for extending shelf life that don't compromise flavor if there are other ideas. I'm looking at invertase, which I haven't used yet, but overall I've been pretty happy with invert sugar. I've also read where using more butter and less cream can increase shelf life by lowering the AW value....any truth to that?

Great info as normal everyone...

I f I may ask what quantity you use of the invert sugar in the ganache , because I have used inverted sugar  and I havent notice that much of difference , I mean not that pronounced.

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  • 6 years later...

I am starting out with making chocolates, and I would like to try filling some with a flavor like raspberry. However, I want to get as much of the pure fruit flavor as possible, rather than just incorporating raspberry into a ganache. What I have in mind is filling the chocolates with something as close to a pure sauce of raspberries and sugar as possible. Is there a specific method that works best for using fruit as filling? I would imagine that the filling can't be too liquid in order to work well.

I'm sure in the future I would also like to try other fruits besides raspberry, so it would be great to know how to best use fruits in general as filling. Thanks a lot!

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This isn't really an answer to your question, but I just thought I'd chime in to say that I recently made a filling with one part ripe strawberries (blended smooth but seeds left in) and 2 parts chocolate, and was surprised how well the strawberry flavour came through. If you dropped it down to 1:1 I reckon you'd have a pretty strong berry flavour, and the texture would probably still be fine for moulded chocolates.

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To get the purest fruit flavour I would go with a fondant centre flavoured with the fruit you want to use. I'm certainly not a pro, but when I want to do this I buy a dried fondant powder and hydrate with the fruit in question, adding extra acid if it gets too sweet. There are also freeze dried (real) fruit powders you can buy to amp up the fruit flavour without adding in extra water.

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From a practical standpoint I would say it should be of higher viscosity than the melted chocolate you`re using to back your shells. For instance, when I`m making cherry cordials and the cherries exude too much liquid, the juice floats up through the melted chocolate making it impossible to seal. From a safety standpoint, if your sugar concentration is not high enough the chocolates will have a short shelf life.

There are other techniques for getting highly fluid fillings into chocolates. If you`re interested there`s some great information on here in other threads if you do a search for "starch molding".

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Bear in mind that if you make a filling with a very high water-content, as yoou will get if you use pureed fruit, it will have short shelf-life and may even make the chocolate deterioate. However, if the chocolates are for eating within a short time span, it sounds excellen

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Bear in mind that if you make a filling with a very high water-content, as yoou will get if you use pureed fruit, it will have short shelf-life and may even make the chocolate deterioate. However, if the chocolates are for eating within a short time span, it sounds excellen

Is there a difference between using a puree one has made and a commercial one? I am asking because there are many ganache recipes that call for fruit puree--to take just one example, Greweling's passion fruit ganaches. I think Greweling always calls for reducing the puree by half, but not all recipes do. I hate reducing purees because of the deterioration in flavor that comes from cooking the fruit, but I am also concerned about water content in the finished product.
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the commercial ones will give you a consistent product, as they have sugar and pH adjustments. When you reduce the puree volume by boiling, you're increasing the flavour and decreasing the water content, so a double whammy :)

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What's the best place to buy these commercial purees? I've looked at L'Epicerie, but the shipping is so exorbitant that I don't really want to buy from there. I could understand if they would charge 15.00 dollars for everything together, but every puree container purchased seems to add $15 in shipping, which I don't understand. If I wanted to buy 4 containers, the website quoted me $56 for the price for UPS Ground (the lowest shipping level).

Edited by Erdbeereis (log)
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What's the best place to buy these commercial purees? I've looked at L'Epicerie, but the shipping is so exorbitant that I don't really want to buy from there. I could understand if they would charge 15.00 dollars for everything together, but every puree container purchased seems to add $15 in shipping, which I don't understand. If I wanted to buy 4 containers, the website quoted me $56 for the price for UPS Ground (the lowest shipping level).

After a long wait, the Qzina online store has finally gone active. They do free shipping U.S./Canada for orders over $100 and $20 flat rate for orders under $100. They have a large selection of purees in both tubs and top-down bottles.

It's kinda like wrestling a gorilla... you don't stop when you're tired, you stop when the gorilla is tired.

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After the cautions about water content in chocolates that contain fruit purees, I thought I should ask for any advice (or warnings) about the recipe I have come up with for peach ganache. If anyone has time, could you take a look? I plan a two-layer ganache, one layer of peach, the other of milk chocolate with cinnamon (Notter recipe), then dip in milk chocolate.

This is based, somewhat loosely, on Peter Greweling's recipe for slabbed raspberry butter ganache.

80g butter

20g glucose

160g peach puree (reduced from 320g)

15g peach brandy

300g chocolate melted and tempered, divided as follows: 255g white chocolate + 45g cocoa butter

I am using a fairly high proportion of cocoa butter in order to reduce the chocolate taste and also encourage the ganache to set up when poured into a frame (tempering helps with this as well).

I will also be adding small amounts of additional flavorings to taste: I have Amoretti peach compound and also some freeze-dried peach powder. Frankly neither one of them tastes strongly of peach in themselves, so I'll add carefully. I am making my own peach puree for the simple reason that I don't have more room in the freezer for tubs of fruit puree.

From my reading I have learned that butter ganache has better shelf life than cream ganache, and I'm using glucose to help with that issue (and also sweeten the frozen peaches, which have no sugar added).

Any input would be welcome.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Everyone

Hope you guys don't mind me jumping in here, I'm a newbie and learning forum ropes!

I bake and fill cakes with basic ganache made with heavy cream and chocolate. I've just started chocolate workshops ( very basics) so all your comments are of huge interest to me. I'd like to make ganache for cake fillings with added fruit puree, could someone give me some guidance about shelf life and really how should it be done? I assume that by adding fresh fruits it would drastically reduce shelf life or am I wrong? Would the butter ganache work for cake filling? Sorry to ask soo many questions, I would really value any advice. :smile:

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After the cautions about water content in chocolates that contain fruit purees, I thought I should ask for any advice (or warnings) about the recipe I have come up with for peach ganache. If anyone has time, could you take a look? I plan a two-layer ganache, one layer of peach, the other of milk chocolate with cinnamon (Notter recipe), then dip in milk chocolate.

This is based, somewhat loosely, on Peter Greweling's recipe for slabbed raspberry butter ganache.

80g butter

20g glucose

160g peach puree (reduced from 320g)

15g peach brandy

300g chocolate melted and tempered, divided as follows: 255g white chocolate + 45g cocoa butter

I am using a fairly high proportion of cocoa butter in order to reduce the chocolate taste and also encourage the ganache to set up when poured into a frame (tempering helps with this as well).

I will also be adding small amounts of additional flavorings to taste: I have Amoretti peach compound and also some freeze-dried peach powder. Frankly neither one of them tastes strongly of peach in themselves, so I'll add carefully. I am making my own peach puree for the simple reason that I don't have more room in the freezer for tubs of fruit puree.

From my reading I have learned that butter ganache has better shelf life than cream ganache, and I'm using glucose to help with that issue (and also sweeten the frozen peaches, which have no sugar added).

Any input would be welcome.

Hi Jim,

I thought I would chime in as I think a butter ganache is the way to go with fruit. You are right that the shelf life is usually better but it depends on the amount of water in the recipe. As you are reducing your fruit by half that will help. What kind of chocolate are you planning to use? I would suggest a neutral milk chocolate as it won't detract from the flavour as much. You might also want to try a white chocolate. That would be nice with peach. Your chocolate proportion is on the low side for a slabbed ganache but the amount of cocoa butter you are using should offset that. If you are using white chocolate, you might want to increase the amount.

Because your peaches have been frozen with no added sugar, I would definitely increase the sugar. Glucose is less sweet than sugar so the amount you are adding won't add a lot of sweetening. I don't care for overly sweet chocolates, but I find that fruit ganache always require more sugar to punch up the fruit flavour. If you have access to invert sugar (trimoline), I would suggest that. It has a higher sweetening capacity than sugar and it will help with shelf life as well. If you don't have it, try using a neutral tasting honey - which is basically nature's version of invert sugar!

Another tip I use for a soft ganache that I want to coax to set up more firmly is to add some cocoa butter at the end when the ganache is just under 34C. I don't use Mycro - rather I temper cocoa butter, pour it into bar molds and once set up, I break those up and process them in my thermomix just as you would do for nuts. I end up with a mycro type product but using my organic cocoa butter. I add approx. 1% of this powdered cocoa butter based on total batch size. (ie. if your batch size is 1000g - then add 10 grams of cocoa butter powder at the end). I make my ganache using the Thermomix so I am able to process it after the addition of the cocoa butter. You want to be sure that there is no grit in your ganache. If you are doing it by hand, you might want to skip that and just make sure that your ganache is in temper.

Oh and another thing, I agree with you about adding the compound and peach powder sparingly. They might tend towards a 'fake' flavour.

Please let us know how it turns out. It sounds delicious!

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I assume that by adding fresh fruits it would drastically reduce shelf life or am I wrong? Would the butter ganache work for cake filling? Sorry to ask soo many questions, I would really value any advice. :smile:

Hi Rox,

In your ganache, you would not be using 'fresh' fruit. The fruit would be cooked and preferably reduced by half. If the fruit is reduced, the shelf life of the ganache should be better than a cream ganache - especially if the fruit you are using is acidic. A butter ganache is thicker than a cream based ganache so I think it will work even better for a cake filling. Using a butter ganache for fruit based flavours allows the flavours to be more pronounced - again a plus for a cake filling.

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Hi Jim,

I thought I would chime in as I think a butter ganache is the way to go with fruit. You are right that the shelf life is usually better but it depends on the amount of water in the recipe. As you are reducing your fruit by half that will help. What kind of chocolate are you planning to use? I would suggest a neutral milk chocolate as it won't detract from the flavour as much. You might also want to try a white chocolate. That would be nice with peach. Your chocolate proportion is on the low side for a slabbed ganache but the amount of cocoa butter you are using should offset that. If you are using white chocolate, you might want to increase the amount.

Because your peaches have been frozen with no added sugar, I would definitely increase the sugar. Glucose is less sweet than sugar so the amount you are adding won't add a lot of sweetening. I don't care for overly sweet chocolates, but I find that fruit ganache always require more sugar to punch up the fruit flavour. If you have access to invert sugar (trimoline), I would suggest that. It has a higher sweetening capacity than sugar and it will help with shelf life as well. If you don't have it, try using a neutral tasting honey - which is basically nature's version of invert sugar!

Another tip I use for a soft ganache that I want to coax to set up more firmly is to add some cocoa butter at the end when the ganache is just under 34C. I don't use Mycro - rather I temper cocoa butter, pour it into bar molds and once set up, I break those up and process them in my thermomix just as you would do for nuts. I end up with a mycro type product but using my organic cocoa butter. I add approx. 1% of this powdered cocoa butter based on total batch size. (ie. if your batch size is 1000g - then add 10 grams of cocoa butter powder at the end). I make my ganache using the Thermomix so I am able to process it after the addition of the cocoa butter. You want to be sure that there is no grit in your ganache. If you are doing it by hand, you might want to skip that and just make sure that your ganache is in temper.

Oh and another thing, I agree with you about adding the compound and peach powder sparingly. They might tend towards a 'fake' flavour.

Please let us know how it turns out. It sounds delicious!

Thanks for all your ideas. I can now report on the result of the peach ganache. Alas, it was not good. I half-filled the molds with cinnamon ganache, then the rest of the way with peach. Upon reflection, I realized that the peach was totally unsuccessful and had to take drastic action to save the pralines. It was really a comedy of errors. First, the frozen peaches had absolutely no taste--wonderful bright yellow color, but no taste. So I started over with canned peaches, which were much better. I used white chocolate plus cocoa butter to thicken the mixture. The result was just too bland. So I added the peach powder. It had no taste whatever (it's a name brand of fruit powder, but it was terrible and I threw it out). Then I began adding the peach compound. I have decided I am not thrilled with fruit compounds. Perhaps if you knew it was peach, you could taste it, but otherwise it just had an artificial taste. Finally I tried peach brandy. That had an alcohol kick, but not much flavor. In any event I left the peach ganache to set overnight, but by morning it had not set thoroughly, and the taste was still bland. I was so angry that I carefully scraped the peach mixture out of the molds, leaving the cinnamon behind. Then I made a recipe of Greweling's passion fruit ganache (fortunately I had some frozen passion fruit in the house). The resulting pralines were a great hit; people noticed the subtle taste of the cinnamon, and no one knew what a disaster the whole thing had almost been.

My conclusion: Peaches are just too subtle to use in ganache--and that explains why I have never seen a recipe for peach ganache. Pears are only marginally better. It looks as if one has to have a strongly flavored fruit--passion fruit or apricot or orange, for example.

Sad story, but I learned something. And I was only making the chocolates for family and friends, so it wasn't the major issue it might have been.

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