It just seemed obvious to me that someone should have made chocolate truffles using rea truffles, and I figured there must be hundreds of recipes out there. But I looked and I hunted and I Googled, and no. There weren’t.
Makes 30-40 truffles
Ingredients
225 plain chocolate
150ml full fat milk
40g caster sugar
50g truffle
Coating options
Raw cocoa
Gold leaf
Edible glitter
Icing sugar
Chopped toasted hazelnuts
Chocolate vermicelli
Method
Break the chocolate into squares and melt in abain-marie, or a pan of hot water. Don’t let the water boil, and don’t let it touch the bottom of the bowl containing the chocolate.
Place the milk, double cream and caster sugar in a saucepan and bring barely to the boil. Remove from the heat and slowly add to the chocolate, stirring constantly. The mixture will temporarily look a bit scarily wrong – ignore this, it will all come back together!
Allow the ganache to cool to lukewarm, at which point it should be much thicker, but still more liquid than solid.
Peel the truffle (don’t ditch the skins – add them to something else!) and chop it into tiny pieces. You can grate it, but I prefer the texture of little grains of truffle. I use a food chopper for this, as it quickly and effortlessly produces a very fine result.
Stir the truffle into the ganache, cover and place in the fridge until set.
Using a teaspoon or melon baller, carve out even amounts of truffled ganache and roll into balls. If you are going for serious presentation, you can weigh the ganache to make sure you get the same amount each time, but I quite enjoy picking a smaller or larger one according to how much I want to idulge myself!
Roll the balls very lightly in raw cacao powder, cocoa, chopped hazelnuts, edible gold leaf, glitter…you decide! I tend to stick to raw coca powder…as I love the fact that the only texture in these comes from the little chunks of truffle, but any of the other coatings would work, too.
If you are planning to give any away, make sure you do this quickly, before you have the chance to eat the lot. This is a serious warning. It happened to me, and I had some explaining to do…
Chef’s Tip
If you pause before chilling, this sauce is outragrageously good poured, still warm, over ice cream.
Find out more about “Discovering the Great British Truffle” by Marion Dean and Marion Pennington attrufflehuntersdogschool.com.