A different approach to ganache
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I actually started playing around with this post earlier in the year and realized that it’s been sitting as a draft all this time. As I recently began work on a FAVE post on scones which may take me a bit of time, it seems fitting to share a quickie with you. Even if you’re in the midst of heat and humidity and don’t want to turn on your oven, these recipes can be done on the stove top. Plus you can freeze your end result and be ready for those wonderful autumn days when French macarons might be on your to do list.
While I have plenty of baking and pastry books in my home library, I love browsing the shelves at our local libraries. Not only do they often have newer books available that I can peruse before I might consider a purchase but also many that have been around for some years. One of those is François Payard’s book “Payard’s Cookies”, coauthored with Anne E. McBride and published back in November, 2015.
As I paged through the book I was drawn not so much to the cookie recipes but to some of the other components that might go into a cookie project - things like nut pastes and ganaches. Hmmm . . . I should try a couple of these.
Payard includes recipes for making your own nut pastes (almond/hazelnut, pistachio) which can be made ahead and then incorporated into a ganache or other filling. He offers two ganache versions - “fruit” when using fruit purées and “dry” when using ingredients like extracts or nut pastes.
Raspberry ganache centers surrounded by white chocolate raspberry Swiss Meringue Buttercream
Here’s the recipe PDF for both fruit and dry versions.
First fruit . . . . .The primary ingredient in fruit ganache is 100 g fruit purée along with 30 ml heavy cream (or you can leave out the cream and use 130 g fruit purée). Additionally there’s 56 g / 2 oz white chocolate, 40 g / 1/4 cup minus 2 teaspoons granulated sugar, 10g / one heaping tablespoon cornstarch and 75 g / 5.5 tablespoons unsalted butter.
The mise
Place white chocolate in a medium bowl. Whisk together sugar and cornstarch in a small separate bowl. Place cream and fruit purée (in this case raspberry) in a saucepan and have diced butter ready on the side.
Bring cream and purée to a boil, whisking to avoid sticking. Then whisk in sugar/cornstarch, return to a boil and whisk 2-3 minutes until it thickens.
Pour the fruit/cream mixture over the white chocolate and blend until melted.
Add butter and blend until smooth.
Press plastic wrap directly on the surface and refrigerate an hour or overnight until set. It should be pipe-able.
Being in macaron mode I was already planning to use the raspberry Swiss meringue buttercream in my freezer for a batch and thought . . . . . hmmmm . . . how about a center dollop of raspberry ganache to compliment that? Why sure!
I added vanilla speckles to the shells - Yummy!
The dry ganache is essentially the same as far as ingredients other than using 140 g heavy cream and 20 g of nut paste to replace the cream and fruit purée in the fruit version. Here’s the recipe again.
As an aside: what you’ll have to decide is whether you wish to make your own nut paste(s) a.k.a praliné - essentially caramelized nuts that are ground into a paste (a entirely different topic!). It’s a process that you may not want to pursue.
But if you do, here’s the recipe for praliné shortbread that includes how to make the paste itself. If you go for it, remember the paste can be made ahead and keeps for some weeks in the fridge.
The good news is you have the option of buying your nut paste(s) from various sources such as well stocked bakery supply sites, nut vendors or Amazon. There are lots of choices out there, particularly for pistachio paste due to the recent popularity of Dubai chocolate bars.
OK - on to the dry ganache. Cream and paste go into the saucepan - then the steps are the same.
The mise
Almost there
All blended up
For this macaron project I used the pistachio ganache as the center and piped a ring of strawberry Swiss meringue buttercream to fill the vanilla shells. Not bad my friends.
And so it goes. Until next time.
