This month’s Bon Appétit puts a highly useful arrow in its readers’ home-cookery quiver with a piece on DIY chocolate truffles.
Truffles—like bagels, fried chicken, sushi, and a host of other foods we’re used to buying, rather than making—are sometimes thought to be beyond the reach of the average home cook. But they’re shockingly attainable, given a bit of interest and some high-quality bittersweet chocolate.
“Getting into Truffles” features the recipes of Vosges Haut-Chocolat founder Katrina Markoff, who is pictured looking a bit like a trust-fund hippie, sporting a Grateful Deadesque “Free Yourself” T-shirt while lavishing highbrow truffles with artisanal care. Her concept?
‘Because it’s my company, I was able to create things that seemed far-fetched,’ she says. Out went super-sweet fillings, and in went pasilla chiles, Tuscan fennel pollen, and wasabi.
Fennel pollen aside, the recipes provided in Bon Appétit have their feet planted squarely on the ground. Building off of a solid basic bittersweet chocolate truffle recipe, readers can concoct truffles in the key of lemon and thyme, mango curry or balsamic vinegar.
Homemade holday gifts can be kinda touch-and-go, but I can vouch for truffles. Nailing the perfectly spherical fresh-from-the-chocolatier look can be tricky, but attaining smooth, rich flavor is surprisingly simple.
And anyone who doesn’t like rich dark chocolate is unlikely to be worthy of a home-baked gift to begin with. Because they’re objectively wrong.
I followed the excellent Kahlua truffle recipe from epicurious.com, but somehow misread and added way more ‘lua than was called for. My resultant “truffle shots” were a party hit. They’re time consuming to roll and the track marks don’t look appetizing on your hands, but I didn’t have to temper chocolate or work with molds (a future aspiration) and anyway, who can resist rich chocolate rolled in nuts, powdered sugar, and cocoa?