Food, Home & Lifestyle
Bonbon Filling: Dark Chocolate and Banana Passionfruit Ganache
Lesson time 18:39 min
Learn how to make creamy, rich ganache that can be infused with flavors—like the banana-passionfruit variation in this chapter. Then, learn how to fill, cap, and unmold perfect bonbons.
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Topics include: Filling the Bonbon Shells • Capping the Bonbons • Unmolding the Bonbons • Serving and Storing the Bonbons
Teaches French Pastry Fundamentals
James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel teaches his essential techniques for making delicious pastries and desserts in his first-ever online class.
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For this chocolate filling, I'm using a simple, classic chocolate ganache, which is just chocolate, butter, and cream. I'll also show you a variation of this dark chocolate ganache with a little bit of passion fruit. This is one of my favorite flavor combinations. So the ganache will be shiny, smooth, creamy. You should be able to close your eyes, bite into a chocolate bonbon without looking at it, without thinking too much, you should know exactly what you're eating. It should be like a burst of beautiful flavors. So now I'm going to show you how to make the center of the chocolate bonbon. It's called a ganache. It is essentially just a few ingredients, chocolate, cream, and butter. So that's the base for the ganache. And then I'll show you how to, essentially, add some flavors to this ganache to make the center of the chocolate bonbon really delicious. I'm going to start with the cream. So I'm going to place the cream in a pot. I'm going to do both of them at the same time. I'm going to turn the heat into medium, medium high. And then we're going to take a slightly larger bowl and we're going to place our chocolate on the bottom. My butter will be kept outside just to have it room temperature. It'll be easier to emulsify in the ganache. For this chocolate filling, I'm using a dark chocolate ganache, which is a 70% cocoa content. It goes very well with a little bit of passion fruit and a little bit of banana. But you can also have, if you're a chocolate lover, just straight chocolate. So for the chocolate ganache, we're just going to heat up the cream and bring it to a boil. And for the passion fruit banana, we're just going to heat up the cream with the passion fruit and with the banana puree. So it's always important to bring everything to a boil to sterilize everything we have in the ganache. So the ganache is, essentially, inside the chocolate bonbon. You want to preserve it for as long as we can. Usually, chocolate bonbon can keep for a few weeks or sometimes a few months. If you want to for this ganache, you can always substitute the cream with almond milk or soy milk. It's an easy swap. There's not that much difference with the consistency or the texture of the ganache. And it's easy if you have any allergies. So our cream is boiling here. I'm going to take it off the stove. And the most important part, when you add the cream to the chocolate, you're going to add a little bit in beginning, and let us sit for just a few seconds. So this will actually melt the chocolate. Very important that we re-emulsify the cream with the chocolate. Ultimately, that's our goal. We want to have a smooth, very creamy, shiny texture. The hot cream will start melting the chocolate. And we're going to mix it a little bit. So think about it like if you do a mayo at home. You add a little bit of mustard and then you add the oil little by little. So you want to re-emulsify all the fat with the chocolate here. And if you use the othe...
About the Instructor
Celebrated for his innovative twists on classic desserts, Cronut® creator and James Beard Award-winner Dominique Ansel has been called the “world’s best pastry chef.” In his MasterClass, Dominique teaches his essential techniques for perfect pastries. Learn baking and more with his precise methods, add classic recipes to your repertoire, and explore texture and flavor inspirations to delight friends and family with your own decadent desserts.
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Dominique Ansel
James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dominique Ansel teaches his essential techniques for making delicious pastries and desserts in his first-ever online class.
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