NM-Bruce wrote:
> Chocolatier comrades-in-arms,
>
> On a trip recently to Chicago, I had the opportunity to sample the
> products at Vosges Haut Chocolate, an upscale chocolatier that
> specializes in unusual ingredients in their truffles such as spices
> and cheese and so on. What impressed me about their products was
> that they had perfectly spherical shapes to their truffles.
>
> How do they get such perfectly round shapes? From visual inspection,
> the chocolates are not molded: they don't have the high gloss of
> molded chocolate, they don't have any seams that I can see, and they
> have a flat 'foot', so it appears they are enrobed or dipped. But
> they are perfect spheres and very smooth. And the ganache is pretty
> soft, which would seem to be difficult to form into spheres.
>
> Can perfect sphere shaped truffles with a soft-ish ganache be done by
> hand? Or is this some "trick-of-the-trade" using some kind of mold
> system that assures uniformity? It's probably my lack of skill, but I
> find I need to use a pretty stiff ganache for hand-rolled-dipped, and
> my truffles always have a certain slightly non-spherical quality. I'd
> love to be able to do better.
>
> Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
>
> -Bruce
> PS: Yes, I realize I could have just asked the nice woman at the
> Vosges counter, but of course it didn't occur to me until I was back
> home.

Perfectly round truffles are not important to me--I like things to look as
if they've been touched by the human hand--but the likelihood is that they
are using a mold at some point in the process. Perhaps they are molding and
chilling the ganache alone (someone once described to me a method he had
devised for doing this which involved using a mold and freezing, or
partially freezing, the centers). Perhaps they are very thinly coating a
mold, filling it, then redipping the resultant round.

I had a few of their truffles when the chocolate exhibition was at the Art
Institute in Chicago and was unimpressed. Especially for the price. But to
each his own.