How to Make Decadent Dark Chocolate Truffles (EASY)
It’s Valentine’s Day, but you don’t need a special day to let someone in your life know how much they mean to you. You can surprise them with chocolate any time of the year! Every day is a good day for chocolate.
Making chocolate from scratch means a whole lot more than buying store-bought chocolate. Sure, you could buy some chocolate truffles. Or, you could lament about how you poured your heart and soul into some homemade chocolates. Better yet, make them for yourself because you deserve it.
We followed Jacek’s Classic Dark Truffles Recipe in Edmonton Cooks. If you want to buy someone chocolates — and you live in Edmonton — we highly recommend purchasing all of the things there because it is delicious. But like we said earlier, you should still try to make truffles on your own because it’s easy and you’ll get all those brownie points (yes, we’re 6 years old still apparently).
Ingredients
1 cup Valrohna Manjari 64% chocolate*, finely chopped
¼ cup Valrhona cocoa powder
½ cup whipping cream (35%**)
1 tbsp light corn syrup
1 tbsp unsalted butter, room temperature
*We really wish this recipe gave an exact amount in grams so we could be more precise. This is roughly 170g.
**We could only find 33% whipping cream. Close enough, right?
Do I Need Valrhona Chocolate?
Short Answer: No.
Long Answer: While you can use baking chocolate that is commonly found at the grocery store, we recommend getting your hands on some Valrohna Manjari chocolate if you can. It is absolutely delicious and your truffles will be 1000x better. They’ll still be great with regular baking chocolate, but they’ll be next level if you can find the good stuff.
The good sh*t.
How do we know this? We conducted a little experiment:
The Chocolate Taste Test
We wanted to see if there was a noticeable difference if you used high end chocolate vs basic bitch chocolate. We enlisted the help one of our friends who used to be a baker, and had him sample four different variations of chocolate truffles:
Cheap Chocolate, Cheap Cocoa Powder
Cheap Chocolate, Expensive Cocoa Powder
Expensive Chocolate, Cheap Cocoa Powder
Expensive Chocolate, Expensive Cocoa Powder
We asked him to pick out the two extremes: #1 and #4. To our surprise, he was able to correctly identify them! High quality ingredients make a difference.
1v1 me bro
Making Chocolate Truffles
If you think that chocolate truffles must be hard to make based on the fancy sounding name, then fear not. Much like our soufflé post, chocolate truffles sound harder to make than they really are. The hardest part is not scorching the milk, which is easy to avoid if you have a good food thermometer.
The first thing you want to do is prep your chocolate by chopping it up and putting it in a glass or metal bowl. Then you’ll want to put the milk and corn syrup into a pot on medium heat. You’ll be adding this to your chocolate very soon!
Mediocre Tip: Don’t pre-heat the pot over medium heat. There’s a good chance that you’ll get the pot too hot and scorch the milk. Unless it’s something that you need to fast fry or sear, it’s almost always a good idea to put everything into a cold pot or pan and then bring everything up to temperature slowly.
Make sure that you watch the milk and corn syrup mixture — there’s not a lot of liquid and it will heat up quickly. Once the liquid gets to 176°F, remove it from the heat and pour it over the finely diced chocolate and let it sit for a minute to melt the chocolate. If you don’t have a thermometer, you want to watch for the point just before it boils and take it off the heat then. Using a rubber or silicone spatula, slowly mix the milky corn syrup with the chocolate. Move in circles until everything is smooth and glossy.
The start of something wonderful.
Once the milk and corn syrup has successfully been incorporated, add in the butter and bust out your immersion blender! What, you don’t have an immersion blender? That’s alright, we here at Mediocre Chef have you (sort-of) covered. While the recipe doesn’t give a substitute for an immersion blender, we think that you could get away with using a hand beater. And if you don’t have one of those then you probably shouldn’t be attempting this recipe (or you could bust out a whisk and see what happens). We didn’t test the hand beater or the whisk so we can’t vouch for the results, but it’s the best substitute that we can think of.
Mmmmm. Chocolate.
Take your immersion blender and blend the chocolate and butter together until the butter has been incorporated and there are no more chunks or streaks. Now that the butter has been incorporated you need to let the chocolate mixture cool to 77°F, or just above room temperature. (The Mediocre Chef test kitchen was exactly 77°F on the day we made these, according to us waving our food thermometer around in the air which we don’t think is quite how that works but whatever.) Yes, this is going to take a while. That’s okay, just let the chocolate sit on the counter and go and watch your favourite TikToks.
After what will feel like forever, the chocolate will be at 77°F. Once you’ve reached this point, bust out the immersion blender again (or hand beater) and give the chocolate a good mixin’. This will help give the truffles a super smooth texture. When you’re satisfied with the consistency, put the chocolate in the fridge to firm up.
Once you’ve let the chocolate cool for a good 20 minutes in the fridge, it’s time to start forming your truffles! We learned that body temperature affects your ability to make truffles — if you run hot (like Trevor), it’s likely that the chocolate will get melty in your hands pretty fast. However, if you have cold hands all of the time (like Brittany does) you’ll have no problem forming the chocolate into balls. Use a tablespoon to measure out the chocolate so you have consistently sized truffles and get rolling!
Mediocre Tip: Wear gloves so you don’t get chocolate all over your hands. It makes cleanup a whole lot easier!
Once shaped, the last step is to roll your truffle in cocoa powder to finish it off! Simply put some powder on a plate or pie dish and roll it around to coat. Viola! You’ve made decadent chocolate truffles. *chefs kiss*
Mediocre Tip: One more quick tip — we also recommend tapping the truffles lightly against a clean surface to make some of the cocoa powder fall off. If you don’t do this you’ll have too much cocoa powder, which will make your mouth feel like you just ate some sand. (And sand is just the worst, it’s coarse, and rough, and it gets everywhere.)
Mediocre Thoughts
Trevor: Chocolate truffles are dope. They’re easy to make and customizable! Want to coat them in coconut instead? Easy. Want to coat them in chopped and toasted hazelnuts to make some sort of Ferrero Rocher knock off? Go crazy. You could even get super fancy and coat them in tempered chocolate to create a hard chocolate-y shell with a soft chocolate-y interior. See what I mean?
If you do decide to make them and are planning on giving them to someone, or you just want to treat yo’ self, splurge on the higher end chocolate. The difference is a bit subtle at first, but once you notice it, it’s hard to go back to the basic chocolate. Truffles made with baker’s chocolate and generic cocoa powder are perfectly adequate, but they lack any sort of flavour profile. They are one note, and one note only: chocolate. The Valrhona Manjari on the other hand had more of a nuanced flavour to them, which resulted in a flavour that had some nice fruity notes. There’s more happening, which I enjoyed much more
Brittany: I love chocolate. Who doesn’t? (If you hate chocolate why are you reading this still!?) I’ve mostly only had them as a final plate at a fancy restaurant, so making these made me feel very fancy. Knowing that I was the main recipient of these delicious truffles was even better. Happy Valentine’s Day to me, from me. (In my defense, I asked Trevor if he wanted to take some home and he said no.)
I was also excited to try Valrhona Manjari chocolate — I wanted to try the best of the best and go all out. But I also knew that not everyone has access to that kind of chocolate, so I wanted to try a “basic” version as well with regular ingredients. The results? They were both dark, delicious, and decadent. But the Valrhona Manjari chocolate with the Valrhona cocoa powder was the clear winner when comparing the four different versions of truffles we made. The chocolate itself made the biggest impact — the cocoa powder made a slight difference, but it didn’t have as big of an impact as the Manjari chocolate center.
If you can’t find Valrhona chocolate, you’re missing out. But even if you can’t find it — please, please, please still try to make these! They are so good. Although not all chocolate is made equal, if you buy a dark baking chocolate your results will still be delicious.
Our Final Review
Taste: 5 chocolate explosions in your mouth out of 5 🍫🍫🍫🍫🍫
We’ve ooh’d and ahh’d about Valhrona Manjari chocolate enough, but we’re going to do it one more time — it’s seriously so good. If you can splurge to buy it, you won’t regret it.
Presentation: 5 chocolatey balls out of 5 (lol, we’re 12 years old) 💝💝💝💝💝
There is something about truffles that is just so elegant. They’re so simple, but they make a statement. They scream, “I’m bite sized, please eat me”.
Affordability: 3 bouquets of roses out of 5 🌹🌹🌹
This rating is based on having to spend $16 on 300g of Valrhona Manjari chocolate and $10 on 200g of Valrhona chocolate powder. Yes, we probably could have found it slightly cheaper online, but this is the price we paid for delicious truffles. We still have a ton of powder left (for making super fancy hot chocolate in the future) and have more Valrhona Manjari chocolate left to snack on or bake with, so we’re not mad.
We hope you try to make these delicious dark chocolate truffles at home! Whether you make these for yourself or someone else, they’re sure to impress. Tell us about your adventures making truffles in the comments below!
Sidenote: The recipe claims to yield 30 truffles. Respectfully, this is a load of bullsh*t. We were able to get about 15 truffles from this recipe. So, if you do decide to make this recipe for yourself, you should be expecting roughly 15 truffles.