chocolate mousse [recipe]

mousseChocolate mousse may be my favourite desert, most likely because it was considered the top desert by both my mother and my grandmother!, but it is very easy both to miss and to mess the outcome. Which is why I never eat mousse in a restaurant and why I statistically fail to make a proper mousse about 40% of the time [no reproducible experiment available, though]. My recipe is indeed both incredibly simple in its ingredients: only use a bar of baking chocolate and 7 eggs, and highly variable in the output: a wrong kind of baking chocolate, an improperly melted chocolate, an imperfect separation between whites and yolks, those are sufficient reasons for the mousse not to hold, producing instead a chocolatey custard of no particular appeal… Here is the recipe (essentially the one provided inside the Nestlé dessert wrap):Ingredients and utensils

  • 7 fresh eggs, fresh as they are used raw (avoid double-yolkers as well!, as they are hellish to separate);
  • a 250g bar of (bitter) cooking chocolate like [my grandmother’s] Menier dessert, Nestlé dessert, or Poulain dessert, or bitter dark chocolate, with a high cocoa butter content;
  • two large bowls and a smaller one;
  • an egg-beater or a cooking robot

Steps

  1. Break the chocolate bar into small chunks and add four spoons of water;
  2. Melt the chocolate by bain-marie or microwave using a temperature and duration as low as possible, and let it cool down;
  3. Separate white from yolk one egg at a time in a small bowl, setting aside [for another recipe] any egg where yolk could have gotten mixed with white, dropping each white into a large bowl and 5 or 6 of the yolks into another large bowl;
  4. beat the whites into a hard and even harder foam;
  5. mix well the melted chocolate with the yolks;
  6. incorporate as gently as possible the whites in the chocolate mix, to avoid breaking the foam, by portions of ¼, until the preparation is roughly homogeneous;
  7. cover and put in the fridge for at least 5 hours.

Warning

Since this recipe uses raw eggs, the mousse should be eaten rather quickly, within the next 48 hours. Although it usually vanishes in one meal!

4 Responses to “chocolate mousse [recipe]”

  1. Alan Fekete Says:

    My version of this uses 200g chocolate with only 4 eggs (ie 350g for the 7 eggs mentioned here). I separate the eggs and beat the whites first, before melting the chocolate. I add the chocolate to the yolks immediately after melting (ie while hot), and I stir extensively but gently to mix it through and smooth it out. Also, I add a good splash of some liquer such as cherry brandy to the yolks/chocolate mix, before folding in the stiff whites.

    I find almost universal success with this, except if the melting fails!
    [Let me mention that from my experience with microwave melting of the chocolate, it is very important to use chocolate that is about 50% cocoa; trying with say 65% cocoa content (or more) often ruins it, leaving burnt/fused rather than melted chocolate.

    • Interesting alternative, because all recipes I have seen suggest cooling the chocolate as much as possible! I completely agree that the microwave is a liability, which is why I go by 30 sec periods and check all is fine…. But less cocoa means a less-chocolate-y mousse! I rather suggest a 85% Lindt dégustation noir! With compulsory bain-marie then. And the more whites the fluffier the mousse…. Bon appétit!

  2. Yum, like this one too! Step 5, mixing chocolate and yolks, is often the reason for failure for me: may result in a hard block, unmanageable for step 6…

    • Ah, this may be because the chocolate is cooked instead of melted. This happens to me from time to time when I set the microwave power too high. The ideal way of melting the chocolate remains the bain-marie…!

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