chocolate mousse [recipe]

Chocolate 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!