Sunday 20 April 2014

10 Beer Chocolate Truffle Recipes


Easter means chocolate. It also means a long weekend of beering (that’s what it means for me, anyway). It’s also a fine time to bring beer and chocolate together and make truffles. The good thing for this recipe is that once you know the basic way of making the truffles you can pimp them with whatever beer and chocolate you want.

The basic Beer Chocolate Truffle recipe
Makes 10-20 truffles

100ml double cream
100ml beer
25g butter
Pinch of salt
200g dark chocolate (or 400g if it’s white or milk)
Something to roll the truffles in

Gently warm the cream, beer, butter and salt in a pan but don’t let it boil. Remove from the heat and mix in the chocolate, stirring until it melts. Put in a bowl and place in the fridge to allow the mixture to cool and set. When ready to go, use a melon-baller or two spoons to create the round truffle shapes and then roll in cocoa powder, ground roasted barley (this works really well if you can get some), crushed toasted nuts or desiccated coconut. Then eat.

If you want to make these with milk or white chocolate then the recipe changes slightly and you need more chocolate to liquid. So a mix of 100ml cream and 100ml beer requires about 400g of chocolate.

Here are 10 of my favourite combinations

Cherry beer and dark chocolate – you can also add dried sour cherries to it

Simply imperial stout and dark chocolate which combines nicely to make the mix extra rich

Get spicy with dark or milk chocolate, dried chilli flakes and cardamom, plus coffee stout

Go Belgian with milk chocolate and quadrupel, perhaps also adding some cinnamon or quad-soaked raisins

Weizenbock with white chocolate and rolled in toasted hazelnuts

Double IPA and white chocolate, plus a teaspoon of honey, then rolled in coconut is really good

An unexpectedly delicious combo is milk chocolate and Rauchbier, giving the equivalent of chocolate covered bacon. A pinch of smoked salt helps boost it all

Black IPA, dark chocolate and orange zest is superb

Recreate PB&J with dark chocolate, a tablespoon of crunchy peanut butter and some raspberry beer. Roll this one in crushed salted pretzels

Bourbon barrel-aged stout with milk or dark chocolate and rolled in coconut is like an adult version of a Bounty bar



This recipe (and the photo at the top) is from my new book, Beer and Food. It’s out on 15 May and you can pre-order it online - below are 10 sample pages. I’m really excited for this book to be released – it’s about the best of beer and food together, there’s some science to how and why beer works well, there’s ideas for pairings, plus a few recipes using beer in them.

1 comment:

  1. Does the beer actually impart any flavour in the final product? The flavour of dark chocolate is really bold and bitter anyhow, I'm not convinced that 100mL of beer will impart any additional flavour?

    ReplyDelete