This morning I was reading an article in the New York Times by Melissa Clark called For Your Sweetheart, and More. Obviously the article talked about preparing a wonderful stay-at-home meal today as an alternative to going out to a restaurant.
One of the recipes she offers up is a dessert recipe for Bittersweet Chocolate Mousse with Fleur de Sel (Salt). Ok, this sounds like a great idea for a romantic meal or any meal for that matter, but what struck me were the ingredients. They only included bittersweet chocolate, fleur de sel and WATER.
I was always under the impression that water and chocolate DO NOT work together. No Way, No How, Not Ever! I learned if just a drop or two or water interacts with the chocolate, it will alter the fat molecules in the chocolate and cause them to clump up and ruin everything.
So now I was curious and did a little research to find out if this could be true and came up with these YouTube videos on how and why this process of combining just chocolate and water can produce a tasty chocolate mousse. This must be some form of alchemy.
My first stop was at Serious Eats - Sweets where Liz Gutman shows us in her video (below) how she made Chocolate Mouse with just chocolate & water.
She says in her blog post that she saw Chef Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck in London do this same process in his video. Chef Heston also gives credit to this process to Dr. Herve This, a French physical chemist whose main area of study is molecular gastronomy.
I have not given this a try yet, but I plan to make an attempt with the help of my daughters who both love to cook and eat anything made with chocolate. I'll post my results after I give it a try.
If anyone has already tried this method of making chocolate mousse, please leave a comment below and let me know how it was.
Ryan
Stephen, Alton Brown did a similar recipe. If memory serves he added water and coffee then used a whip creamer that uses nitrous to add the "fluff". I'm thinking of ordering one of the whip creamers. I'm just wondering if it will hold up like traditional mousse does. My thought is it wouldn't work for making a mousse cake or other similar desserts due to instability.
Samantha
I just made this today- was highly skeptical going into it but the end result is incredible!
I did however find that the 285 g chocolate called for is not enough if you're using 1 c water. Initially I couldn't get it to set up at all. I ended up re-melting the soupy result from my first attempt and adding more chocolate- it set up fine after that. I definitely recommend trying this out.