How to make spectacular vegan chocolate truffles from a few ingredients
The first time I made truffles from chocolate ganache, it was a revelation: How could just two ingredients, chocolate and cream, set up to form such a perfect texture? It almost felt like a cheat; this shouldn't be so easy. Scoop, roll, coat, done.
It wasn't until I cooked with two of my favorite vegan chefs, Rich Landau and Kate Jacoby, a few years ago that my truffles evolved further. Jacoby showed me how to make a pot de creme using little more than dark chocolate, beet juice, coconut milk and cornstarch. I loved it warm — and then noticed that when I refrigerated it, guess what happened? Yep, just like ganache.
I figured a simple coconut milk-chocolate combo would do the same thing, so I tried it, and sure enough, magic. Since then, I've seen plenty of other recipes that play with the same ingredients — and often add several others — but I've never found a good enough reason to branch out beyond that effective one-two punch.
I have experimented with lots of coatings, though: Plain cocoa, unsweetened coconut, pecans or other nuts, chipotle or other ground chiles for the brave-hearted. I love them all, but the best coating of all came to me when I was rooting around the pantry for inspiration. I found a bag of freeze-dried strawberries and blitzed them to a powder in a mini food processor, and the truffles I rolled in them turned out to be my favorite. (Freeze-dried raspberries would be a natural, too.)
The best thing about these is that if you use dairy-free chocolate, they're vegan, and just as tasty as traditional ones, which broadens their appeal to include just about anybody who loves chocolate.
The second-best thing? The fact that, unlike ones made with heavy cream, they're built on shelf-stable ingredients I happen to always have around. That means I can melt, scoop, roll and coat them on little more than a whim.