On Food and Cooking

plush. Ganache seems to have been
invented in France or Switzerland in the
middle of the 19th century. Chocolate
truffles, morsels of ganache shaped into
rough balls and coated either with cocoa
powder or a thin layer of hard chocolate,
were a simple homemade sweet until well
into the 20th century, when they became
fashionable luxuries.
In an even mixture of cream and chocolate,
there’s an abundance of the syrup phase to
hold the fat and particles; but in a firm, high-
chocolate mixture, there’s less syrup, and
proportionally more cocoa particles that
slowly absorb moisture from the syrup and
reduce its volume even further. With
chocolates high in cocoa solids, the cocoa
particles can eventually absorb so much
moisture that they swell and stick to each
other. The water-deprived emulsion then fails,
allowing the fat globules and droplets to
coalesce, and the fat to separate from the