Ruth Kennison: The Chocolate Project, Bean-to-Bar and Dark Chocolate Truffles (original) (raw)
Honey represents a sweet Jewish New Year! Why not kick off the calendar year by indulging in chocolate. Just make sure it’s the good kind.
“When you’re using really good chocolate, it just elevates everything,” chocolatier and chocolate educator Ruth Kennison told The Journal.
Kennison, who is based in Los Angeles, has turned the love of chocolate she had growing up into her fourth career.
“I remember on my 16th birthday, every guest brought me a box of Godiva chocolate,” Kennison said. “No one told them to; it was just a known fact that that’s what I wanted was chocolate.”
After several careers and lots of traveling, Kennison and her husband decided to kind of settle down. When she became pregnant, Kennison took a pastry certification program and became a pastry chef.
“My good friend was opening a cooking school … I’d been teaching pastry making with her, and she saw I was a very good teacher,” Kennison said. “She said [to] choose one thing and become an expert at it.”
The answer was obvious: chocolate. Kennison went on a deep dive that included French pastry school and The Chocolate Academy. A trip to Paris led to an origin trip to Mexico, where Kennison met farmers, saw cacao trees and learned how chocolate was processed from bean to bar.
“I thought I’d never had any artistic bone in my body; I was an organizer and a production assistant and all sorts of things,” she said. “And I realized, this is this form of art that combines food and chocolate and art.”
She returned to Los Angeles and decided to become a chocolate educator, which includes teaching bean-to-bar chocolate making.
“Chocolate comes from a fruit [that] grows only 10 to 20 degrees above and below the equator … so it grows in West Africa, Asia, Central America, South America and Mexico.,” she said. “When you open it, [the] white stuff is fruit and it tastes like lychee, and then inside of it are the little cocoa beans that need to be fermented to be made into chocolate.”
Thanks to the craft chocolate or bean-to-bar movement, Kennison explained that there are fewer steps between the farmers and the makers. The price may be a bit higher, but you can taste the difference.
“Chocolate makers are buying much higher quality cacao, paying the farmers more … and they are roasting the beans very, very gently,” she said. “Industrial chocolate makers burn the cacao and they add things like vanillin, which is … a chemical that imitates vanilla to hide notes of bad chocolate.
“Bean-to-bar makers aren’t even adding vanilla because they’re just roasting the beans very low and slow, so you’re getting the pure natural flavors of the bean, similar to wine; and when that batch of cacao goes away, you’ll never have that exact bar again.”
Kennison does chocolate tastings the way sommeliers do wine tastings.
“My goal is to make people that are chocolate consumers and more educated about their chocolate,” she said. “I really want people to read packages and be aware; ask questions of their grocers, like, ‘Where is this chocolate from?’ It will change the whole supply chain.”
Kennison noted that while kosher chocolate has a reputation for being not so great, there are places, such as Letterpress in Los Angeles, which have wonderful bean-to-bar kosher chocolate.
Once you have quality chocolate, there are plenty of things you can make. Kennison likes to use all parts of the cacao, which includes the cocoa nibs, which she said are crunchy, nutty and bitter. It’s the “good stuff.”
For instance, Kennison loves vanilla soft serve ice cream with homemade caramel sauce, cocoa nibs and sea salt. She also makes double chocolate chip cookies, and includes the cocoa nib for a little crunch.
Chocolate truffles, she explained, are one of the simplest things to make. They have only three ingredients – chocolate, cream and butter – and you can add flavors to them in different ways.
“It can be a coffee chocolate truffle by steeping coffee in your cream,” she said. “I just made a London fog truffle with Earl gray and vanilla.”
Kennison’s dark chocolate truffle recipe is below.
“Another recipe I love is something Jose Andres once told me to make,” she said. “Take a baguette, cut it into rounds and [put] a very good piece of dark chocolate [on top]; put it so quickly in the broiler that it melts, but [is] still holding its shape, and then put the best olive oil possible, drizzled, and then also some salt on it.”
Some of the best Jewish treats are made with chocolate. And a lot revolve around Passover, such as flourless chocolate. You can also make chocolate macaroons or a coconut macaroon, where you dip the bottom of it in chocolate.
“I make the matzah crack every year,” she said. “I make a homemade caramel and then throw tempered chocolate on … and then sprinkle it with all sorts of nuts and cocoa nibs; don’t forget your cocoa nibs!”
Go to Chocolate-project.com to learn more about Ruth Kennison and her upcoming chocolate-centric classes and events, including ones at The Gourmandise School in Santa Monica. Follow @ChocProject on Instagram and Facebook.
For the full conversation, listen to the podcast:
Dark Chocolate Truffles
8 ounces of high quality dark chocolate (look for Valrhona, Tcho or Republica del Cacao), chopped
½ cup of heavy cream
1 Tbsp (13 grams) room temperature butter, cut into small pieces,
Pinch of Maldon sea salt
In a small saucepan bring the heavy cream to a boil and turn off.
Place chopped chocolate in a medium sized bowl, pour the heavy cream over the chopped chocolate.
Wait 1 minute and then whisk the cream into the chocolate until it creates a shiny ganache. Whisk in the butter and salt.
Let chocolate ganache set overnight at room temperature.
Roll the ganache into round truffles then roll them in your favorite topping! Try cocoa powder or crushed nuts.
For optional flavors: Steep an ingredient (like coffee or tea) into the heavy cream, remove and follow the recipe.
Debra Eckerling is a writer for the Jewish Journal and the host of “Taste Buds with Deb.” Subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. Email Debra: tastebuds@jewishjournal.com.