Italian Dark Chocolate Pastry Cream | Crema al Cioccolato Fondente

Sep 29

11 min read

Crema al Cioccolato Fondente (Italian Dark Chocolate Cream)

This is the dark chocolate cream Italian pastry kitchens spoon into glasses rather than pipe into shells: a custard base carrying chocolate as a flavour, not a ganache stiffened into a sliceable block. The whole dish turns on one decision made before the pan goes on the heat, which is how much chocolate the base is asked to hold.

Yield: 6 glasses. Prep: 25 minutes. Cook: 15 minutes. Chill: 6 hours. Total: about 6 hours 40 minutes. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: dolce al cucchiaio. Region: Piedmont and northern Italy.

The Story

Italy came to chocolate through Turin. Cacao reached the Savoy court in the closing years of the sixteenth century, and by 1678 the Duchess Regent Maria Giovanna Battista had granted a licence for the public sale of chocolate as a drink, which made Turin one of the first cities in Europe where an ordinary person could buy it over a counter. The city built an industry on it. Bicerin, the layered glass of chocolate, coffee and milk still served at the Caffe Al Bicerin near the Consolata, dates from the eighteenth century. Gianduiotto, the hazelnut paste invented when Napoleonic blockades made cacao scarce and expensive, arrived in 1865. For two hundred years Turin exported chocolate machinery and chocolate technicians to the rest of the continent, and Swiss producers learned a good deal of their craft there.

Out of that came a distinct Piedmontese habit of treating chocolate as a flavour for creams rather than only as a confection. The bonet, the cold chocolate and amaretti pudding of the Langhe, is the oldest example on a restaurant menu. The wider family it belongs to is the dolci al cucchiaio, the spoon desserts, which is the corner of Italian pastry that never adopted the French vocabulary of mousses and bavarois. A crema in this tradition is thickened with egg and a little starch, it holds its shape only loosely, and it is eaten from a glass or a coppa with a teaspoon.

The amaretti at the bottom of the glass are the other Italian half of the dish. The bitter almond biscuit of Saronno, in production commercially since the eighteenth century and made at home in Lombardy and Piedmont long before that, carries a note of apricot kernel that dark chocolate takes to immediately. Putting the biscuit under the cream rather than beside it is a domestic trick, not a restaurant one: it keeps the crumb where the spoon reaches it last, and it gives a dessert of very few components a second texture for nothing.

Ingredients

For the chocolate cream

Dark chocolate, 64 to 70 per cent, finely chopped, 5 oz (140 g)
Whole milk, 1 1/2 cups (360 ml)
Heavy cream, 1/2 cup (120 ml)
Egg yolks, large, 4
Granulated sugar, 1/3 cup (65 g)
Cornstarch, 2 tbsp (16 g)
Unsweetened cocoa powder, 1 tbsp (6 g)
Vanilla bean, split, 1/2, or vanilla extract, 1 tsp (5 ml)
Fine sea salt, 1/4 tsp (1.5 g)
Unsalted butter, cold, cubed, 1 tbsp (14 g)

For the base of the glasses

Amaretti biscuits, 3 oz (85 g)
Dark rum or Marsala, 1 tbsp (15 ml), optional

For finishing

Heavy cream, cold, 1/2 cup (120 ml)
Powdered sugar, 2 tsp (8 g)
Dark chocolate, for shaving, 1/2 oz (15 g)
Flaky sea salt, a few grains per glass

Preparation

Weigh the chocolate against the base

Read the label before you weigh anything. The quantity above is calculated for a bar between 64 and 70 per cent cacao. If yours is nearer 50 per cent, raise it to 6 1/2 oz (185 g); if it is 80 per cent or above, drop to 4 1/4 oz (120 g) and add 2 tsp (8 g) more sugar. Chop it fine and evenly, on a board with a large knife rather than in a processor, and put it in a wide bowl.

Crush the amaretti and set the glasses

Put the amaretti in a bag and crush them with a rolling pin to a coarse rubble, not a powder: you want pieces you can feel. Divide them between six glasses of about 5 fl oz (150 ml), press them down lightly with the back of a spoon, and sprinkle over the rum or Marsala if you are using it. Set the glasses on a tray so you can move all six at once later.

Scald the milk and cream

Combine the milk, cream, the split vanilla bean and the salt in a heavy saucepan. Bring it to the point where the surface trembles and steam lifts off it, then take it off the heat, cover it, and leave it for 10 minutes to draw the vanilla out. Scald means just short of a boil. A rolling boil here costs you volume and gives the milk a faint cooked flavour that reads through the chocolate.

Whisk the yolks, sugar and starch

Whisk the yolks and sugar together until pale, then sift in the cornstarch and the cocoa powder and whisk again until the mixture is completely smooth and glossy. Work the cocoa in properly at this stage, while the mixture is thick: any lumps left now will not disperse once the hot milk goes in, and they will still be there when you strain the finished cream.

Temper and bring the custard to the boil

Pour a ladle of the hot milk into the yolk mixture, whisking hard, then a second, then return everything to the pan. Set it over medium heat and whisk continuously, reaching into the corners. It will thicken suddenly. Keep whisking and let it reach a true boil, with slow thick bubbles breaking the surface, and hold it there for 60 to 90 seconds. Starch thickened creams need that boil to lose their raw taste.

Pour the custard onto the chocolate

Pour the boiling custard straight over the chopped chocolate through a fine mesh sieve, scraping the pan. Leave it alone for 2 minutes without stirring. The retained heat does the melting for you, and stirring too early drags unmelted pieces through a thickening mass and leaves you chasing them. Fish out the vanilla pod if it caught in the sieve.

Emulsify and finish with the butter

Start in the centre with a small whisk or a flexible spatula and work outwards in tight circles until the mixture turns from grainy and dull to smooth and glossy. Then add the cold butter and stir it in. A stick blender for 15 seconds, held below the surface so it draws in no air, makes the finish noticeably tighter and is worth using if you have one.

Fill the glasses and chill

Fill the glasses while the cream still falls from the spatula in a ribbon, because it sets fast and a cream poured late leaves folds and trapped air. Level the tops by tapping the tray on the counter. Chill uncovered for 30 minutes so the surface firms, then cover and refrigerate for at least 6 hours. Whip the cream with the powdered sugar to soft peaks only at the moment of serving.

Plating

Take the glasses out of the refrigerator 15 minutes before they go to the table. Straight from the cold the cream is firm and its aroma is shut down; at around 54°F (12°C) it loosens under the spoon and the chocolate opens up. This is the single easiest thing to get right and the one most often skipped.

Spoon a loose mound of the whipped cream slightly off centre, so part of the dark surface stays visible: the contrast between the two is most of the visual appeal of a dessert in a glass. Shave the chocolate over it with a peeler in broad thin curls rather than grating it, add two or three grains of flaky salt directly onto the cream, and serve with a long teaspoon that reaches the amaretti at the bottom.

Professional Technique

The thing worth understanding here is that a ganache and a chocolate cream are the same two families of ingredient in a different ratio, and the ratio is what decides everything. In a ganache the chocolate is the structure: it sits at roughly one part cream to two parts chocolate by weight for a firm slab you can cut, and near one to one for a soft filling. The liquid is there to carry the chocolate. A chocolate cream inverts that completely. Here a thickened base holds four or five parts liquid to one part chocolate, the starch and egg supply the set, and the chocolate is present as an aroma and a little extra body. This recipe sits at about the four to one mark.

What surprises people is how abruptly the dessert changes character in the middle of that range. Between about three parts liquid to one of chocolate and two to one, a cream stops behaving like a cream. It loses the slack fall from the spoon, the surface stops levelling itself, and it begins to hold the mark of the spatula. There is no gentle slope through that band: you cross it and you have made a different dessert. So choose the ratio by what the cream has to do. A filling for a tart shell or a bigne has to hold a cut edge and belongs above the line. A cream in a glass has to yield to a teaspoon and belongs well below it.

The calculation only works if you count the cacao percentage of the bar, because that number is mostly a statement about fat. A 70 per cent bar carries roughly 40 per cent cocoa butter by weight; a 50 per cent bar carries closer to 27 per cent. Swap one for the other at the same weight and you have changed the fat going into the cream by about a third, along with the sugar in the opposite direction. That is why the same recipe made with two different bars gives two different desserts, and why the weights above are pinned to a stated percentage.

Texture and Moisture Control

A cream of this kind fails in two directions and both are visible on the surface. Undercook the base, pulling it off before a real boil, and it will look set in the glass but release a thin watery layer overnight as the weak starch network contracts and squeezes liquid out. Overwork it after the chocolate has gone in, whisking hard or whisking long, and you break the emulsion the other way: the fat comes out of suspension and the cream turns dull, slightly greasy on the tongue, and grainy at the edges. The window between the two is generous, but you have to aim for the middle of it deliberately.

The uncovered half hour in the refrigerator is there to manage moisture rather than temperature. A surface allowed to dry briefly forms a thin skin that then holds the cream level and stops condensation dripping back onto it once the glass is covered. Cover a warm glass straight away instead and water collects on the film, falls back, and leaves a pale wet patch. After that first half hour the cover is essential, because a chocolate cream left open takes up refrigerator smells faster than almost anything else in there.

Professional Mise en Place

This is a dessert that is entirely made in advance and finished in thirty seconds, so the work is front loaded and service is almost nothing.

Equipment and tools

Heavy bottomed saucepan and a balloon whisk
Fine mesh sieve and a wide heatproof bowl
Digital scale, needed for the chocolate rather than useful
Stick blender, optional but worth having
Six glasses of about 5 fl oz (150 ml) on a flat tray

Prepared ahead

Glasses filled and chilled, up to 2 days ahead, covered
Amaretti crushed and pressed into the glasses, same day
Chocolate chopped and weighed to the stated percentage
Milk and cream infused with vanilla, up to 4 hours ahead, kept cold and rescalded

Service setup

Glasses out of the refrigerator 15 minutes before service
Cream whipped to soft peaks at the last moment, never held
Chocolate shavings made cold and kept in the freezer until needed
Flaky salt and long teaspoons within reach of the pass

Chef Tips

Buy a bar with a percentage printed on it and buy couverture if you can. The cacao figure is the only number that lets you scale this recipe honestly, and a bar sold simply as dark chocolate can be anything from 45 to 75 per cent.

Chop by hand, not in a food processor. A processor gives you a mixture of dust and chunks, the dust melts instantly, the chunks do not, and you end up stirring far more than the emulsion wants.

Taste the base before the chocolate goes in and expect it to be too sweet. It has to be. The chocolate arrives with a great deal of bitterness and no sugar of its own to speak of, and a base seasoned to taste good on its own gives a flat finished cream.

If the cream splits and looks oily, whisk in 1 tbsp (15 ml) of hot milk off the heat. Almost every broken chocolate emulsion is short of water, and a small addition brings it back where more stirring will not.

Common Mistakes

Pulling the custard before it boils. The cream will set in the glass and then weep a watery layer within a day, and it keeps a raw starchy taste. Let it come to slow thick bubbles and hold it there for a full minute.

Using a bar of unknown percentage. Cacao percentage is mostly a measure of cocoa butter, so an unlabelled bar makes the quantity meaningless. Either weigh to a stated percentage or accept that the set is a matter of luck.

Stirring the chocolate the moment the custard hits it. Unmelted pieces get dragged through a mixture that is already thickening and never catch up. Wait the full 2 minutes and let the heat do the work before anything moves.

Pouring the cream into the glasses too late. It sets quickly, and a cream ladled in once it has begun to hold its shape traps air pockets and folds that no amount of tapping removes. Fill while it still runs off the spatula.

Serving the glasses fridge cold. At refrigerator temperature the fat is firm and the aroma is closed. Fifteen minutes on the counter is the difference between a pleasant dessert and one that actually tastes of chocolate.

Wine Pairing

Recioto della Valpolicella DOCG: The safest match on the list. Dried Corvina grapes give a sweet red with cherry and dried fig fruit and, crucially, enough residual sugar to sit above the bitterness of a 70 per cent bar. Its acidity is high for a sweet wine, which keeps the pairing from turning heavy against the cream fat.

Moscato di Scanzo DOCG: A tiny Bergamo appellation and the most interesting pairing here. Moscato di Scanzo is a red muscat dried on racks, so it brings rose and dried plum aromatics on top of sweetness, and its light tannin gives the wine something to push against the chocolate with. Pour it in a small glass, slightly cool.

Montefalco Sagrantino Passito DOCG: For anyone who wants tannin against tannin. Sagrantino is among the most tannic grapes in Italy and the passito version keeps that grip alongside the sugar, so it meets the astringency of dark chocolate head on rather than smoothing it. Choose this with the highest percentage bar you would use.

Marsala DOC: A Superiore Dolce or Riserva works on a different principle: oxidative ageing gives walnut, dried orange peel and caramel notes that read as a second flavour beside the chocolate rather than a contrast. The fortified alcohol also cuts the cream more sharply than any of the passito wines above.

Girò di Cagliari DOC: The Sardinian option, and the lightest of the sweet reds listed. Low tannin, gentle sweetness and a dried cherry character make it the right choice when the amaretti are pronounced, since almond and this wine share an aromatic register that dark chocolate then sits underneath.

Storage & Reheating

Filled glasses keep in the refrigerator, covered tightly, for up to 3 days. They are at their best on the second day, once the amaretti have softened slightly at the point of contact and the chocolate has settled. Never leave them uncovered in a refrigerator with savoury food: the cream picks up smells quickly and there is no fixing it.

This dessert is not reheated. It is also not a candidate for the freezer, because freezing coarsens the starch set and thaws to a separated texture. If you have leftover cream rather than filled glasses, keep it in an airtight container with film pressed against the surface, and beat it smooth with a spatula before using. Whipped cream and chocolate shavings are always made fresh.

Nutrition

Per serving, based on 6 glasses:

Calories: 425 kcal
Total Fat: 26 g
Saturated Fat: 15 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 10 g
Cholesterol: 175 mg
Sodium: 130 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 42 g
Fiber: 3 g
Total Sugars: 30 g
Added Sugars: 20 g
Protein: 8 g
Lactose: 5 g
Principal micronutrients: iron, magnesium, copper, calcium, vitamin A, vitamin B2