Hervé This’ Chocolate Mousse

In the realm of “easy” desserts, there are a number of books that offer “5-minute” recipes, or “5-ingredient” recipes. However, I snobbishly avoid these, as they usually compromise on flavour, or require using compound ingredients like pre-made frosting or store-bought sponge cake. So it was with some amazement and delight, that we discovered this dairy-free, Passover-friendly, one-ingredient dessert.

Hervé This has experimented with, and written about, the science of cooking. His seminal book, Molecular Gastronomy, sits, unread, on my shelf at home. So seeing his name attached to a dessert recipe caught my eye. How could you make a chocolate mousse without dairy?

I needed to make about a dozen small servings, but I decided to do a test run first. There’s a number of recipes out there, but I don’t recall which one I used. I’ll include links to a few here, with their ratio of chocolate to water for reference:

• Food 52 (1.333)
• Serious Eats (1.296)
• NYT Cooking (1.14)

I whipped up (literally) a batch by hand, but it remained quite loose, despite many strong arms taking turns to whisk. After fifteen minutes, we decided to add in more melted chocolate, which improved things considerably. We used these new proportions for the second batch, which came together a lot quicker. You’ll need to experiment, since the fat and cocoa content will vary among chocolates.

Predictably, this chocolate dessert was gobbled up immediately. Everyone loved that it only had one ingredient. The quality of your chocolate is key, as there’s nothing to hide behind!