The Many Faces of Chocolate

flickr/Alexis Fam Photography

Did you know that you could make chocolate mousse just by using a block of chocolate and tap water (that you’ve preferably filtered)? I didn’t. Here’s why: every recipe I’ve seen for chocolate mousse and its derivatives, pots de crème, have called for ingredients that I didn’t want bastardizing the fine chocolate that resides in a special spot in my kitchen. Rarely eaten but carefully chosen, the chocolate I stash away at home is appropriate for only the most special occasions, like dinner parties.

The recipes that I know ask for too many ingredients, as though you need to perform ceremonial rituals to make sure the resulting mousse lives a happy life before it enters your mouth. Sometimes, you need to assemble a mini separation system in your kitchen in order to incorporate egg yolks into the melted chocolate. Other times, you need to add gelatin, cream, or extra sugar that, frankly, takes away from the chocolate flavor.

I came across this recipe for chocolate mousse that only needed a good bar of chocolate and filtered water.

After a bit of digging, I learned that a man named Hervé This (pronouned t-eee-ss) invented the technique. Mr. This has been largely credited by everyone from top chefs to food bloggers with having created the molecular gastronomy movement. Just the list of people who lend their positive reviews to the back cover of his 2008 book, Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, reads like a Who’s Who of the modern culinary criticism world.

Having coined the term molecular gastronomy in the 1990s, it seems that This is quite involved with the vocabulary of these culinary times. He even makes a distinction between molecular gastronomy and molecular cuisine. He contends that molecular cuisine had sprung to life as soon as chefs and cooks departed from Paul Bocuse’s 1976 book, La cuisine du marché. La cuisine was the definitive schism between molecular cuisine and everything before it. Even la nouvelle cuisine is old-school. If you use any method or ingredient that Bocuse did not use in his kitchen, as documented in La cuisine, then you practice molecular cuisine.

The more commonly understood term, molecular gastronomy, refers only to the science of cooking, learning through observation and experimentation. In fact, This believes that molecular cuisine is slowly dying since everyone basically does it and, thus, no longer merits a special name, but molecular gastronomy lives on as a scientific discipline.

Now, what concerns chocolate in this discussion of semantics is the difference between emulsions and mousses. Sometimes chocolate mousses are referred to as emulsions, but in fact they aren’t. An emulsion, in the food world, is a mixture of fat and an aquaeous liquid that can be held together by an emulsifier. Most produced chocolates do contain emulsifiers, with lecithin being the most common. (I love how I got this piece of info from a part of the site whose URL discreetly contains the word nerdzone.)

The fat in a chocolate bar doesn’t dissolve in water or milk, but chocolate makers add lecithin into the chocolate preparation in order to hold that bar together: cocoa butter, milk, cocoa solids and all. Even fine chocolatiers add lecithin into their treats.

Basically, the chocolate that we eat is already an emulsion of fat and milk. When you start beating warm chocolate with a whisk, you introduce air into the chocolate, which will encapsulate the air as it slowly cools. When the chocolate entraps the air, that’s when you get a mousse. And, that’s the recipe.

Trawling the web, I found a weird patent for mousse with sterilized pieces of chocolate.

Another patent from 1983 described a product that could potentially be used to create “dessert mousse”. It patented a mix that called for: some type of sweetener, 10 to 80 percent weight of fat (any kind), 0.1 to 15 percent of a binder and 0.5 to 10 percent of an emulsifier. Ick.

Chocolate mousse has such a bad rep. They have required of us a bunch of heavy ingredients when made the traditional way at home. I’ve always known it as something that I would have found next to the Jell-O or yogurt at the grocery store, and there’s nothing special about that. (Well, shelf-stable tapioca kind of stands out to me.) The chocolate mousse gets lost in an army of mini containers. But I think chocolate mousse can make a comeback with This’s technique. It can shed its 1960s bulk and its 1980s portable portion sizing and find its way back into your kitchen in its purest form, mixed with a little water.