You’re Doing Chocolate Covered Strawberries Wrong
A typical chocolate covered strawberry is good. Just good. There’s no doubt about how well the taste of sweet, tangy fruit pairs with bittersweet dark chocolate, but the downside is the design. Berries dipped in melted chocolate are usually refrigerated, where the fats and sugars re-solidify and become brittle. Show how your lover bites into fruit only to have the chocolate shell immediately bounce off, usually on a plate, shirt or floor. Delicious. To make matters worse, well-meaning adults dip cold berries into hot chocolate, causing a thin but powerful layer of condensation to form between the fruit skin and the chocolate shell. By the time you imagine the little beauties, that chocolate layer is barely holding on.
You know what doesn’t say “I love you”? A dessert that falls apart when you try to eat it. Do not dip strawberries in pure melted chocolate. Use ganache instead. This will give you the same intensity of chocolate without breaking down, and you only need to add one ingredient to turn the chocolate into ganache: heavy cream. Heavy cream has a high fat percentage, which allows it to emulsify with chocolate, resulting in a silky, luxurious chocolate sauce that never gets brittle. Depending on the ratio of chocolate to heavy cream, you can make a chocolate ganache that stays sticky and soft after cooling, or a ganache that becomes hard enough to be scooped up and rolled ( like for chocolate truffles ). Regardless of the ratio, it will always remain somewhat malleable. Definitely malleable enough to bite through without shattering into pieces of frustration.
Making ganache is easy and as quick as melting chocolate. Simply heat cream and chopped chocolate or chocolate chips together in the microwave. Whisk every 20-30 seconds until the mixture is completely melted and combined. For a dense ganache, great for ripe fruit, use a 2:1 chocolate to cream ratio by weight. You don’t need much ganache to top a dozen strawberries, just about half a cup of chocolate chips and three tablespoons of heavy cream according to this recipe . Leftover ganache isn’t a problem, if you’re making a large batch you can always use it for the truffles or skip this one and pop it straight into your mouth. Ganache sticks well to cold fruit, but if possible, bring the strawberries to room temperature before dipping them into the warm ganache. Strawberries in ganache are perfect in their simplicity, but you can sprinkle with chopped nuts, shredded coconut, or sprinkle on soft ganache to spice it up. Let these enhanced chocolate berries chill on a parchment-lined plate in the refrigerator until you’re ready to impress.