Recipe Chocolate truffles, caramel, and leftover macarons by Luciano García

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Globalization has brought many advances, but also risks. In pastry, one of those risks is that creations from all over the world end up looking very similar, disconnected from the places where they are going to be consumed.

Luciano García, a teacher at Ott College and owner of García, an ambitious establishment on the outskirts of Buenos Aires that successfully fuses cuisine and pastry, focused in so good.. magazine 26 on redesigning some of his offerings to connect them more and better with the territory in which they were made.

Additionally, he wanted to offer a gastronomic reflection on the use of ingredients, giving a new and interesting life to leftover macaron halves in this recipe. “Creativity is sometimes associated not with innovative formats but with that search that helps to reinvent a product, to rethink it, or even to recycle it. No creation is free from the possibility of being optimized in terms of processes or in terms of taking advantage of possible waste. Looking at the leftover macaron halves, I decided to recover them, generating a crispy coating different from a truffle.”

Photos: Pablo Baracat

Discover so good.. magazine 26

Chocolate truffles, caramel, and leftover macarons

Macaron dough (yields 90 halves of approximately 4 cm)

95 g egg whites
250 g sugar
230 g confectioners’ sugar
230 g almond flour
40 g cocoa powder
95 g egg whites
q.s. roasted peanuts, chopped

Make an Italian meringue at 130ºC with the first amount of egg whites and the sugar. Whip on high speed to obtain a stiff meringue. Mix the confectioners’ sugar, almond flour and cocoa powder and homogenize with the second amount of egg whites. Fold the meringue into this second mixture with the help of a spatula and mix to the desired texture, making sure the mix does not become too runny. Pipe onto a silicone mat using a #9 tip. Sprinkle with coarsely chopped peanut, previously roasted at 140ºC for 12 minutes. Do not leave to dry but immediately bake instead. Bake in an oven preheated to 150ºC for 11 minutes. Leave to cool.

Salted caramel core

150 g heavy cream, 35% fat
100 g butter, at room temperature
100 g honey
3 g liquid lecithin
80 g glucose DE 40
7 g salt
150 g sugar

Combine the heavy cream, honey, lecithin, salt and glucose over the heat and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat and set aside to use while still hot. Simultaneously, dry caramelize the sugar and deglaze by adding the hot liquid little by little while stirring to prevent the sugar from crystallizing. Once well incorporated, add the butter and emulsify. Process with a handheld blender and reserve in the refrigerator.

Chocolate cream

200 g heavy cream, 35% fat
50 g egg yolks
80 g sugar
330 g 811 Callebaut dark couverture
600 g heavy cream, 35% fat

Make a crème anglaise and pour over the finely chopped chocolate. Allow to cool down to 30ºC and add the remaining heavy cream at a temperature over 15ºC so it is properly incorporated. Pipe into 8-cm hemisphere silicone molds. Freeze. Once frozen, unmold and remove the center with the help of a baller or a rectangular cutter. Fill the cavities with the salted caramel and combine both hemispheres. Join with a plastic skewer and freeze again.

Crispy chocolate coating

1200 g milk chocolate couverture
120 ml neutral oil (sunflower or corn)
400 g peanut

Roast the peanuts at 140ºC for 15 minutes. Chop coarsely and reserve. Melt the couverture to 40ºC, add the oil, mix and emulsify. Cool down to 31ºC so that it crystallizes and add the peanuts. Coat the spheres completely.

White spray

100 g dark chocolate couverture
100 g cocoa butter

Melt the dark couverture and cocoa butter to 40ºC and strain. Process with a handheld blender. Pre-crystallize to 31ºC. Place in the airbrush and spray the spheres.

Assembly

Unmold the chocolate cream hemispheres and empty the center with the help of a baller or a rectangular cutter. Fill the resulting cavity with the salted caramel. Combine both hemispheres to form a truffle, joining them with a plastic skewer. Freeze again. Coat the truffles in the crispy coating and drain off. Cover with macaron halves broken into pieces before crystallizing. Reserve the truffles in the freeze and spray. Allow to thaw in their appropriate temperature range – between 4 and 7ºC.

Discover these creations by Luciano García in so good.. magazine 26

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