Published December 14, 2006.
Do sophisticated flavor and glamorous presentation take a day's effort?
Many chocolate tart recipes require complicated steps and fine pastry skills to pull them off.
We wanted a chocolate tart with a silky, sophisticated texture and a dense, slightly bitter flavor—that was still easy to make.
We started with a crisp, cookie-like tart dough that we had previously developed in the test kitchen, to which we added cocoa for an extra dimension. We discovered that a simple ganache—dense to a fault and creamy—made a great start to our filling. Ganache recipes vary in their ratios of cream to chocolate; testing proved that 1 part cream to 1 1/2 parts chocolate, by weight, rendered the perfect flavor and texture. Adding butter isn’t uncommon for ganache, and indeed 12 tablespoons gave the filling an optimally smooth texture. We opted not to use vanilla as a flavoring—it undercut the robust chocolate flavor—but found that cognac emphasized the chocolate flavor.
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