Chocolate Truffle Tart - Cooks Illustrated

Published December 14, 2006.

Do sophisticated flavor and glamorous presentation take a day's effort?

The Problem

Many chocolate tart recipes require complicated steps and fine pastry skills to pull them off.

The Goal

We wanted a chocolate tart with a silky, sophisticated texture and a dense, slightly bitter flavor—that was still easy to make.

The Solution

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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Chocolate Truffle Tart

America’s Test Kitchen is a 2,500-square-foot kitchen located just outside of Boston. It is the home of Cook’s Country and Cook’s Illustrated magazines and is the workday destination for more than three dozen test cooks, editors, and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes until we understand how and why they work and arrive at the best version. We also test kitchen equipment and supermarket ingredients in search of brands that offer the best value and performance. You can watch us work by tuning in to America’s Test Kitchen (www.americastestkitchen.com) on public television.