Ganache Spreadsheet from eGullet
The following information is provided by eGullet member Jim D.:
In April 2008, eGullet member schneich began a thread on what constitutes a well-balanced ganache for use in chocolates with a satisfactory shelf life (Balancing your Ganache Recipes 2.0). He wrote about a formula developed by author Ramon Morató and offered a spreadsheet authored by one of his employees to make it easier to apply Morató’s ratios to other ganaches. He wrote as follows (capitalization has been supplied for readability):
A while ago I wrote in another thread concerning water contents in ganaches, that it is not very wise to mess with your ganache recipes in order to get a well balanced recipe that also has a good shelf life. We had some big problems with some chocolates that were only about 3 weeks old but got moldy on us even if we produced, and stored them correctly. When that happened I read quite a lot of books. None of them seem to give a sufficient answer to the problem, there were even some books (sadly also including the book by Peter Greweling) who had very terribly balanced recipes in them. This is not a problem if you are producing chocolates just for friends & family, but if you really want to sell your chocolates you are in a complete different position. My experience shows that you just can’t produce chocolates and throw em away after week three. You need to be able to store them for a certain (if limited) amount of time, and the customer should also be able to keep em for two weeks or so. So the only book that I found that gave a sufficient answer is the one by chef Ramon Morató who is the principal of Aula Chocovic. In his book he introduced a formula which he developed over the years and which proved to be true. If you go by this formula you can even save yourself the hassle of buying an Aw-meter :-). The formula simply says that in order to get well balanced shelf stable recipes you need to match the following ratios:Download the Excel spreadsheet for ganache
Since it is quite some calculating work to tweak each recipe, one of my employees (thank you Julia) came up with an Excel sheet which does Morató’s formula automatically. If you want to use it, you might need to tweak it because your ingredients might differ water, sugar or fat content wise, but other than that this tool is easy to use.
- water content maximum 20%
- sugar content minimum 30%
- cocoa butter content minimum 21%
- milkfat content maximum 15%