powdered sugar

To keep the sugar from caking up. Without the cornstarch all you'd have is a solid block of sugar that used to be powdered, and is now compressed into a cake.

I don't think there is one.

Grinding in a spice grinder will give you smaller granules. To get powdered sugar, you'll have to use a mortar and pestle, at least according to my friends who wanted plain powdered sugar for a redaction of a 15th century recipe.

jenn

-- Jenn Ridley snipped-for-privacy@chartermi.net

The cornstarch is added in very small amounts to prevent caking. You might check at a health food store to see if they have any without cornstarch. If you have an ethnic grocery, you might also check there for imported brands. Frankly, I wouldn't worry about using it in the truffles. Since virtually all confectioner's sugar contains cornstarch, the recipe you have most likely assumes that you will be using sugar with cornstarch. Also, I doubt that you will be able to produce anything close to the consistency of powdered sugar at home.

Icing sugar. Find your nearest British food shop. I think there's one in LA. I'm not certain what other ethnic food shops might have it.

-- Cymru Llewes Caer Llewys

Thanks for the info, but the truffles were a disaster, and my source in the Netherland said that was due to the cornstarch in the Powdered sugar. The Recipe is from him, a friend in the Netherlands. :( Most likley I have to find another recipe, or grind the sugar real fine. It's a Whipped cream trufffle and delicious. Etnic stores are not found here in the mountains. You have to make a lot from scratch, which is fine with me. Trying again. Thanks Conny

-- Conny - Sonora - CA - USA

To prevent caking and clumping. IMHO this is simply a visual/consumer appeal thing - it's easy enough to break up clumps in undoctored powdered sugar with a fork.

Why do you need powdered sugar at all? The classic truffle ganache uses no added sugar, simply cream and chocolate. IMHO it works better than using any sugar additive. You could coat truffles with powdered sugar instead of cocoa, but this wouldn't be an application for which the addition of cornstarch would be critical. If it's used in the truffle mix itself, though, you will want no cornstarch at all.

Wholesome Sweeteners makes one. I can buy it in bulk at my local co-op - it looks pretty clumpy, but works nicely. I suppose any store around your area that carries Wholesome Sweeteners (best known for their Sucanat product) will be able to order it for you if you ask.

Not recommended. These grinders won't grind it nearly fine enough, and are also not designed to handle products that liquefy under heat and mechanical action. The sugar will probably gum up the machine and unless you start with block sugar, the grinder will most likely not get any "bite" into the sugar, so the net result would be poor.

Still, can you post your truffle recipe? I suspect your best results will come from using no sugar at all.

Thanks Alex for your reply. Here is the translated recipe: CHOCOLATE TRUFFLES WITH WHIPPING CREAM

½ lb. butter of good quality with a minium of water ½ lb whipping cream 35% ½ lb. powdered sugar (w/o cornstarch) (500 gr) 500 gr. chocolate

In a pan with thick bottom, bring cream and butter slowly to the boil and add the sugar (donut be in a hurry with this). Cool cream to room temperature. Stir butter to a cream and add slowly to the cream and sugar. DO NOT WHIP. Put the mix into a pastry bag and make little balls on a baking sheet with baking paper. Cool the balls on the sheet in a freezer for about 30 min. Cover at this stage the balls with white or regular chocolate confiture.

Melt chocolate in microwave dish or au Bain Marie. Take 2 or 3 balls at the time from the freezer. With white chocolate you can roll the truffles in coconut, with brown chocolate, roll the balls in cocoa powder. Cool truffles.

Thanks again Conny

-- Conny - Sonora - CA - USA

0.5 lb = 227 g.

Typically, butter has 80% fat. Thus, 227 g butter + 227 g 35% cream = 452 g total dairy, at 57.5 % fat. Roughly, this is equivalent to clotted cream.

It's not clear what percentage of sugar the chocolate has. If the 500g chocolate is unsweetened, then the equivalent amount of sweetened chocolate would be 727 g of 68.8 % bittersweet chocolate. Since sugar contains no fat, and unsweetened chocolate has about 50% fat, the approximate fat percentage would be 34.4 %. This is a lower-cocoa-butter chocolate, similar to El Rey's "Gran Saman". In that situation, this would be close to 1.6 : 1 proportions of 70% bittersweet and clotted cream to make a ganache.

That wouldn't be a bad effort, although it would be undoubtedly slightly greasy, owing to the high milkfat percentage and lower cocoa butter percentage. It would be rather soft, for similar reasons, and because the total amount of chocolate is somewhat less than the "classic" 2:1 ratio.

My guess is that the recipe at this point wants you to add the chocolate, after melting it - i.e. that "stir butter to a cream" means "melt chocolate and stir to a creamy consistency". This would make more sense in light of the previous instructions.

I assume the word you're looking for is "couverture".

...

As written, the recipe is somewhat confusing. Is it supposed to create buttery, cream centers with no chocolate in them, surrounded with a hard chocolate "shell"? Or is it supposed to be creamy, chocolatey centers coated with the same shell? The first would really be chocolate-covered clotted cream frosting. The second is true chocolate truffles, albeit with the shell.

If you're trying to create chocolate truffles, then based on the analysis I outlined above, a classic-technique 2:1 ganache would work just as well if not better for fewer steps and less hassle. Get some high-quality 70% bittersweet couverture, and some 40% fat heavy cream. Use twice as much chocolate as cream. Grate or chop the chocolate finely. Scald the cream, and pour it, still hot, right over the grated/chopped chocolate. Stir gently with a spatula until well-blended. Cool. You can then chill for centers, if making truffles with a hard shell, or roll in cocoa, if you prefer the classic presentation.

If you really do want a white, cream center, it might be worth seeking out clotted cream which will help you avoid mixing butter and whipping cream. Instead of using powdered sugar, I might suggest using the candy-making method: dissolve some ordinary sugar in a bit of water, bring to the soft- ball stage, then pour carefully into the cream. You seem to have a very unusual recipe - I'm not quite sure what the objective of it was, but it does seem to me that it takes a rather roundabout route to achieve results you can get using other, more practical methods (more practical in the sense that they don't require you to track down esoteric ingredients)

If used just to coat the outside of the truffles, the problem probably wasn't the powdered sugar. I use powdered sugar to coat one of three types of truffles each year at Christmas and haven't had a problem unless the truffles were too loose (like my first attempt at Chocolate Raspberry where I didn't change anything except adding Raspberry Puree). I have had some success with using regular granulated sugar to coat truffles--hardens into a nice shell even on moist truffles. what's your recipe? Maybe there is something with it.

PAX! Greg

Hi Alex;

This is not the first time we converse about truffles. I knew, when I saw your name, that it was familiar to me. Sure enough, I think it was December 1997, you advised about making chocolate truffles. I made them and they were delicious!!!! Now on to the cream truffles. They are a white , soft center, in a jacket of either white or regular chocolate. Of course they melt in the mouth. I translated the recipe from the Dutch language, and yes I meant "couverture" instead of the (jam confiture) Sorry about that. In my haste to translate and find a solution, I boo-booed. I'm not sure if I can find "clotted cream" here, but I think I have a recipe how to make it. other than the aforementioned recipe. I have all ingredients, (Belgian chocolate for the outer jacket) and I will as per your advise, melt the sugar in the water and cook it to a syrup. I wonder if I could instead of making the syrup, use white syrup from the bottle? And do away with looking for powdered sugar w/o corn starch. Thanks so much for your tips and explanations. I will keep you posted about the results. Happy New Year to you and the group!! Conny

-- Conny - Sonora - CA - USA

Hi Alex;

This is not the first time we converse about truffles. I knew, when I saw your name, that it was familiar to me. Sure enough, I think it was December 1997, you advised about making chocolate truffles. I made them and they were delicious!!!! Now on to the cream truffles. They are a white , soft center, in a jacket of either white or regular chocolate. Of course they melt in the mouth. I translated the recipe from the Dutch language, and yes I meant "couverture" instead of the (jam confiture) Sorry about that. In my haste to translate and find a solution, I boo-booed. I'm not sure if I can find "clotted cream" here, but I think I have a recipe how to make it. other than the aforementioned recipe. I have all ingredients, (Belgian chocolate for the outer jacket) and I will as per your advise, melt the sugar in the water and cook it to a syrup. I wonder if I could instead of making the syrup, use white syrup from the bottle? And do away with looking for powdered sugar w/o corn starch. Thanks so much for your tips and explanations. I will keep you posted about the results. Happy New Year to you and the group!! Conny

-- Conny - Sonora - CA - USA

OK, now I'm clear what you're talking about. IMHO the people who made this recipe are rather stretching the term "truffles" - I'd give this confection a different name. The original truffles are, of course, the mushrooms. Chocolate truffles, in the classic recipe, are balls of firm ganache that have been crudely rolled and then dusted with cocoa, so that they look a lot like the mushroom. In this context, the term makes sense.

But the next step people seem to have taken was to call a ganache center enrobed with a hard chocolate shell a "truffle" - already a stretch IMHO since they don't look anything like mushrooms at this point, obscuring the logic of the name. However, at least the center is essentially identical with the classic chocolate truffle, so perhaps one can understand the point.

Now, however, this recipe is calling "truffle" an object which does not actually contain ganache, and doesn't look like the mushroom truffle either. Where does it end? At some point the definition of "truffle" would become so blurred that it would be almost impossible to pinpoint what the terminology meant. Certainly it seems as though the way we're headed is towards "any confection with a soft, creamy consistency that can be sold at a suitably high price at a confectionery".

OK, end of tirade.

Clotted cream is a very British thing - you can get it here in Seattle, and I suspect in most major urban centers in the USA. In Canada it should be even easier to find. In Britain it's ubiquitous, and you can find it in Europe with a bit of searching. You're looking for a sweet cream product that's solid and spreadable, sort of the consistency of cream cheese, with a slightly yellow colour.

It's not easy to make. You need unhomogenized milk, an oven that can go at a low setting, a wide pot, and lots of patience. Without experience it's not very likely you'll get it right. It's easier to buy than make.

No, because it has far, far too much water. Candymaking technique creates a very concentrated sugar solution - even the soft-ball stage is almost entirely sugar. In addition, white syrup often has other ingredients and typically includes a liquid sugar - either invert sugar or corn syrup, both of which never solidify and so will never reach the soft-ball stage.

Another option which would achieve very similar results is to make white chocolate truffles - simply substitute white for bittersweet in the truffle recipe I already described. Be sure to use El Rey white chocolate if you can, far and away the best. Scald the cream only lightly - if the cream is too hot when you add it to white chocolate, the truffles will be grainy.

Again, powdered sugar without cornstarch isn't impossible to find, but it does require some persistence and in any case I think using soft-ball sugar will yield even smoother, silkier results.

Jenn Ridley wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

No - it has lumps in it, but they're easily broken up. In Australia, (and in UK too, I think, possibly also in Canada) you can get icing sugar (powdered sugar) without cornflour (cornstarch). There are two types of icing sugar available - one is mixed with cornflour and is labelled icing sugar mix. The other has no cornflour and is labelled pure icing sugar. There are always lumps in it, but I just break them up when sifting the icing sugar. The type without cornflour is preferred by cake decorators etc, I believe, for making hard setting icings - royal icing etc.

As far as availability in the US goes, someone else (Alex, I think) has mentioned a wholefoods/healthfood store. Possibly the OP could also try checking with cake decorating suppliers?

Rhonda Anderson Cranebrook, NSW, Australia