A Study In Dessert: Chocolate Mousse with Chestnuts

Elements: chocolate mousse, chestnut dacquoise, sautéed chestnuts, bitter chocolate sauce, cocoa nib crumble, chestnut-honey gelato, micro-marigold blossoms.

Concept: Chocolate and chestnuts are a classic European dessert pairing, particularly in Italy. In America, chestnuts are best known as a stuffing sidekick on the Thanksgiving dinner table. How could I best introduce Americans to it? Pair it with a familiar dessert—chocolate mousse.

Ingredients/Technique: Chestnuts are a versatile ingredient that is featured in various forms throughout this dessert: sautéed, as a flour, and in honey. The mousse is poured into savarin Fleximolds. Once the mousse is set, sautéed chestnuts are pressed into the top of the mousse. Once frozen, the mousse is unmolded and sprayed with a 50:50 mixture of cocoa butter (Mycryo) and 70% Valrhona Guanaja and returned to the freezer for 20 minutes. As chestnut flour has an intense flavor that is reminiscent of soybeans, it’s very important to spread the dacquoise batter thinly so the cake remains thin and flexible when baked. After baking, the cake is chilled, brushed with chocolate, and frozen for 20 minutes until it becomes firm enough to cut cleanly. Use a ring cutter to cut the dacquoise and invert onto a lined sheetpan. Pipe a spiral of medium ganache on top of the dacquoise and place the frozen, sprayed mousse on top of the ganache pressing down slightly to secure it to the dacquoise.  The cocoa nib crumble is a flourless tuile ground in a Robot Coupe. The bitter chocolate sauce is based on a shiny chocolate glaze recipe in which I omitted the gelatin, reduced the sugar by 50%, and doubled the amount of chocolate. For this recipe, I am using Valrhona 80%; it is an intense chocolate whose bitter and acidic notes balance the sweet chestnut components of this dish. The chestnut-honey gelato uses a standard vanilla gelato recipe in which the sugar is reduced by half and replaced with chestnut honey (510 g of honey per 4000g of milk/cream). Like the flour, chestnut honey is both bitter and intensely smoky sweet, which is why I chose to use the honey in a creamy component. The micro-marigold blossoms add a lemony finish. (No, they are not on the plate just to look pretty.)

Flavor Pairing: chocolate and chestnuts.

Comments: This dessert is gluten and nut-free (no really, chestnuts are not nuts).