Classic Chocolate Mousse

Let's make chocolate mousse. Mousse au chocolat from my book, Start Here, which you should buy and also pre-order Ham's book, Hello Home Cooking. Huh? This is the classic chocolate mousse. Fluffy, light, and easier than you think. In my book, I made it with white chocolate because I know a lot of people hate white chocolate, but I love it. I especially love white chocolate macadamia nuts, but dark chocolate mousse feels appropriate for Valentine's. And once you know this method, you can make it with whatever chocolate you want. You can make it with butterscotch chips. You can soar. To start, I've got some high quality dark chocolate. Right here, I chopped it up roughly. This is bell rona. There's surprisingly very little in this. We got chocolate, we got eggs, we got some sugar, we got cream. So you want to go for the best stuff possible. It really, really makes a difference here. If you can't afford to splurge on your chocolate and eggs, the eggs is where you should splurge. You didn't see that coming, right? Hot tip. The eggs. The eggs matter very much. If you don't have a good quality egg in your chocolate mousse, it's going to have like a weird eggy taste. You can melt your chocolate in the microwave, but oh gosh, it got so hot. Perhaps a little to help me. A couple tablespoons of butter. Not every chocolate mousse has butter, but I do feel like it kind of makes a little more forgiving if you don't have the best chocolate. And also, it's very important with white chocolate, which can seize pretty easily. If you're going to do this in the microwave, make sure you stop every 15 seconds, give it a stir, and then you want to stop heating your chocolate when it's almost fully melted, but there's like a few little bits in there still. It'll continue to melt from the residual heat, but if you melt it all the way, it's kind of at risk of burning. Chocolate burns pretty easily. Even if you go out for Valentine's Day, you should come home and have chocolate mousse because there's something really nice and romantic about having dessert at home. In bed. In bed. This is the perfect thing to have in bed, watching a movie, getting cozy, right? That's the perfect end to the evening. Okay, we're almost melted. You can see there's just a couple of chunks. I'm going to turn it off and we'll just set this aside and it'll fully melt from the residual heat. Now, we're going to use our water bath again to cook our eggs. So I do my mousse a little bit differently. Traditionally, you separate the eggs and then you add the yolks into your chocolate and you whip your whites into a meringue and fold that in. I like to keep my eggs whole, but I warm them up. By warming up the eggs, they actually whip up really well even without separating. So you do have to go through this extra step of heating up your egg, but you don't have to separate it. And I feel like the added bonus of pasteurization makes it worth it. We're going to crack our eggs right into the bowl that we're going to whisk it in. You don't have to use a stand mixer. You can also do this with a hand mixer. And if you really, really want to go for it, you can totally do this by hand. It's going take a while. I recommend you do it with a friend and you tap out because you're going to get tired. To this, I'm going to add some sugar and salt and we're going to whip it up. Not to get it thick at this point, just to make sure it's evenly mixed before we heat it up. It's important to have this well incorporated before you place it over the heat because if you have pockets of egg white floating around in there, that'll curdle once you place it over the heat. See how there's all this egg around the edge right there? You're going to make sure that's scraped down because once again, up on those edges, that's where the egg can curdle. Now we're going to place it over the water. You want to make sure that the bowl isn't actually in the water. You just want it resting above because you want it to be heated from the steam. Stir constantly and make sure you're up there getting those sides. If you're not worried about pasteurization, you don't need to take the time. Just warm this up until the sugar is dissolved. Get in there and when you rub a little bit of the mixture between your fingers, you won't feel any grit, but if you want to pasteurize it, cook it until it's somewhere between 135 and 145. Now when you're taking the egg's temperature, just to be safe, pull it off the water. Let's see where we're at. Whoa! 150. Okay, we definitely did it, but you can see there's like it's forgiving. Now we whip. So while that was whipping up, I just came back to check out my chocolate and you can see that those few chunks have melted. It's totally smooth, but it's cooled just a bit. That's really important. If this chocolate is like ripping hot and when you fold the cream in, it's just going to go. I haven't done anything with chocolate in a while. We got chocolate. I forgot what a fan I am. I don't really like eating it. I just like working with it. Like cakes. I don't like eating cakes. Whoa! Will you freaking look at that? Can you believe how light and fluffy that is even though we didn't separate the eggs? That is because we cooked them a bit. Now the three parts to your mousse is we have our melted chocolate, we have our whipped eggs, and we have cream. Now we're going to whip our cream as well, but I don't want to have to get another bowl dirty. So I'm going to mix this into my chocolate, then I'm going to whip my cream, and now that's my chocolate. Now you've got to do this in stages. It's very important. The cream has to be very, very cold in order to whip up. So the chocolate is warm, this is slightly like body temperature, and this is cold. So you need to bring this all together very gradually so the chocolate doesn't seize. Anytime you're mixing something fluffy into something dense, you can make a bubble sacrifice to the gods. We need to bring these two things to like an equilibrium in a lot of ways, not just in terms of temperature, but also texture. So I'm going to add a third of this into here, and we're just going to stir it in. We're not even going to bother folding. We're just going to stir it in because we need to lighten up our chocolate. And it's going to feel really sad watching it fully deflate, but I'm telling you, you got to do this. This is your sacrifice. This is your sacrifice to the mousse gods, and I'm telling you it will be worth it. So go for it, evenly incorporate this. Look at how much lighter it already is just from one addition. And you can see the chocolate kind of wants to seize because the eggs have so much liquid. And chocolate, the way chocolate works is a little bit of liquid makes chocolate really angry, and a lot it's okay with. So now we begin folding. Folding, you cut down the middle, you lift up the side. You cut, then you lift. Our third addition of our whipped eggs. The fold motion has become more important because we are trying to preserve the bubbles now. Okay, now we're going to whip our cream, and we're going to fold that in just until it's like thick and a little bit fluffy, because once this goes in the fridge, it's going to thicken up more. If you get your whipped cream really stiff now, once it goes in the fridge, it's going to eat like butter, and you want this to stay really tender and soft. I'm excited. I'm really excited. Okay, same thing. We're going to add this in a couple of stages. There goes our first bit. Gently fold. See, if you added your cream right into the chocolate, you get little chunks. Like, the chocolate would immediately set from how cold the cream is. A, the cream would melt a bit. B, the chocolate would seize a bit. It's bad for everyone involved. I'm going to go ahead and add the rest. It's so freaking good. I'm going to leave it streaky. Just a couple more turns. That's enough. Okay, and I'm going to now, I'm going to dish it up. Get all your pretty glasses, so we can plate this up. I love different glasses. This is so easy, and I think it's very impressive. You can let this set before you scoop it into cups, but I'm like, I think it looks so pretty right now. I want to scoop it in the cups right now, and then I'm going to let it set. It is important, I know you want to like dig right in, but once this sets in the texture's going to be so amazing. Look at how light and airy. I'm going to pop that in the fridge, let it, let it chill. It's so good. Look, look at, look at how fluffy. All right, it's been a couple hours. We rolling? Let's get a, let's get a mousse. You can add some fruit, crunchy toppings. My favorite way to finish this is with a little bit of very good olive oil and some flaky salt. You think that looks exciting? Should we get in there?