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Thursday, February 12, 2015

Craving Meets Comfort: A Recipe for Chocolate Soup



Craving Meets Comfort: A Recipe for Chocolate Soup

Sometimes hot cocoa just won’t cut it. This dessert from Colleen Riley of Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Nunu Chocolates is so rich, nuanced and all-consuming, it demands a spoon

By Aleksandra Crapanzano in the Wall Street Journal

REAL-LIFE DESSERTS don’t always live up to the ones we dream about. I learned this a few years ago, after a chance encounter with the book “Cooking in Marseille” by Daniel Young. Flipping through it, I came to a recipe for something called chocolate soup. It stopped me short. Chocolate soup? Could anything sound more comforting and thrilling—at the same time—than this? But before I could cook up a batch, the book somehow got buried or was borrowed, or perhaps I wisely hid it from myself. The idea of chocolate soup, however, stayed with me.
With an eye toward Valentine’s Day, I recently bought a new copy and made the recipe. It was delicious, but more of a molten cake than a soup—and a soup was what my heart had become set on. My own experiments yielded results either too similar to hot chocolate or too solid to serve as soup. So I called Colleen Riley, head chocolatier at the Brooklyn, N.Y., shop Nunu Chocolates, and asked her to make my dream come true.
Her bona fides appeared to be in order. Ms. Riley came to Nunu from another Brooklyn favorite known for classic desserts with a dash of hipster quirk, the pie company Four & Twenty Blackbirds. And before that she spent several years at Valerie Confections in Los Angeles. Nunu, where Ms. Riley landed almost two years ago, has made a name for itself with chocolate caramels, cacao-nib bark, double-dark truffles and—this being Brooklyn, land of the small-batch and artisanal—craft-beer-infused ganache. (I tried that last one skeptically and found it surprisingly compelling.)
The time finally came to test Ms. Riley’s recipe. Surpassing even the sweet my subconscious had concocted, she delivered something sublime—a soup indeed, thick enough to coat a spoon. Spiked with Grand Marnier, sweetened with orange-blossom honey and lightened with freshly squeezed orange juice, it is nuanced and balanced. Ms. Riley wanted, she told me, a result that was “rich but felt light, fresh and decadent.” Exactly.
We immediately started brainstorming variations: raspberries and Crème de Framboise, Comice pears and Poire William, crushed amaretti cookies and amaretto liqueur. But go ahead and start with the recipe as laid out below. It is hard to imagine anything better.
Chocolate Soup
Total Time: 20 minutes Serves: 2
  • ¼ cup heavy cream
  • ¾ cup whole milk
  • 1 Cara Cara or navel orange, zested, then segmented
  • 6 ounces 65% dark chocolate, broken into pieces
  • 1 tablespoon orange-blossom honey
  • ¼ cup freshly squeezed and strained orange juice
  • 1 tablespoon orange liqueur, such as Grand Marnier or Cointreau
1. In a small saucepan over medium heat, bring cream, milk and orange zest to a boil, then immediately remove pan from heat. Off heat, allow zest to steep in milk mixture for 15 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, in a medium, nonreactive bowl, combine chocolate and honey.
3. Place infused milk back over medium heat and bring to a boil. Pour milk through a strainer into chocolate-honey mixture, whisking together until chocolate is fully melted and texture is smooth. Gently stir in orange juice and orange liqueur until combined.
4. To serve soup at room temperature, let sit 30 minutes. When ready to serve, stir until thoroughly combined, then divide between 2 bowls. Garnish with orange segments. Alternatively, soup may be served warm (stop after step 3 and serve) or cold (chill in refrigerator until puddinglike, at least 2 hours).

—Adapted from Colleen Riley of Nunu Chocolates, Brooklyn, N.Y.

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