Chocolate Mousse

For those who know me well, chocolate mousse is a bit of an obsession and a bugbear for me. An obsession that dates to the time when I was about eight and my family spent three weeks in Paris. It seems like I had chocolate mousse for dinner just about every night. When we got back to the States, I saw it on the menu at a Long Island restaurant, so I ordered it. What came out was a large, grayish stack of something almost completely, but not entirely, unlike chocolate mousse. Since that time, I have tried chocolate mousse at many restaurants and discovered a disturbing trend (to me at least). Even French restaurants in the US started producing a thicker, denser mousse that (as it was explained to me at one French restaurant in Philadelphia some years ago) appeals more to the American palate. This is my bugbear. Why would the French of all people bend their cuisine to others?

In recent weeks I have tried to recreate the chocolate mousse of my brief sojourn in Paris. There are two important elements to a great chocolate mousse: texture and flavor. To me, the mousse should be light and airy, not thick and creamy. And it should have a rich, cloyingly bittersweet chocolate flavor. If too thick, the rich flavor will be too much to get through more than spoonful. I have tried a couple of recipes and discovered a couple of things. Most start with melting chocolate of some kind and then folding in beaten egg whites and/or whipped cream. The proportions are important, because the chocolate can easily be overwhelmed by whipped cream. The second issue is how the chocolate is combined with the white ingredients. One recipe I tried had only 4 oz of chocolate, a cup of whipped cream and four egg whites. When blended, even if you cool the chocolate to room temperature, the cream will still be cold enough to cause the chocolate to sieze and produce flecks throughout the cream, not evenly distribute.

I then tried a recipe that called for twice the chocolate, half the cream, and using both parts of the egg. The chocolate is melted with 4 Tbsp of water and then blended with the egg yolks before stirring in some of the cream and then folding in cream and egg whites. The texture turned out very well, but too sweet because of the superfine sugar called for to add to the egg whites (it called for 3 tbsp, but I only put in 2 and it was still too sweet). It meets one of my two criteria, but tThe search goes on...