Foams are fancy. That’s probably the main reason I make them! Everyone is immediately impressed when there’s foam on a cocktail, and what we see certainly adds to our experience.
But I have to admit that when I’m making a menu for my cocktail parties, I’m still a bit brute force about my foams. I have an iSi whipper, therefore I shall make a foam. My foam creation process is very foam-centric rather than being inspired by an actual drink and going “you know what this drink needs? A such-and-so foam!”.
In any case, someone let me know ahead of time that they would like a dark chocolate foam. No further specification. No cocktail that it should go on top of. So right up my alley.
Now, it’s very tempting to walk the known roads, and just go for something creamy. But I realised I wasn’t really enthusiastic about putting chocolate mousse on my drinks. So instead I turned radically away from it, and went in the direction of aromatic spices instead! It required some ongoing discipline not to add cream to the mix, but I succeeded!
First task: what kind of spices and ingredients go well with chocolate but are “hard” instead of “soft”, so a little more assertive, bitter or spicy? (I don’t like hot spicy in drinks so from now on “spicy” just means “with the characteristics of spices”). Coffee, mole and regular chocolate bitters, cardamom, anise, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace are some clear contenders. Also caramel and vanilla easily come to mind, but should be used sparingly to avoid too “soft” of a flavour profile.
As a base, I decided to use Creme de Cacao instead of actual chocolate, again because I think that gives a “sharper” taste. I kept the vanilla (in the form of a syrup) because I figure it’s an important ingredient to tie everything together, but for the caramel I am going to use my home-made burnt caramel because it has a nice bitter taste instead of something buttery-sweet. I followed Art of Drink’s instructions for this (made it like 3 years ago and it’s still good).
I also found sort of by accident some proper black cardamom in a local toko (asian specialty store), which was my first ever encounter with the stuff. It’s kinda weird, very clearly related to ‘regular’ green cardamom, but also pretty awesome. Just by the smell you can tell it goes well with chocolate (but the internet has also told me this).
To get the spices in, I crush the following raw ingredients slightly:
- 1.2 gr black cardamom (2 pods – I cut these open a bit first)
- 1.5 gr star anise
- 1.5 gr mace
- 4 whole cloves
I toast them for a bit in a dry pan, and then add 50 ml of water which I bring to a boil. When it does, turn off the heat and let it steep for about 30 minutes. In this case that left me with about 35 ml of spice water. If I’m making this again, I will probably make a little bit more (and with more spices). Strain out the spices.
For the foam itself, I follow Truffles on the Rocks template (and found it to be very effective), which aims for 300ml of liquid for a 0.5L whipper. So we get:
- 120 ml dark creme de cacao (de Kuyper in this case)
- 35 ml of our spice water
- 10 ml burnt caramel
- 15 ml vanilla syrup
- 120 ml water
- 6 drops of coffee extract
- 8 drops of Bittermens Mole bitters
As per the advice, I left this mixture in the fridge overnight to make sure everything was nice and cold before adding the powders.
Since we have 300ml liquid, we add 1.8 gr methyl cellulose and 0.5 gr xanthan gum as per the template. We need to blend it on high speeds. I have a hand-held immersion blender – pro tip: stick the blender in first, and then add the powders, because they are sticky! This way, the powders won’t stick so much to the blender stick when you put it in. Still, I did need to scrape some of the goop from the blender halfway through to put it back in the mix.
The rest is just following Truffels’ instructions: add to the whipper, charge it twice: 1 charge, shake for 30s, then 2nd charge.leave in the fridge for 30 min.
You can see the result of the picture. I’m super happy with this foam. It’s clearly cacao-y, but it’s also surprising and aromatic. After a week it was still good. One strange thing though I was hoping or expecting a very dark colored foam (the liquid was almost pure black), but I guess it’s the very fine bubbles that make it just a very light brown.
It behaves like chocolate in the sense that the foam works with any drink that works with regular chocolate too. In this case you see it topping some Green Ladies that were very well received.
