This month we present you a delicious recipe from our Pastry Chef Francesca Benedettelli. Winter is a perfect time to make chocolates and, in particular, the month of February when the feast of lovers falls, it is the ideal time to try a sweet preparation to give on Valentine’s Day to the people we love or to enjoy together.
The Pastry Chef explains you, step by step, how to make a high-quality pastry with special techniques that can also be reproduced at home.
The pistachio praline is a small delight made up of a soft melting pistachio “cremino” covered in a dark chocolate shirt.
For this preparation, we will need a cooking thermometer, a spatula and a fork for the icing.
The ingredients are:
400 gr of 70% dark chocolate
400 gr of 35% white chocolate
170 gr of pure pistachio paste 100%
Instructions:
Melt the white chocolate and temper it by bringing it to 24°C. To temper the chocolate you can proceed with the “priming” method using the microwave oven, a simple method that can be easily repeated even at home without special equipment.
You proceed by melting 300 grams of white chocolate until it reaches 45°C (55°C for dark chocolate) and a third is taken, keeping it warm in a bain-marie.
Then, 100 g of previously chopped chocolate are added to the 2/3 of melted chocolate and, by mixing, the temperature reaches 26/27°C (28/29°C for dark chocolate).
At this point, the chocolate kept warm in a bain-marie is added to raise the temperature of the mixture and reach 28/29°C (31/32°C for dark chocolate).
Once the chocolate is tempered, the pistachio paste is added, reaching 24°C. With the help of a spatula, the mixture is spread in a steel frame or on a silicone mould, trying to obtain the thickness of half a centimetre, and then leaving it to crystallize for 12 hours.
Subsequently, we proceed to the cut by creating small parallelepipeds measuring 2cm x 2cm x 0.5cm and with the help of a fork, they are then completely glazed with 70% dark chocolate previously tempered.
Before our covering crystallizes, we can give space to our creativity by decorating them as we like, with pistachio grains, or with cocoa bean nibs.
Usually these pistachio pralines are served at the Santa Elisabetta restaurant at the end of lunch or dinner, accompanied by a good coffee.
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Photo Credits: Sandra Pilacchi
