Vegan Mousse au Chocolat
Today I had a small dilemma. I could not decide if I want to continue programming to process on the coding-related blog series or if I should finally add a cooking related post to my site.
As so often my wife helped me decide. She wished to try the vegan mousse au chocolat that I learned about last week in a cooking class.
Neither me nor my wife are vegan (or even vegetarian) but nevertheless we like to look beyond horizons and see different things. I was lucky to get that vegan cooking class as a birthday gift from my family and was generally be interested what we will be cooking.
I was quite surprise when I saw mousse au chocolate in the recipe booklet. I was even more surprised by the main ingredient which is called Aquafaba. Something I had never heard before. So I asked the cooking instructor what Aquafaba is:
Aquafaba is the name for the water in which chickpeas have been cooked.
This blew my mind.
Wait what? You can turn the water from the chick peas can into mousse au chocolat? Me – and also the other participants – where really surprised. Afterwards I checked on the net and probably one could have known Aquafaba before, as especially in the vegan cuisine it seems to be pretty common – as it works as a good replacement for egg white. The name is latin “Aqua” – water and “faba” – bean.
If you want to learn more about Aquafaba check out Aquafaba.com.
So how does this work? Pretty much how you would make standard mousse au chocolat actually.
Ingredients for 4 small servings:
- 125ml Aquafaba (e.g. from one 400gr can of chick peas)
- 1 tsp Winestone baking soda
- 0,5 tsp Lemonjuice
- 120gr dark chocolate
- 30gr powdered sugar
- pinch of salt
First the chocolate is chopped in fine pieces and then slowly melted in a water bath.
In the meanwhile add the lemon juice and baking soda to the Aquafaba and put it in the kitchen machine to stiff. This may take a few minutes. But in the end it will look just like stiffed egg white.
After a few moments you can add the powdered sugar (sift it before adding) and the little salt.
When the chocolate is melted turn the heat off and let the chocolate cool down a little bit. It is important that the chocolate cools down so that it is nearly hard again before you can fold the stiffed Aquafaba with the chocolate.
Once the Aquafaba is stiff and the chocolate cooled down carefully mix everything.
Then fill the mass in 4 bowls and put them in the fridge. Leave them in the fridge for at least 2 hours ( thats the time we gave it in the cooking class while eating the other dishes). If you can cool them even longer to have better texture.
