What is ganache made from?

Ganache is a classic mixture typically made from chocolate and cream. The process involves heating the cream and then pouring it over chopped chocolate, allowing the chocolate to melt and blend with the cream. This combination creates a smooth and rich mixture that can be used for various applications in pastries, desserts, and confections.

The cream adds a creamy texture and helps to achieve a luscious consistency, making ganache a popular choice for fillings, glazes, and frostings. The proportion of cream to chocolate can be adjusted to create ganache with different firmness levels, suitable for various uses, such as truffles or cakes.

While chocolate can be paired with other ingredients like water, butter, or milk, these combinations do not yield the same rich and smooth result that chocolate and cream do. Water would not provide the desired emulsion and could lead to a less appealing texture, butter can be used to create a variation of ganache known as "butter ganache" but isn't the traditional recipe, and milk can be used as an alternative but generally results in a ganache that is not as rich compared to the traditional cream-based version. Thus, the most common and recognized formulation for ganache is indeed chocolate and cream.