Cooking with Julie in the Napa Valley, California Part 1/3

Cooking with Julie in the Napa Valley California part 1/3 The first we’re going to do is I’m going to demonstrate the beginning of the truffle so that you guys know how to make it. All right, are you guys ready to start? So, you can go ahead and stick one of the spots here in our pasta boards. Napa is really very well known for its wine and it’s now becoming more well known for its food as you know we have probably one of the best restaurants in the world through the French laundry. And people come out here to experience the food and wine in Napa and it's a great place to experience the food. You’re going to experience the food at the restaurants but for people who want to have more of a food experience, to taste the local cheeses and taste the local wines and meet local veterans that you come into my classes, it really gives you a great Napa experience because we want to show the people who come here the best of what we have. The first thing I want to show you is one of the easiest and most versatile things that you wish should have known a long time before. What we’re going to make is chocolate truffles. You’re looking at a chocolate. I’m going to cut this so that you guys can taste this. These things are really important that when you’re going to make things that you taste everything that you’re going to use. I’ve broken the chocolate into the small pieces to make it melt very evenly for us. In the mean time, while we’re tasting that I’m heating up here. I use organic heavy cream and we’re going to just bring that to a boil here. And you pour that in on top of your chocolate and this mixture that I’m making here is a very classic French sauce. It’s called a ganache. All it's doing is using the hot cream to melt the chocolate. And so again think about, we only got two ingredients here. So, if you haven’t picked the best of the best and your favorite, you’re not going to have a wonderful tasting truffle. This is also soft butter at room temperature. I use a butter from Pennsylvania called—it’s very high in fat content and very low in water. A lot of the butters have a lot of water whipped into them. And mix that up to we get it nice and smooth. Just make sure you get rid of any little streaks of butter. Once you’ve got this mixed up and it’s nice and smooth, this, you could use as a frosting for a cake or cupcakes. And you want it nice and smooth. Scrape around the outside to get everything well incorporated. And look at that, isn’t that beautiful? This is nice and thick. Now, you’re done. I mean it doesn’t really get easier than that. Then I take a pan. I line it with plastic. It makes it easy for clean up and to get it out. And now take your chocolate and you put inside here. So then, I’m just going to fold this over so there’s nothing gets into it. And this goes into the refrigerator for about an hour. So, we’ll take it out after we make our pasta and shape this into truffles and I’ll show you how to shape them. Dip them into the chocolate and I toasted some. We can do some plain and some toasted coconut here. Coconut or toasted hazel nuts, toasted walnuts, toasted almonds and then you could have some plain and some toasted coconut and it looks really pretty on the by side. This is a group. We got them together that wants to learn how to make pasta. So, they’re able to come in and see exactly how the pasta is made through demonstration and then actually go through the whole process themselves. It’s the best way to learn because they get to see how everybody else’s done it because the next time they do it, they might do it the way person next do it, it could be too dry, it could be too moist and they really learn from their mistakes and how to fix things and it really makes them live with a good skill.