I first learned to make chocolate mousse in France, where the recipe was always the same: melt dark chocolate, whisk in egg yolks, fold in meringue, fold in whipped cream. Voila, chocolate mousse! That’s how I made it for a long time; if it was good
enough for the French, it was good enough for me. Years later a top pastry chef explained to me that you really only need two ingredients for a good chocolate mousse—chocolate and cream. Other ingredients, like eggs, just mask the flavor of the chocolate,
but restaurants like to add them because they are cheaper than chocolate. One thing I will say about eggs in chocolate mousse is that the yolks do give it a silky quality. To mimic this silky texture, you can actually add a tablespoon of neutral vegetable oil to your
mousse, distasteful as that seems. Just whisk it into the melted chocolate and cream before folding in the whipped cream. I omitted this step, but it does work well, particularly if you are making your mousse several hours before serving. I chose to make
a milk chocolate mousse with a relatively dark milk chocolate, Sharffen Berger 41 percent, so it’s not overly sweet. I served the mousse over a gooey, half-milk, half-bittersweet chocolate ganache, and topped it off with crunchy, salty-sweet toasted almonds. An American spin on a French classic, and très bon!
