Ganache
Chocolate and cream held as one phase — an emulsion that firms as its cocoa butter crystallises, and splits when the balance of fat and water goes wrong.
What makes it set
An emulsion, and Solid fat
A baked product is set by the oven. This one is not — and what sets it instead decides almost everything that can go wrong with it. See the whole family by mechanism.
Also called chocolate ganache (INTERNATIONAL), chocolate truffle mixture (INTERNATIONAL)
Ganache is chocolate melted into cream. It is used warm as a glaze, cool as a piped filling, and cold and beaten as a whipped ganache; the same mixture does all three, and which one it is depends only on temperature and on how much cream went in.
What it is, physically, is an emulsion. Chocolate is mostly cocoa butter and sugar with cocoa solids through it; cream is mostly water with fat suspended in it. Combining them puts a large quantity of fat and a modest quantity of water in the same bowl, and something has to hold the two together — the cocoa solids, the milk proteins and the lecithin in the chocolate all do part of that job.
When a ganache splits, the emulsion has failed and the fat has come out as a greasy layer. It is the most alarming-looking failure in this family and one of the most reliably recoverable, provided the correction is the right way round.
What holds it together
A water-continuous emulsion: cocoa butter and milk fat dispersed as droplets through the water of the cream, stabilised by cocoa solids, milk protein and the emulsifier in the chocolate. It firms on cooling because the cocoa butter within those droplets crystallises.
AN OPEN DEBT, AND A NARROWER ONE THAN IT LOOKS. The oil-in-water account is standard in the confectionery literature and the food-science work on ganache destabilisation exists — it is paywalled, and no open full text was obtained on 27 August 2026. What BakeHQ actually needs it for is the corrective action, which holds under either reading: adding fat to a broken fat-and-water system does not repair it. The phase claim is what remains unsupported.
RecordedNot yet sourced — a known gap
What temperature does to it
Wide working range and two failure points at its ends. Too hot, and the emulsion loosens and can break as the cocoa butter melts out of the crystal structure holding it. Too cold too fast — cold cream onto warm chocolate, or a fridge — and it seizes into a grainy mass instead of setting smooth. Setting is a crystallisation, so a ganache left to firm slowly at room temperature sets glossier and smoother than one chilled.
RecordedFollows from evidence recorded elsewhere on BakeHQ
How it keeps
Keeps for several days at cool room temperature covered, and longer refrigerated, but a chilled ganache has to be brought back to room temperature slowly or it will be grainy and dull. It freezes better than most preparations here, because there is comparatively little free water in it to form damaging ice.
RecordedEstablished practice, not a measured result
What a good one is like
- Texture
- Glossy and completely smooth; no grain, no visible fat separation
- Structure
- Pourable when warm, sliceable when cold, with no sudden transition between
Where it stops
A ganache is only as good as the chocolate in it, and it will not hide a poor one. Its firmness is set by the ratio of chocolate to cream and by the chocolate's own cocoa butter content, which means a recipe written for one chocolate can be soup or a brick with another — dark, milk and white are not interchangeable at the same ratio, because they carry very different amounts of cocoa butter and milk solids. It is also not a substitute for buttercream where a light, pipeable finish is wanted; whipped ganache is closer, and is still denser.
Why the instinctive fix makes a split ganache worse
A ganache that has broken looks oily and curdled, and the instinct is to add more chocolate to bring it back together — because more chocolate is what makes a ganache thicker, and the mixture looks thin.
That is exactly backwards. The emulsion has failed because there is more fat present than the water phase can hold in suspension; chocolate is mostly fat, so adding it moves the ratio further in the direction that broke it.
The recovery is to add a small amount of warm liquid — cream, milk, even water — and to work it in from the centre outward, either with a spatula in small circles or with a stick blender kept below the surface so it does not beat in air. The additional water gives the fat somewhere to go, and the emulsion re-forms.
It is the same logic as a split mayonnaise, and for the same reason: both are emulsions that failed on the fat side.
Related
Used on and in
Warm as a glaze or cool as a filling from the same bowl, which is unusual and is a property of the emulsion rather than of the recipe.
What it is built from
Its cocoa butter is what sets the ganache, which is why two bars at the same stated percentage can give quite different results.
Supplies the water phase that holds the fat in suspension. Running short of it is what a split ganache has done.
The science behind it
Fat plasticity and crystal structure
Cocoa butter crystallising is what turns a pourable glaze into a sliceable filling without anything else changing.
Keep reading
Buttercream
Sets by solid fat rather than by an emulsion, which is why the same complaint means something different in each.
Fillings, icings and creams
The whole family, grouped by what sets each one.