Chocolate-Oat Bars

This is a simple dessert, but I like it because it takes something luxurious (dark chocolate) and stretches it with two ordinary and cheap ingredients (half-and-half and oats).

Needless to say, it will only be as good as the chocolate you use. The best cheap source of baking chocolate I've found is Trader Joe's Pound Plus bars--you get more than a pound of chocolate for under $5, and it tastes good, too. But you can use any type of chocolate that you'd be willing to eat "as is."

Lately I've been reading the book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. It gives simple ratios for doughs and batters, mostly. If you like inventing recipes, it's a wonderful book and you should go buy it. The recipe here for ganache is from that cookbook. The other inventions are my own. This cookbook often measures by weight rather than volume because that makes the ratios work, so you'll need to get out the kitchen scale for this recipe.

You will need three ingredients: chocolate, half-and-half, and oats.

This recipe is based upon ganache, a chocolate and cream mixture. When ganache is hot, you can use it as chocolate sauce, like on ice cream. When it's cold, you can roll it into balls and make truffles out of it.

Measure out equal amounts of chocolate and half-and-half by weight. (The recipe calls for cream, not half-and-half, but it's a very flexible recipe and I didn't want to go buy cream.) I think I used 6 oz. chocolate and 6 oz. cream. Chop the chocolate into roughly equal-sized chunks and put it in a medium-sized bowl. It's better to err on the side of the bowl being too big. I know this--I really do--but for some reason I used a too-small bowl and made a mess as a result. Oh well.

Put the cream in a small pot and heat it gently (low to medium heat) on the stove for a few minutes. As soon as it starts to simmer (make a few bubbles that weren't there before), take it off the heat right away and pour it over the chocolate. DO NOT TOUCH for five minutes. After that, take a whisk (it must be a whisk--I tried a spoon and got the aforementioned mess, but a whisk worked perfectly) and gently stir the cream and chocolate together. Now you have ganache.

Get out the oats and pour in a lot. I must have used at least three cups, but it may have been more than that. Add as many as the ganache will comfortably hold. You want the ganache to hold the oats together, not the other way around.

Now spread out a large piece of wax paper or parchment paper on the countertop and tape it down. (Parchment paper works better, but wax paper is much cheaper and it will do, so that's what I chose.) You should have at least two feet of it. Put the ganache mixture on the wax paper and spread it out with a spatula. Put another piece of wax paper over the top of the ganache mixture, and press down with your hands so that it's all about the same thickness, 1/4 to 1/2 inch. Now leave it to harden. If you have fridge space, it'll harden pretty fast in the fridge, maybe in an hour or so. I have no fridge space, so I left it on the countertop for six hours.

When it's hardened, peel off the top layer of wax paper and then replace the wax paper on top. Now flip it over (wax paper on the bottom) and remove the wax paper from the top. Now it's been loosened from the wax paper. Slide it onto a large cutting board and cut it into small squares (a large cleaver works nicely for this).

 

Store the bars in a container in the fridge. Yum.

Note: If you want your chocolate bars to be sweeter, you can add corn syrup to the ganache, or you can dust the bars with powdered sugar at the end.