Orange and chocolate is one of the best loved pairings there is, and few names say orange quite like Cointreau. Our culinary Cointreau is distilled from sweet and bitter orange peel and bottled at 60% vol, clear, colourless and with no sugar at all, so it flavours a white chocolate ganache or a buttercream without colouring it or changing its sweetness.

Why Use a 60% Concentrate? 

A bottle of drinking spirit will flavour a ganache, but it brings plenty of water with it, and water is what makes a ganache runny and cuts its shelf life short. At 60% vol you need far less for the same flavour, so the filling keeps its thick consistency, stays fresh for longer and each bottle goes further. Cointreau goes further still, as its flavour is concentrated well beyond its strength: you need only around a sixth of the amount a recipe gives for the drinking version. Our video above explains more of the reasons to use it.

Read our guide to Working with Culinary Alcohols for more.

How to Use Cointreau

At 1.2% of your recipe it lengthens shelf life and masks any off notes from other ingredients, at 1.5% it lifts the flavour of a filling with no orange or alcohol coming through, and at 3% your ganache carries the recognisable taste of bitter orange. For an orange crème, our recommended rate is 2.5%, or 25ml per kilo of base. Add it to a cooling ganache at around 30°C, as our Cointreau Fruit Ganache does, because a hotter mix lets the alcohol and the orange evaporate. Its orange oils dissolve far more readily in alcohol than in water, so stir it well through syrups and sorbet bases. For more ideas, try our Lime and Cointreau Ganache or Orange Cointreau Gelato.