Excessive Tiramisu Testing: The Hunt For The Best Ingredients (Ep #4)

This is the nerdy and extremely excessive testing of the tiramisu ingredients I wanted to explore to help inform the ultimate tiramisu recipe. This isn’t a video about the ultimate recipe, but how to get there. I hope this will help you reflect your own preferences in your choice of ingredients. I tried all of these different components so you didn’t have to, and regret none of it.

My previous Tiramisu Series videos
Tiramisu episode 1: https://youtu.be/oWMbuTc7iIU
Tiramisu episode 2: https://youtu.be/9536y-4Nl7A
Tiramisu episode 3: https://youtu.be/TPZSpYrS0Cs

My video about coffee strength: https://youtu.be/8jAMOAmYCJI

Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
1:21 Coffee part 1: The Dunk
5:03 Coffee part 2: Strength
7:35 Coffee part 3: Choice of coffee type
10:27 The Savoiardi biscuit
14:29 Eggs
17:38 Mascarpone
19:50 Cocoa powder
23:52 Timing: How far in advance to make your tiramisu
25:30 Conclusions

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How to Make The Best Coffee At Home: https://geni.us/howtomakethebestcoffee
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– Today we’re talking tiramisu, excessive, horrifying quantities of tiramisu. I have eaten dozens and dozens of tiramisus in my quest for the ultimate coffee person’s tiramisu recipe. This video is not the ultimate recipe. This is the testing and experiments that we did along the way to get there. You know, my ultimate recipe

May not be what you’re looking for, but from today’s video, the things that we’ll share that you’ll learn will help you tweak and improve your own perfect recipe. A couple of things before we get started. Firstly, the base recipe that we’ll be using. We’re gonna use the kind of original

Notarized recipe from Le Beccherie. We did enjoy it in a previous testing video. However, we will be halving the amount of sugar used in it because that version was just way too sweet. And secondly, in order that I still like tiramisu at the end of this whole process,

We shot this over a number of days, so that’s why my clothes keep changing in this video. Now, a big part of this is gonna be ingredient testing. The tiramisu is a dessert of very few ingredients. You’ve got eggs, coffee, sugar, mascarpone, savoiardi biscuits, and cocoa powder. That’s it.

Should you be buying the fancy version of each one of those? Does it make for a better tiramisu? And then there are kind of technique questions, things from the cooking of eggs through to, well, how far in advance should you prepare your tiramisu for peak flavor? But we’re gonna start with that combination

Of ingredient and technique that is coffee. Of course we’re gonna obsess over the coffee part of this thing, but there is a sequence of testing we must go through to get there. And we must start with the dunk. And I will say this does result in perhaps the nerdiest

And weirdest chart this channel has ever produced. I’ll explain, when you’re making tiramisu, you must dunk a savoiardi biscuit into liquid coffee to pick up that flavor. I wanted to know, no, I needed to know exactly how much liquid the biscuit was absorbing. You know, would it have a big impact on texture?

Would it have a big impact on taste? These are the things we needed to find out. And so we tested it, of course using a high speed camera to kind of fully capture exactly how long each dunk was. And we were able to produce this chart.

On the X axis, you’ll see time of dunk in seconds, and on the Y axis, you’ll see grams of liquid coffee soaked up per gram of biscuit. And what you’ll see from this chart is that it soaks up the coffee really, really quickly. We tested four versions for this.

We tested the kind of fastest possible dunk that we could manage, a half second dunk, a one second dunk, and a two second dunk. Beyond two seconds, well, things literally start to fall apart, so that was not worth testing. Here’s the results. First tasting. Quickest dunk, slowest dunk.

Notable to me that these two in particular have wept quite a lot of liquid back out again overnight. This tray was a little coffeed when we finished. Now it’s just swimming in coffee. So, I’m not excited for that. Let’s get in, have a taste, ’cause this is primarily about

Texture more than anything else. Even for the fastest dunk, texture’s nice actually. I’m concerned that I don’t think I want more liquid in there. The slightly longer dunk. Not a huge difference. Very slightly softer. I’m not sure there’s a big difference there. Both super nice. The bottom obviously having been swimming in liquid,

Very, very wet looking. Taste wise. No. It’s surprising that the upper biscuit has some texture left. The bottom one is just, it’s just mush. It’s bad. It doesn’t bode well for our last one of these four. Not sure I’m excited. Just wet and soggy. Okay, just go. This is an exciting time.

There’s functionally no difference here. Now you’ll see one more little experiment here. Because dunking with accuracy was so difficult, we did pre-portion the coffee and dose each biscuit individually with what we thought might be the perfect amount. Let’s just see how that goes. Good but I would say I actually overestimated

The liquid it required here, and my recommendation would be slightly lower for the nicest texture where you’ve got just a little bit of bite from the biscuit, but just tons of coffee flavor too. For those of us who are nerds, well, the answer is 14 grams. That’s how much coffee per biscuit

We preferred in testing. That’s actually something that’s incredibly hard to do repeatably with a full immersion dunk. What we found better was to have a tray of coffee, half the height of the biscuit, and you would do a dunk and roll sort of quickly in and over and out,

And that got you pretty close pretty consistently. However, I must confess, that’s not what we did for the remainder of testing. Knowing that we would need 14 grams per biscuit, that’s exactly what we added with little syringes every single time. I know, I know, but science! Now that we knew how much coffee

Each of these particular biscuits needed, we could get on and answer the next question in the sequence, which is, how strong should the coffee be? Now, I’ve made a video all about strength and coffee before, if you wanna know what I’m kind of talking about here.

But we wanted to test variations in strength to see how it would impact flavor. To give you an example, an espresso is about 10% strength. That means 10% of the drink is sort of dissolved flavor from the ground coffee, and 90% is water. Filter coffee, at the other extreme,

Is about one and a half percent sort of flavor, coffee solubles, and 98.5% water. So there’s a big variation there. We built a simple comparison. We would test coffee at varying strengths, going from two to four to six to eight to 10% strength. We would brew espresso that was about 10% strength

And then using a refractometer, sort of dilute it down so that the flavor would be consistent throughout, the kind of extraction would be consistent. And all that would be changing is the kind of intensity of flavor in the end dessert. So this is not a blind tasting.

We’ve got 2%, 4%, 6%, 8% and 10% strength. I didn’t wanna do it blind because the first thing I taste would kind of set a benchmark. So if I tasted the strongest thing first, everything else would seem disappointing potentially. Let’s get into it. Definitely not enough coffee flavor. That’s good.

That’s a nice amount of coffee flavor. It comes a little strong in the finish, like it’s a little almost harsh, a touch bitter in the finish. For sure, that’s too much. 8% strength, which is kind of modern espresso. No. It’s not, it’s just, it’s not clean and sweet.

That’s not what you want from a good tiramisu. Now this feels a little empty having come straight from this, and that’s the problem with these kind of tastings. I would say between 4 and 5% strength is kind of where it’s at. That’s really nice, but I’m not sure for the extra caffeine

You’re gonna get in this, that’s gonna be the best experience. Tons of flavor, maybe too much. Now this one was a little contentious in the tasting we did after my tasting with the whole team. Some people really did prefer the 6% strength over the 4% strength, but I stand by the 4% strength.

I think it’s a really nice balance of intensity and flavor without potentially something like, well, excess caffeine. That is something we’ll touch on a little bit later on. Now, 4% is a surprisingly strong cup of coffee. It is achievable without an espresso machine, and it’s definitely something we will explain

And cover more in the final recipe video. But now that we knew, well, how much coffee we needed, how strong that coffee should be, we could get on and answer the question of, well, what kind of coffee should we be brewing? And for this, we took five different coffees.

We took a light roasted washed coffee from Columbia, a light roasted natural processed coffee from Ethiopia, a medium roasted blend, a dark roasted blend and some decaf. How much would the characteristics of the coffee come through? Would they clearly express, or would they get a little bit lost?

So this one is gonna be a blind tasting. I don’t know what’s where of the five different coffees that we’ve brewed. I’m kind of nervous that I won’t be able to spot the ones, you know, I should be able to spot. But I guess that’s the important bit. Can people tell the difference?

Interesting. Wouldn’t say it’s a lighter roast. Want a bit more comparison first. Very soft coffee flavor. Ooh. Didn’t know what that was. Yeah, not a lot going on here. Not a ton going on there either. I can’t easily pick out a natural from a washed coffee, which is really quite surprising to me.

Obviously there’s a lot of egg, cream, sugar standing between me and the coffee flavor, but it is doing a lot of editing. It really is masking a lot of complexity. It’s masking a lot of origin. Even roast level to some extent. I’m really surprised. Okay, I just have to know what’s what now.

Ooh, interesting. The dark roast was here. I get it but it’s not obviously dark. So this is the natural. If you hunt for it, it’s there. Medium roast. It’s just, it’s turned up in a very chocolate kind of way. I like that. Oh ho ho! Decaf.

I don’t think I was a huge fan of you. You seemed a little empty. Not bad. There’s no negative coffee flavor here. This is a filter roasted decaf coffee, so it’s a little bit lighter, so it hasn’t got a ton of bitterness. But I don’t think anyone would know

That was decaf, which makes me excited. This must be the light one, light washed coffee. If you hunt for it, it’s a little bit more acidity. It doesn’t do well. I’m gonna say a light roasted, nice clean washed coffee just doesn’t really stand up to all the other ingredients in this dessert.

It’s pleasant but it’s not showing the best of coffee, I would say. This one feels like a mixture of good news and bad news. Those super interesting, very characterful coffees that are really quite expensive, well, those are wasted here. The nuance just does not come through.

However, I’ve tasted enough bad coffee in tiramisus to know that lower quality coffee definitely, definitely does come through and should be avoided. I would still recommend specialty coffee, clean, sweet, delicious coffees. For me, we stuck with the medium roast from this point onwards, as well as that 14 grams per biscuit,

And the 4% strength. That was the benchmark from now on in all future tests. And the next tests would be all around the savoiardi biscuit. We went shopping for a wide range of savoiardi biscuits at a bunch of price points too. We did wanna include a homemade version,

And from previous videos people were upset that we didn’t do Stella Parks’ AKA BraveTart’s tiramisu recipe. So we did do her savoiardi recipe from that particular one and included it here. Now this is gonna be kind of a theme to this particular section, but the varying kind of moisture in the biscuits

Was actually a really big factor. We couldn’t just dose the kind of fixed gram per gram that we’ve been using in previous biscuits, because you’d end up with sort of moister biscuits getting much, much wetter from the additional coffee. So we kind of had to use our best judgment

To dose enough coffee for taste, but not so much that the whole thing kind of fell to pieces. This was a surprisingly interesting test. Let me show you what happened. Let’s start at the beginning. That is a wet, dense biscuit. It’s gotta be the potato flour one, quite mealy, dense. Number two.

Not bad. These are really big biscuits. I thought they might get a bit wet ’cause they’re a little bit softer. No idea what you are. Distracting texture. 100% out. We’re not doing very well here. That feels better. A wetter biscuit again. And you can see looking inside here

That there’s a sort of glistening coffee liquid. I’m thrown now. I know what you are, you’re the smallest biscuit and the cheapest, and probably the driest going in. Not bad. A cheap dry biscuit is a pretty good vehicle for coffee. When you’re shopping for these things, I’d be looking for no weird ingredients,

No potato flours. I think that’s out. I’d be looking for a pretty dry biscuit. I don’t think you want retained moisture, a soft sponge. I think you want dryness. Let’s find out what’s what and get a dry version of each one just quickly. They’re very light, very brittle.

The snap is sort of weird. And to eat one… Is not – it’s not – fun. They’re very, yeah, no. This one, this is, it’s a floppier biscuit. So these ones, the Esca, soft, bendy, sort of spongy. Quite enjoyable to eat. A bit of maybe orange zest in there. But I don’t think appropriate for the dessert. Got the homemade.

Not bad in terms of like snap, but just a little bit soft. I’d be tempted actually to dehydrate them after baking to make sure they were as dry as possible. Flavor-wise, they were very nice. The one that we’ve used for almost all the testing is the Vicenzovo. Super available, not particularly expensive.

I’m very annoyed that in this one case, I have overdosed this biscuit with coffee somehow. Super classic, like sugar on the top, great texture, nice snap, crispy. Great, no distracting flavors. What is this one? This would be the other classically widely available choice. Very similar looking to the Vicenzovo, the Antico Borgo. Similar snap. A little bit more orange zest in there maybe. Slightly distracting flavor. Didn’t love it quite as much as this one, but it’s a solid choice. Leaving at the end with a super cheap Sainsbury’s classic from the UK. Now these might be heresy to use. They say ‘boudoir’ on the back,

I don’t really understand why. They’re labeled as sponge fingers, not savoiardi. But crispy sugar top. Nice snap. Very dry. These performed adequately. If you can’t source a good traditional Italian-made biscuit, this’ll do. Now it is possible that we did under bake Stella’s biscuit in this one. I do accept that. We followed the times and temps, but I think for me, if I was to do it again,

I would either extend the bake a little bit more, or potentially even do a second kind of dehydrating lower temperature bake. Just because I think I want as little moisture as possible in a homemade biscuit. This is one where it felt like they’re kind of cheaper or the more traditional options

Definitely won out. But now let’s talk about eggs, because eggs are a little bit of a problem in tiramisu, because traditionally they should be raw, and raw eggs kind of exclude a bunch of people who don’t want to eat raw eggs or are advised not to eat raw eggs.

And so we wanted to test the cooking of eggs in comparison to raw eggs to see really what happens to texture and to flavor. So alongside a raw egg version, we did a kind of traditional and quite common technique where you cook down your egg yolk with some sugar in a bain-marie

Or double boiler till we get it to about 77 degrees Celsius. It’s still a liquid there, it’s not cooked and sort of scrambled there. It’s still a liquid but you can then add that cooked, pasteurized sort of egg yolk to your mascarpone and carry on from that point onwards.

But then I wanted to test something less cooked but still pasteurized, which meant sous vide. And so as a comparison point, we took an egg yolk, cooked it at 60 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. It was still runny afterwards, it wasn’t cooked but it was pasteurized. Would this be a useful step

Or fussy and pretentious? Now, here we’ve had some sort of issue in this middle one here. Something in the setup has gone wrong. I don’t know whether it’s a function of whatever’s happened to this egg, or a mistake in all of the creams that we’ve whipped up,

’cause we’ve whipped up a lot of creams. We’ll find out. I’m looking for a combination of taste impact potentially and texture impact potentially too. But I don’t know what I’m gonna find. Feels extremely familiar, which I guess makes me think raw egg. Let’s come to the melty friend. Confusingly dense.

Maybe it just hasn’t taken on as much air as it should have done. Nice. Something about that was particularly enjoyable. Let me just double check. I like this one more and I don’t know why. I do not know what it is about it. Just something has charmed me here. Raw egg, as expected.

Good times, familiar, tasty. Cooked egg. Having done cooked egg recipes that have not gone kind of weird, makes me think that’s an error in whipping. It was under whipped potentially. This one though, which must be sous vide. Yeah. That’s great. It makes me wanna sous vide the eggs every time.

I don’t why I like it so much. The texture’s great. Something about the flavor I like. Makes no sense. We haven’t cooked the egg, it was at 60 Celsius, just pasteurized it. But I really like it. And so if I was nervous of raw eggs and I had a sous vide circulator,

I’d be very tempted to do that. I just really like that. I need to double check it again in the future but that’s really tasty. Look, none of us wanted this to be the case. None of us wanted sous vide to be the answer to this question, but it kind of undeniably was.

It really did make the whole thing a little bit more enjoyable, and I still struggle to fully articulate why. The texture was somehow kind of lighter, cleaner, just nicer. I don’t like that it’s true but it’s true. Let’s move on to mascarpone, because this is another one of those tests

Where we could answer the question, does buying the more expensive or more artisanal mascarpones make for a better tiramisu? We bought three, a standard kind of supermarket version, a slightly fancier more artisanal, and then one very expensive, very fancy version. How would they impact the final dish?

I won’t lie, I’m curious if I can tell from a taste, texture perspective which one’s which. I have a strong feeling I know which one this is just because having seen them texturally, it’s quite obvious. But we’ll start at the beginning. I don’t which one this is. Familiar, friendly, tasty.

I’m curious at this. At nearly, what, like four times the price. Is it worth it? Oh, it’s a very different feeling texture. I feel like I need to chew it. I’m not sure you should need to chew mascarpone cream. It’s got a higher fat content and a lower moisture content.

So obviously having been in the fridge, it’s got that sort of set dairy fat texture, which I’m not sure I’m into. I’m definitely not into. Third one, curious if I can tell the difference at nearly three times the price, I think, between the cheapest and this one.

If this is the cheap or not, I don’t know but. Feels a little bit heavier than the first one. So I’m gonna say this is my favorite, but it might be the familiar one we’ve used a lot. Let’s find out. It is the familiar one that we’ve used a lot.

So this is your standard, relatively cheap supermarket one. Moisture content’s about 50%. Yeah, yeah, this is the fanciest of the fancy. This is not the dish to use this for. High fat content is not your friend. This one just feels a little stiffer, a little bit more set up.

Check your moisture content, check your fat content. I think that’s the key. Don’t spend money because the flavor doesn’t come through and the textures tend to be that little bit fattier. When you’re out shopping for your mascarpone, you can just look at the nutritional information on the side.

If you add up the fat, the carbohydrate, the protein, the salt, well, pretty much everything else is going to be water. And we found our sweet spot to be around 50% water, and that kind of 40 to 42% fat region. This is one however that I’d love to hear your thoughts

And experiences with though. This leaves us with one last ingredient and that is cocoa powder. This plays a role in not only the sort of taste of the dish, the texture of the dish, but ultimately the presentation, the look of the whole thing too. It’s important.

And we went out and sourced a whole bunch of different cocoa powders at different price points, different kind of styles. And we set out to see, well, just how much impact these things have on the flavor. Do they add to the harmony of the dish?

Do they blend in or do they stand out in some way? Straight in, let’s have a little taste. Very pleasant, not distracting. A little bit more bitterness. Not a lot of flavor. Doesn’t really pop. I thought this would be a much more pronounced difference. It’s not. No. Back to the lighter colors.

It’s lacking a bit of conviction. All right, let’s try you. It actually works okay with the coffee. That’s really where you get the synergy of flavors. I’ll be honest, I’m sort of struggling with this tasting because I anticipated a lot more variance here than I can taste. Cadbury’s finest. Doesn’t smell great.

I’m not sure it’s a complimentary product. Whereas this one. Go straight in. Yeah, it’s not my favorite taste. But it made the coffee pop in an interesting way. This I’ve tasted quite a lot of, because I think we’ve used this throughout as a kind of baseline choice,

And I think it’s been actually a really good choice. I don’t how I feel about the packaging on this one. Ooh. Does smell a little bit fishy, and I find that offputting. I mean, best before 2026, so what do I know? But I don’t, there’s something about that one I’m not into. Valrhona.

Once we thought you were fancy. Smells like this but not as fishy It doesn’t smell that bad. It doesn’t smell that interesting though. This one is a much headier, kind of fruitier more complex thing. It’s just not making the coffee pop necessarily. It’s the nicest smelling one. It’s also I think the only traceable one on the table. But in a tiramisu, I almost want

Like a roasted version of it, like a little bit darker. You can obviously roast this if you want to, and you could do that. And then on the end, this very large bag of Barry. I don’t know, it’s not a name I think about when I think of cocoa.

You’ve got a little bit of that fishy smell in you too. I don’t know if I’m sold on this style. I feel like there’s definitely a style in this one, this one and this one that I’m not into that has this similarity of smell. You don’t taste it in the finished dessert.

I should make that clear. Like it’s not unpleasant. And I do wonder if just, you know, I’ve become used to this, but I think this works really nicely, certainly with like a well extracted medium roast, like we’re kind of using here for these. These nice complimentary flavors. I thought it would matter more.

I thought it would have a much bigger impact than it does. Even the ones that I really don’t like that much, the cocoa powder is there texturally, and it’s there as a kind of complimentary flavor, but it’s not a big flavor driver. There’s not enough sort of aromatic intensity

In any of them to really take the lead in this dessert, which is kind of good news, and also feels like a frustrating lack of opportunity to do something more interesting. I might in the future play around with roasting something like this, just to bring a bit more depth to it.

That might be fun. But yeah, an interesting tasting, a frustrating tasting, if I’m honest, to end on. One additional note, I do see recipes out there occasionally calling for the grating of chocolate on a tiramisu. For me, my experience with that, especially with good quality chocolate

Is that it’s a bit of a distraction both texturally and also from a flavor perspective. They’re just kind of too heady, too interesting. They’re a distraction. For me, I would say stick to a good quality cocoa powder that you really like to kind of get that harmony,

That balance, that thing where the tiramisu becomes more than the sum of its parts. That’s what I kind love about this dish. Which brings us to the final test for this video. How far in advance should you be making your tiramisu? We did a simple test.

We had a fixed time and we worked backwards. So we would have a tiramisu made 48 hours in advance, 24 hours in advance, about eight hours in advance, and then two hours in advance. Would one have an advantage? Would flavors meld and improve? Or would the whole thing just get soggy and gross?

One way to find out. So we’ll start with the oldest one. This is 48 hours old, 24 hours old, made this morning, made less than a couple of hours ago. Let’s dive in. Expected a wetter biscuit for some reason. Not the case. Hmm, interesting. It’s almost like that’s a slightly moister biscuit.

Getting pretty fresh. Morning of. I quite like that. At this point, I’m not seeing a benefit in waiting longer than make it that morning. Overall though, that’s very good. Let’s get into here. Also good. The biscuit’s definitely softened down fine. It does feel slightly more, you know, separate in its textures and tastes.

This was great though. These are very good. One more quick taste and a summary. This is my least favorite, followed by this, followed by this. And actually this one is my favorite. I don’t quite know why. I think the real point is the gaps between them, tiny. Making it right before, fine.

Making it a day ahead, fine. Making it two days ahead, probably fine. And certainly we all know that a tiramisu made the day before and half eaten and then enjoyed the rest of the week is a good time. So that brings us to the conclusion and wrap up for today’s video.

And I’ll be honest, it’ll be a little while before I can face another spoonful of tiramisu. But more is in my future ’cause we have to get to the ultimate recipe. That will be the final video in this series. And in that we will cover my recommendations

For every aspect of ingredient, technique and recipe. Before that though, I’d love to hear from you: which aspect of testing was missing from this video? Is there one particular aspect or one thing you’ve learned today that you’ll be applying straight away to your own version of tiramisu?

I’d love to hear from you down in the comments below. But for now I shall say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.