1,608 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 77 videos

The dissociation of a preparation

It may have already happened to you: You prepare a sauce, a cream, a ganache etc. and then suddenly or almost, the whole thing dissociates, and from a smooth mixture that you were preparing with love, you end up with a horrible thing with a more or less solid part and another liquid part.

It's the dissociation, or as the french pastry chefs and cooks say, "it's tranché!".

15 K 4.9/5 (13 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Cream Sauce Problem Dissociation Solid Liquid

Last modified on: January 22^th 2022

For this post Comments Lasts posts Follow

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

For example, here is a chocolate-hazelnut ganache that is tranché:

ganache qui a tranché

It doesn't show up very well in the (small) photo, but there's a thick chocolate-hazelnut pan base, and on top a layer of liquid fat.

What happened?

In the vast majority of cases, it's because in your mixture there is a fatty part and a watery part, the whole thing comes together in a delicate balance.
If this balance is broken because there is too much of one or the other, or a thermal shock, the whole which was homogeneous dissociates, it cuts!

This imbalance is often caused by the heating, perhaps excessive, of the preparation, and during this heating the water can evaporate and reduce, the fat not.
This is what happened with the ganache above, I didn't remove the simmering cream from the heat soon enough before adding the chocolate and hazelnut powder, sad result.
Another example, a bearnaise sauce or a hollandaise sauce that slices when it was almost finished, it's certainly because there was too much butter added and not enough water in the vinegar-wine-herb or lemon reduction.

And besides, it doesn't prevent this tragedy, there is little or no warning of disaster for an amateur, it is quite brutal.

What to do if it does?

1) Don't panic, don't despair, because it's very easy in this situation, so great is the disappointment, to swear a good big blow, to say to oneself that it's ruined, and to throw everything away...
2) Keep a critical eye: OK it's tranché, but what if it lacks water? Let's try to compensate it, and for that :

- Remove immediately from the heat or the water bath
- Add, very cold, a little bit of water (Béarnaise) or one of the components that brings it (cream for the ganache).
- Take the mixture back slowly, with a whisk, a spatula or a maryse to incorporate this addition (cross your fingers too, put all the chances on your side ;-).

sauce béarnaise

3) If it still doesn't work, use the super power of cornstarch:

- Incorporate a mixture made of a tablespoon of water and a teaspoon of cornstarch in the preparation that you will put back on the fire and will whip until return of the initial texture.

eau + maïzena

You will have understood, there is no fatality in these small culinary dramas, it is just a bit of physics in your pan, it is necessary to try to be attentive enough during your preparation, to prevent rather than to cure.

To sum up: A preparation that goes off is most of the time an imbalance of water/fat, an imbalance that you can try to reduce or eliminate to regain the initial smoothness.

Lasts posts

Season to the right level

When you need to salt something—for example, fish fillets before cooking them—you’ll naturally sprinkle them with a pinch of salt using your fingers. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this very ordinary gesture, which is done all the time in the kitchen, and yet there’s a...
October 14^th 2026973

How to Properly Fill a Jar

When you have a jar in your kitchen that’s almost empty—flour or almond flour, for example—you’ll probably refill it before it’s completely empty. And that’s a great way to go about it—no one wants to run out of an ingredient right in the middle of a recipe. Once you’ve...
October 2^nd 20269055

Serving Temperature for Wine

When it comes to serving wine, you may (like me) have a fairly simple rule of thumb: red wine at room temperature, and white, rosé, and yellow wines in the fridge until it’s time to serve them. It’s very easy to remember, but it’s a bit simplistic, and you’ll see that there’s a much...
September 23^th 20261,0105

Hot Emulsified Sauces

In French cuisine, sauces are a very important part of a recipe—not just a side dish. In fact, they’re so important that, especially since the time of Auguste Escoffier, they’ve been classified into categories. And among these categories are “hot emulsified sauces,” or lukewarm ones. ...
September 9^th 20261,4125

Hot Dishes and Cold Dishes

When plating or serving a dish—whether hot or cold—on a plate, it’s very important to make sure they’re both the right temperature; in other words: if the dish is hot, the plate should be hot, and conversely, if the dish is cold, the plate should be cold. Is this really important? Let’s...
September 2^nd 20261,1543

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other articles you might also like

What happens to the bread when you make it?

This bread that we eat every day, and that our baker makes for us, what happens during its manufacture so that it becomes bread? I will try to answer this question, and to summarize the complex alchemy that takes place.
May 28^th 202117 K4.9

Parsley stems

Parsley, whether curly or flat, is a delicious ingredient in many recipes, where it is used both raw and cooked. When used raw, in a salad for example, where it always provides, alone or with other herbs, a remarkable freshness, only the leaves are kept. And when used cooked?
July 28^th 202512 K 13

Candied fruits: don't get ripped off

Do you like candied fruit? You might like to nibble a handful or add it to a recipe, like a classic fruit cake or delicious Italian specialities like panettone or sicilian epiphany pie.
June 21^th 201772 K 24.2

The right weight of pastry for a pie

Let's try to solve a thorny problem: How much dough will I need when I make my next pie? You're planning to make a pie, you're going to use your favourite mould or circle, but how much pastry will you need to fill it completely with a well spread pastry, without being too thin, or on the contrary...
March 20^th 202070 K4.3

The so-called "nervous" meats

You've probably heard this before, we're talking about "nervous" meat, or meat with nerves, to describe what is indicated by the blue arrow on the left. This is a piece of beef, and what we call a nerve is not a nerve, it is in fact collagen (chemists sometimes call it a "collagen sink"), a...
April 16^th 202142 K4.4