Chocolate salami is one of the most popular no-bake Italian desserts, made with dark chocolate, biscuits, eggs, butter and sugar.
Every Italian family has its own recipe: we have chosen to make chocolate salami with eggs because the traditional recipe requires them but you can make it without, just replacing them with a little milk.
It can be enriched by adding pistachios or hazelnuts to the mixture: toast them for a few minutes in a pan or in the oven to make them even tastier. Rum is optional, it depends on your tastes. If you want to make chocolate salami for children then don’t use it.
Italian chocolate salami owes its name to the resemblance to a real sausage, both for the shape and for the white coating made with icing sugar. Now let’s see how to do it!
See also:
- Tiramisu Authentic Italian Recipe
- Torta Caprese Recipe
- Torta Tenerina – Italian Chocolate Brownie Recipe
- Coffee Mascarpone Cream Served in Chocolate Cookie Cups
- Gelato Affogato Recipe
- Tiramisu Cake Roll
Chocolate Salami Traditional Recipe
- Prep Time: 30 Min
- Cook Time: 0 Min
- Cooling Time: at least 4 H in the fridge
- Yelds:10
Ingredients
- 300 g (10 oz) of biscuits. We recommend digestive biscuits or vanilla tea biscuits
- 150 g (5 oz – about ¾ cup) of unsalted butter at room temperature
- 200 g (7 oz) of dark chocolate 70% cocoa. We recommend 70% Deliciously Rich Dark Chocolate by Divine Chocolate
- 2 pasteurized eggs or 50 ml (about 3 tablespoons) of whole milk if you don’t want to use eggs.
- 100 g (½ cup) of granulated sugar
- 2 tablespoons of Rum (optional)
- icing sugar for decoration
Directions
Like any classic Italian recipe, there are many variants: from those without eggs, to those with the addition of dried fruit and cereals. What we are going to show you today is the Traditional Italian Recipe of Chocolate Salami, made with eggs. If you are not fond of raw eggs (pasteurized!), replace them with 50 ml of milk, as described in the ingredients list.
This is the best chocolate salami recipe for taste, texture and ease of execution. You make it just in 30 minutes. Time to mix all the ingredients with the crushed biscuits, give the shape and it’s ready. Obviously you have to place it in the fridge for a few hours to cool down and firm up. Finally, roll it in icing sugar to make it look like a real Italian salami before serving.
Now let’s see together the step by step recipe for Chocolate Salami!
Step 1) – Crumble the biscuits coarsely. Use your hands to do this or place biscuits in a food bag and crush them using a rolling pin. Don’t use the blender, because the pieces of the biscuits must be quite large. Then melt the dark chocolate in a double boiler. When ready set aside.
Step 2) – While the chocolate melts, make a cream with the soft butter: work it with a wooden spoon till it’s creamy enough. Then add the sugar
Step 3) – and the eggs (or the milk if you prefer). Mix well until you get a smooth homogeneous cream.
Step 4) – Now add the chocolate. In this step you can add the Rum, but really, it’s optional; chocolate salami is great even without it. Mix until the mixture becomes perfectly homogeneous.
Step 5) – Add the chocolate cream to the crushed biscuits and mix.
Step 6) – Place the mixture on a baking sheet and, using your hands, shape it into a log. Once you have given the right shape, roll it in the baking paper and close to form a large cylindrical candy.
Step 7) – Now roll it up in a sheet of aluminum. Place Chocolate Salami to cool in the fridge for at least 4 hours until firm. Once hardened, pull it out of the refrigerator, remove the aluminum and the baking paper and dust with icing sugar from all sides. Then remove any excess sugar with your hands. Serve Chocolate Salami cut into slices, just like a real salami.
Storage
Chocolate salami can be stored in the fridge for 5-6 days, closed in an airtight container to prevent it from drying out.
You can freeze it whole or sliced and use it within 1 month from the preparation. We suggest to defrost it in the fridge.
How to Serve Chocolate Salami
Serve Italian Chocolate Salami cold, as soon as it is taken out of the refrigerator. If it heats up it loses its consistency and flavor.
Cover it with icing sugar. Remove the excess icing sugar with your hands. Then tie it with twine like a real salami. Serve it on a wooden cutting board: at first glance not everyone will realize that it’s actually a dessert!
Serve Choccolate Salami cut into slices. You can accompany it with Zabaione cream or pastry cream.
Chocolate Salami Cookies
The most important ingredient of this sweet salami are the cookies. You must strictly use simple biscuits, such as digestive or tea biscuits, to which you add the butter and other ingredients. Too buttery biscuits make the salami excessively heavy and fatty. While tea biscuits maintain the right balance between the various ingredients.
As for the consistency, chocolate salami must be soft where there is the chocolate and hard where there are the biscuits. For this reason, the biscuits should never be blended but should be roughly crushed with your hands.
If you crush them in a blender, the result is a chocolate paste with a faint hint of cookies. While if you crumble them with your hands, consistency and flavor will be perfect.
Chocolate Salami Origin and Variants
Chocolate Salami is a dessert known and prepared throughout Italy, perfect for any occasion.
In some areas of Italy they add unsweetened cocoa powder to melted dark chocolate. There are even versions that use white chocolate, enriching it with dried fruit and candied fruit.
In Emilia Romagna there is no Easter Dinner that ends without a slice of this simple greedy dessert. It’s also a smart way to reuse some of the Easter Eggs chocolate.
In Piedmont they make it as similar as possible to a sausage. Piedmontese pastry chefs, in fact, wrap it in an elastic net and add Piedmont Hazelnuts and Gianduja Chocolate, making it a high quality dessert. In Piedmont it’s also known by the name of “Salame del Papa”.
In Sicily it’s called “Salame Turco” (Turkish Salami). The name “Turkish” does not refer to the origin of the dessert, but to the color that recalls that of the skin of the Moors. They usually add Almonds of Avola or Pistachios of Bronte to the biscuits (replacing the Piedmontese Hazelnuts) and replace Rum with Marsala.
