Chocolate salami is one of the most popular no-bake Italian desserts, made with dark chocolate, cookies, 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 substitute eggs with a little milk (read how to make chocolate salami without eggs).
It can be enriched with pistachios or hazelnuts: 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!
Ingredients
- Prep Time: 30 Min
- Cook Time: 0 Min
- Cooling Time: at least 4 hours in the fridge
- Servings: 10
- 300 g (10 oz) of plain cookies. We recommend digestive biscuits or vanilla tea biscuits
- 150 g (1 ⅓ stick) 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
- 100 g (½ cup) of granulated sugar
- 2 tablespoons of Rum (optional)
- powdered sugar for decoration
Instructions
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.
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 cookies, 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!
Classic Chocolate Salami Recipe
Step 1) - Crumble the cookies coarsely. Use your hands to do this or place the cookies in a food bag and crush them using a rolling pin.
DON'T use the blender, because the pieces 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. 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 cookies 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.
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- Salame del Re (Italian King’s Salami Dessert)
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
Serve 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 Zabaglione or pastry cream.
Tips
What Type of Cookies are Best to Make Chocolate Salami
The most important ingredient of this sweet salami are the cookies. You must strictly use plain cookies, such as digestive or tea biscuits, to which you add the butter and other ingredients. Too buttery cookies 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 cookies. For this reason, the cookies 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.
Variations
Chocolate Salami is a dessert known and prepared throughout Italy, perfect for any occasion.
- COCOA POWDER: You can add unsweetened cocoa powder to the melted dark chocolate.
- DRIED FRUIT: 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.
- SALAME DEL PAPA: 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".
- SALAME TURCO: 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 cookies (replacing the Piedmontese Hazelnuts) and replace Rum with Marsala.
Recipe Card
Classic Italian Chocolate Salami Recipe
Ingredients
- 300 g cookies - 10 oz of plain cookies. We recommend digestive biscuits or vanilla tea biscuits
- 150 g butter - 1 ⅓ stick of unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 200 g chocolate - 7 oz of dark chocolate, 70% cocoa
- 2 eggs - pasteurized
- 100 g granulated sugar - ½ cup
- 2 tablespoons Rum - optional
- powdered sugar - for decoration
Instructions
- Crumble the cookies coarsely. Use your hands to do this or place the cookies in a food bag and crush them using a rolling pin. DON'T use the blender, because the pieces must be quite large.
- Then melt the dark chocolate in a double boiler. When ready set aside.
- 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 and the eggs. Mix well until you get a smooth homogeneous cream.
- 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.
- Add the chocolate cream to the crushed cookies and mix.
- 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.
- 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.
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