The Well-Tempered Chocolatier

They say that you eat with your eyes first. I’ve heard it before, most often from French chefs wearing tall hats. I really struggled with this in culinary school, because presentation is not my strong suit. Technical chops, sure. You could cut open my mousse cake and the layers would be of equal thickness, the gelee right in the middle, the sponge soaked all the way through.

But my presentation? Oh, it was passable, acceptable, competent. But I wasn’t about to win any awards for innovation or take-your-breath-away beauty. One of my classmates was a former architect, and everything that he presented was a work of edible art. His stuff really was too beautiful to eat.

I was speaking with a chocolatier friend of mine the other day about presentation. Her temperament is not what you expect from a chocolatier. In the spectrum of the culinary world, you have cuisiniers at one end: hot-tempered, chasing the adrenaline of fast-paced service, and working on a sweaty line. Then, you have pastry chefs: working in their own little corner of the kitchen, measuring and weighing ingredients diligently, and making fancy decorations on teeny tiny desserts. And then you have chocolatiers: strange folks with cold hands, who eschew ovens, forever coaxing and taming the beta crystal in cocoa butter.

Back to my friend. She’s lovely, but she – by her own admission – is not very patient. She doesn’t hand-dip her chocolates, because that’s just excruciatingly slow. She makes molded chocolates, which look fussy but which, if executed properly, will give you 24-36 identical chocolates in one fell swoop.

Her chocolates taste lovely. Her flavours are clear and bright, with subtle flavour profiles that develop as the ganache melts. They are not the fanciest looking chocolates. This summer, she went nuts and put a diagonal green stripe down a rectangular chocolate. I think it was a mint chocolate. They’re far from ugly, but they have a certain understated look. They say “hey, I may look simple, but I’m damn tasty inside. Try me.”

It’s like all her energy goes into the flavours, and whatever’s left goes into the presentation. I get that.

Compare that with some chocolatiers who use copious amounts of coloured cocoa butter to jazz up their chocolates. There are swirls and spatters galore. Sometimes – but not always – the insides are as delicious as the outsides promise. Sometimes, there’s too much decoration and all you can taste is the cocoa butter decoration. In a few (sad) cases, the chocolate is all talk and no walk: pretty, but tasteless (or worse, bad tasting).

So there’s the dilemma. In a perfect world, chocolates would look beautiful and taste amazing. In reality, there are few people who are up for that challenge.

Sure, I eat with my eyes first. If it looks like turd, I probably don’t want to eat it. (Except, of course, the cocoa-dusted truffle. It looks remarkably like turd, but I will still eat it.) But when all is said and done, I’m eating something. And if it doesn’t taste good, then what’s the point?

Here’s my take on it: if you’re going to go to the trouble of giving me a beautiful product, it had better taste like I’m expecting it to. Because it’s one thing to underpromise and overdeliver, which is what happens for an under-decorated chocolate. But to overpromise and underdeliver? That, in my books, is inexcusable. It’s the culinary equivalent of promising someone Fluevog and giving them Payless.

I bought a box of chocolates a few months ago that I was really looking forward to. The chocolates all had cute names and flowery descriptions. Too bad they didn’t live up to their marketing campaign. They missed some really fundamental details. The chocolate coating was too thick, distracting from the ganache. The hand-dipped chocolates had been sloppily laid down, so the bottom edges – the “feet,” as they’re called- were jagged and uneven. The chocolate that they used for dipping and for the ganache tasted strange and slightly waxy. The flavours were invisible or muddy, at best. At their worst, they were disgusting. One of them tasted like mothballs. I actually made a note that one tasted “ass-tastic.” It was so bad that I didn’t even finish the box. I took a perfunctory taste of each one, and then gave them to less discerning friends of mine – who also reported that they weren’t as good as they looked.

And you know, the thing with overpromising and underdelivering is that it’s entirely avoidable. If you can’t take an objective point of view and see that your product isn’t nearly as good as your marketing is, then you have a problem. Sure, you’ll fool some people – but you certainly won’t fool everyone.

Mothball-flavoured chocolate? No thank you.