The Well-Tempered Chocolatier

Entries categorized as ‘Product reviews’

Tea time

July 2, 2009 · 2 Comments

Tea-flavoured confections are tricky things. Too much tea is overpowering and unnecessary. Too little tea, or tea-flavoured confections that aren’t eaten immediately, taste like no tea at all. It’s a conundrum, and one that a lot of chocolatiers deal with by not doing tea-flavoured confections at all.

Somehow, Michael Recchuiti figured it out. Given that my box of chocolates weren’t hand-packed at his shop, I’m going to guess that they were at least 2-4 weeks old. Yet, somehow, his two tea-flavoured chocolates were lovely.

The spring jasmine tea features jasmine blossoms and green tea leaves paired with extra-bitter chocolate. The sheer size of the confection was surprising: at 3 cm squared (that’s almost 1 1/4 inches for you American folks), it’s one of the biggest artisan confections I’ve seen yet. I’ll be picky and say that the top shell was a bit thicker than I’d like, but it wasn’t overly distracting.

The inside more than made up for the overly thick shell. It smelled like what I imagine jasmine flowers to smell like on a summer evening’s walk. And the flavour profile was lovely, well-paced and deliberate. First, there were light floral notes that mellowed to aromatic, sweet jasmine. Next, you got the bitterness of the tea, and the cocoa of the chocolate on finish. The floral notes lingered for a while like a reminder of the beginning of the flavour profile.

The pearl mint tea was a more normal size, approximately 2 cm (3/4 inches) square. The shell on this one was perfect, although there was a bubble in the ganache.

The aroma on this one is pure, fresh mint. There are two kinds of mint – spearmint and peppermint – and they show up at different points in the tasting. First, there’s a low, muted taste of spearmint, followed by the earthiness and bitterness of green tea. This mellows to show off the bitterness of the chocolate, tempered with a pop of peppermint that builds in intensity.

Recently, I tried a similar flavour combination where the balance of flavours was off. The green tea was musty, making the chocolate taste like mothballs. The mint was muddy-tasting and dull, and the entire combination was really unpleasant.

Thankfully, Recchuiti knows what he’s doing.

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The real San Francisco treat

June 30, 2009 · Leave a Comment

When a friend of mine mentioned that she would be going to San Francisco for a few days, an alarm went off in my head. I immediately asked if she would bring me back a chocolatey care package, rattling off a list of chocolatiers and bean-to-bar producers.

Well, she did not disappoint. She brought me, among other things, a box of Michael Recchuiti confections. Specifically, she brought me a green box, with an intoxicating assortment of gorgeous chocolates: star anise and pink peppercorn, lemon verbena, and tarragon grapefruit, among others. And, of course, Recchuiti’s signature burnt caramel.

Egads, I love my friends.

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Caramel is magical, and science is delicious

June 26, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’m a big nerd. I may not wear a lab coat anymore, but I’m still conducting experiments all the time. Case in point: when I visited a friend in Boulder, Colorado, I knew that it was one mile above sea level. The first thing that popped into my head was “high-altitude baking experiments,” the results of which I still have to document.

When it comes to food, I’m always thinking about the science behind it.

Take caramel, for instance. It seems simple, right? Put sugar (white, crystalline) into a pan and heat it up to 165 degrees Celsius. The resulting caramel (brown, liquid) looks, tastes and smells nothing like sugar. How did it do that? What were the molecular changes? At what temperature? It gets me every time. I think it’s magical and fantastical.

And then there’s Christopher Elbow‘s vanilla bean caramel. It’s lovely, honest flavour. In fact, this chocolate was missing from my chocolate menu and I had to guess what was in it. Sometimes, this is fun; often, it’s a crapshoot as flavours are muddy or, ahem, overly subtle. Well, this was clearly vanilla bean caramel. The caramel was rich and buttery, and just sweet enough. The fragrant vanilla floated on top of the caramel – and who doesn’t love seeing vanilla bean seeds in their food?

But let’s get to the cool science. The mouthfeel was amazing. It was perfectly smooth, but not oozy. As I do with my chocolate tastings, I cut this one in half to get a cross-section view. The caramel looks solid in the shell: it flows a little bit, but it stays in the shell. But then you pop it in your mouh, and your tongue is, quite literally, bathed in liquid caramel. It’s partly to do with the heat of your mouth, but there’s also the molecular structure of the caramel. The study of things that are sometimes liquid, and sometimes solid, is called rheology. I think it’s pretty freaking cool.

But even if you don’t, appreciate this: it makes for lovely caramels.

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Christopher Elbow: the classics

June 25, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Sometimes, I have so many things running around my head that I’m not sure which one to tease out first. In context of this here blog, I have so many notes on delicious, chocolatey things that sometimes it’s hard for me to know which one to talk about first.

In Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter says, “Oh dear. Well start at the beginning and when you get to the end…stop.”

(It also happens to be an email signature of a good friend of mine, so it’s not like I’m always thinking about the Mad Hatter. But hey, I do have high hopes for this movie.)

So, I will begin at the beginning, with Christopher Elbow‘s classic flavours.

Exhibit A: champagne. It’s a milk chocolate-based ganache, which is a good choice – dark chocolate probably would have overpowered the delicate champagne flavour. In fact, “delicate” is an excellent word to describe this confection. There’s a very subtle champagne aroma to the ganache, and it’s like it was constructed by fairies with tiny hands. It’s tastes of delicate, fragrant champagne, and the effect is incredibly elegant. You taste a bit of alcohol, but this is far from boozy. There’s a lovely acidic finish, and – believe it or not – a bubbly sensation just before the flavour dissipates. It’s like champagne, transmogrified into chocolate form.

Exhibit B: raspberry. The description, “raspberry pate de fruit topped with dark chocolate raspberry ganache,” is pretty straightforward. There’s no flowery language, no cutesy name, no marketing buzzwords. And once I tasted it, I understood why.

This chocolate doesn’t need a description. It’s full-frontal raspberry, but in an incredibly refined, elegant way. It’s fruity, bright, clean, and positively juicy. Other chocolatiers make a similar product, but the pate de fruit can be a bit too stiff or gelatinous. Elbow’s pate de fruit is, well, almost al dente. It has a bit of give and texture, but it’s delicate enough to meld seamlessly with the ganache. The ganache itself has a pop of fresh raspberry.

And the most impressive thing with all these chocolates? The finish. These chocolates take you through a very deliberate, well-executed flavour profile…and then they’re gone. The crispness of the finish is really quite remarkable. If you’ve ever been to the symphony (and I hope you have – go once, just for the experience) and have seen the artistry in making all the instruments go quiet at the exact. same. time., then you begin to understand just how deliberate these chocolates are.

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Scarecrows and chocolate

June 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment

When I think of hotbeds of chocolate goodness, a few cities come to mind: Paris, New York, San Francisco. Vancouver’s nice and all, and there are some interesting chocolate makers here, but I don’t think we have quite the reputation as other cities.

But how about Kansas City? Erm. I hear there are wizards and scarecrows there. Or maybe that’s just Kansas in general.

Kansas City is also home to Christopher Elbow, who makes exquisite chocolates. The flavours are clear and pronounced, but still elegant and refined. The textures and technique are impeccable. And, let’s be honest, they’re freaking beautiful. His wife is a graphic designer, and has designed stunning cocoa butter transfers for the chocolates.

The chocolates are a mixture of classic flavours (single-origin chocolate, champagne, caramel), new-fangled exotic flavours (yuzu, Russian tea) and modern twists (strawberry balsamic caramel, rosemary caramel). And while I went through them all with a very critical eye, I don’t have a single bad thing to say. Except, maybe, that I didn’t get to try every single flavour, and that is almost tragic.

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