Use better chocolate.
A year ago, after our last day of class at Valrhona, several fellow chocolatiers and I crossed the ancient stone bridge over the Rhone River that seperates Tain L’Hermitage from the town of Tournon. We selected a comfortable-looking restaurant and enjoyed fine French food with soft Rhone wine from the trellis-covered hills beside the town. Dessert was a perfect scoop of homemade Poire William ice cream, a simple cookie, and a filigree decoration of tempered chocolate. Not just any chocolate, but Valrhona Araguani, a 72% blend of Venezuelan cacaos with notes of pear and a bright clean finish, a perfect play off the Poire William ice cream. The French notice these things.
It’s as it a chef were to choose a grocery store tomato over an heirloom variety because the flavor is easier to work with.
I seldom order chocolate desserts in the States anymore. No matter how fine the pastry chef, how perfect the execution, the chocolate nearly always tastes dull and uninteresting. Pastry chefs, it seems, have declared that chocolate to be chocolate and any chocolate will do. In conversation, a pastry student acquantance recently declared that her instructor, a famous pastry chef taught “C—- chocolate is the finest chocolate for pastry” and he would certainly know more about it than a lowly chocolatier such as I. It’s as if, to borrow an analogy from my friend chocolate-maker Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate, “a chef were to choose a grocery store tomato over an heirloom variety because the flavor is easier to work with.”
There’s magnificent chocolate in the world. From single-origin chocolates like Alan’s bold plummy Sambirano Valley Madagascar or Art Pollard’s haunting Jembrana from Bali (Amano Chocolate) to the delicate blends and origins of Valrhona or Francois Pralus. Chocolates that can make a dessert sparkle and shine. You chefs who take care with each ingredient and who would never use a hothouse tomato when there’s an heirloom to be found, please use good chocolate.