Edible Artists Network Magazine Fall 2015 | Page 16

My hands aren’t made for keyboards, pens and phones. I wanted to pick
up knives, whisks, spatulas, have warm chocolate run down my fingers
and decorate showpieces. I longed to talk the kitchen lingo with my
fellow chefs, not listen to some boring corporate ideas and discuss sale
forecasts and charts with curves running up and down through them.
Clean shaven every day, gray suits, white shirts. Ties, which to this day, I
don’t even know how to form the knot. I needed to be on my legs, roam
freely, hear the words “behind you chef” not “did you get the memo?”
So I bolted out of there.
It wasn’t until many years later that I finally had the chance to set foot
onto a cocoa bean plantation. In the meantime, I immigrated to the
United States, spent four years living in Venice Beach California and then
moved over to the east coast to Boston.

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Working for famous chefs, high end establishments and then opening
my own company, I quickly learned that the American chocolate market
was hugely different from Europe. Back home, I was used to only one
product when it came to chocolate. CHOCOLATE! REAL CHOCOLATE!!!
Now, after telling the sales rep I needed chocolate, he would look at
me confused and ask, “Couverture, melting chocolate, candy melts,
pat a glace, coating chocolate, chocolate chips, chocolate discs,
baking chocolate or cocoa block?” I would look back at him even more
confused and reply, “Ahhhhh chocolate, just regular, normal chocolate.”
I learned very quickly that over here in the States there was a wide
variety and many different products to choose from. I guess it’s just like
everything else whether it’s chocolate, cars or people for that matter.
There is crap, medium and great quality. The only product I ever worked
with was real chocolate that needed to be tempered, carefully handled,
very high-quality, smooth and deliciously tasteful. Now that I’d been
given coating chocolate, all I had to do was melt it and use it. Of course,
it was all about lower cost, less time consuming and as an end result,
the quality suffered. You can clearly determine the difference by tasting
these chocolates. Just let it melt in your mouth until it’s completely
dissolved. A lower quality chocolate will leave a greasy feeling in your
mouth, akin to eating a spoonful of shortening. The reason for that is
melting chocolates are chemically altered so they don’t need to be
tempered. The real cocoa butter is extracted and replaced with a lower
grade fat substance or oils, and in really bad quality products they
will go as far as adding paraffin wax. But, there is also superb quality
chocolate available to us, mostly imported from France, Switzerland
and Belgium. Over the last decade or so, chocolate production in the
US has been revolutionized. It’s a bit similar to all the microbreweries
that have been popping up over the years, some of which are of the
highest standard, quality and taste. The same goes for chocolate.
There are a lot of individual chocolate companies that have surfaced.
Some of these turn into chocolate manufacturers and are producing an
amazing product. Most of them are found in the shape of a bar, with
elegantly designed labels on shelves in high end retail stores. And
some of them are made available to us for commercial use. Some of the
small manufacturers pride themselves in their quality and high cocoa
percentage chocolates. You will see the cocoa content percentage right
on the label, marked in big letters. The higher the percentage, the more
bittersweet in taste. There is all-organic chocolate and flavored bars, as
well. Sea salt and caramel, hot chili, which dates way back to the Mayans
that originally discovered and started to experiment with cocoa. There
are even different flavor infused chocolates, some adding cocoa nips for
crunchiness or roasted nuts and dried fruits.