Past Newsletters
Vol 2 No 1

In Pursuit of Chocolate

Wide Range of Cacao Expressions

Start 2001 with this delectable tasting adventure designed to assist you in developing and/or validating your chocolate palate. Three of the world’s most renowned chocolatiers created these bars, and one of the greatest distinctions is the amount of cocoa in each bar. (Any bar over 50% cocoa may be used for cooking as well as tasting.) To compare the flavors and aromas, always begin with the chocolate that has the lowest cocoa content, and listen to the flavors to experience how the cocoa percent changes the chocolate expressions.

Michel Cluizel - 33% Cocoa Milk Most American commercial chocolate is milk chocolate, and by adding milk and lowering the cacao content, it’s less costly to produce. Many aficionados like higher cocoa chocolate without milk, but if you want to taste a near perfect example of a milk chocolate, Michel Cluizel is an outstanding choice. This bar is creamy and rich, and you can still taste complex chocolate flavor lurking behind the curtain of sweet, soft milk. Like all good chocolate, the fine flavor lingers long after the piece has melted in your mouth.

Valrhona - 40% CocoaThis is milk chocolate that is silky and lingering… only slightly sweet and very long in the mouth. The smooth taste is the result of a skillfully balanced combination of carefully chosen South American and African cacao beans. Its flavor, embellished by caramel and vanilla tones, will enchant the palate of any gourmet.

Valrhona - 56% Cocoa A wonderful all purpose chocolate… its sweetness harmonizes well with other flavors, making it our choice for melting and dipping. Its flavor is pleasant, but not overly assertive, so that it melds easily with other flavors in recipes. We use it whenever a warm, quiet chocolate note is called for in a ganache. This bar is also one of the better handling Valrhonas, excellent for molding and decorative work. Of course, if nibbling is your game, it's great for that, too.

El Rey Bucare Dark - 58 ½% Cocoa This bar is characteristic of El Rey's general approach to making chocolate… to create interesting, bold and full-bodied chocolates as an alternative to the many bland and over conched (check our website for description) products flooding on the market. The Bucare Dark has a long, lingering mouthfeel with great character and texture. Moderately acidic, with pleasant overtones of dried fruit, it strikes a nice balance between the dark delights of the 70% cocoa bar and the soft sweetness of a milk chocolate.

Michel Cluizel - 60% Cocoa An interesting comparison to El Rey's Bucare Dark… where El Rey uses only the Corillo bean, creating a single, pronounced note of flavor, Michel Cluizel blends severalbeans, and the flavor notes are intertwined and subdued. I like to think of them as the difference between a jazz band and a symphony. El Rey's bar is jazzy, funky, iconoclastic, and singular, with flavor notes that are like a soloist's jam. Cluizel conducts a symphony, where no instrument kicks out more sound than another. If you listen intently, you'll taste milk and pepper, and maybe a little citrus, coffee and leather.

El Rey Gran Saman - Dark 70%Bold, earthy, complex chocolate with the most pronounced bitterness and refreshing acidity in the entire range of El Rey chocolate. Dark chocolate fans will be delighted by each nibble!

El Rey uses only one type of chocolate bean that is grown in one location to make this chocolate. It's like tasting a single varietal wine, one made with just one type of grape like, Cabernet Sauvignon. Most chocolate is a blend of several types of beans and roasting techniques, grown in many locations.

This gives you a rare opportunity to taste chocolate in an almost primal state… a single bean giving you what it offers, not a blend managed by the chocolatier. This one's flavor is subdued, quiet, until the end when strong aromas of carob rush up your nose like smoke. The Gran Saman 70% usually inspires strong emotions. People fall in love with it, or they will often acquire a taste for it, along their Chocolate Tasting Adventure.

It all started with Monsieur Guironnet, a pastry chef living in the Rhône valley in 1922, when he opened the Chocolaterie du Vivarais… the company that would become VALRHONA in the early 1950s.

Use The Best To Make The Best

From the very beginning, Monsieur Guironnet sought after cacao beans that stood out from the usual fair. Once a small family company, VALRHONA employs 250 people and annually produces 3,500 tons of chocolate! What stays the same is Monsieur Guironnet’s mission to use the best to make the best. Valrhona sets the standards for much of the world.

It is in the south of Normandy where Michel, his two sons and two daughters, who have all inherited the great French chocolate tradition, create their innovative masterpieces.

Independent and Creative

In 1948, Michel Cluizel joined his father and became a chocolate maker. Today, Cluizel’s family business is one of the last independent companies to manufacture chocolate from the very beginning of the process. Fifty years of professional experience has created a master’s touch applied to all stages of production.

Michel Cluizel is the only chocolatier in France that still makes his own couverture (blocks of chocolate ready to be melted and formed into confections). The other French chocolatiers purchase their couverture from corporate giants… concerned with finance, not flavor.

The last of his kind… working with varietal beans from his own farms in nearly every producing country: Sumatra, Venezuela, Ghana, Java, and the Ivory Coast among others, Cluizel and his progeny are producing some of the most interesting chocolates in the world.

To meet the increasing demand for more full-flavored chocolates, Cluizel offers superb quality dark and milk chocolate with new and unique flavors. Indeed, he is the only chocolatier in the world who offers dark chocolates with 85% and 99% cacao content, and two milk chocolates containing 50%! And they are devine!

Most chocolatiers (unlike Michel Cluizel) use a base chocolate from someone else to create their truffles, bars, and other confections. Presitgious hotels, fine restaurants, renowned pastry chefs, and Grand Chefs all over the world practice their art using VALRHONA chocolate.

To quote Chef Francois Payard, co-owner of Payard Patisserie and Bistro in NY City, co-author of Simply Sensational Desserts, and winner of the International Association of Culinary Professionals' 2000 cookbook award… "For me, I like Valrhona. The taste is the best on the market, but it's very expensive."

Valrhona is based in Tain-l'Hermitage, a small town in the Rhone Valley. The company is considered one of the world's leading producers of fine couverture chocolate, which it sells to smaller manufacturers and to consumers. Valrhona is also known for its fine line of chocolate bars, hot chocolate drink, and baking cocoa.

El Rey Holds Court in Venezuala

Here in the fertile valley of Barlovento, about an hour east of Venezuela's capital, some of the world's finest cacao grows in century-old plantations.

On small plantations, in secluded coastal valleys at the foothills of the Andes, generations of Venezuelan farmers have developed the art of nurturing the finest varieties of Criollo and Trinitario cacao trees. They are not easy to grow! (See our website for more details.)

For centuries most chocolate connoisseurs have agreed that Venezuelan cacao is the most flavorful and aromatic in the world. Venezuelan beans have long been appreciated for their lack of bitterness and astringency, and their pure, lingering chocolate taste.

El Rey is the first company to stick close source. All of their chocolate made exclusively with an heirloom variety Criollo, or a combination Criollo and Trinitario cacao beans. Unlike other companies, they have no need transport store them, since these superior beans are grown in back yard! fermented, sun dried, processed using state-of-the-art technology. result… same kind complex character fine, lingering finish you'd expect from varietal wines estate-bottled olive oils.

That they use the finest beans is a given, but they are also taking chocolate making to new horizons as well. All of their choice chocolate contains a high percentage of cacao butter … at least 32 percent and often as high as 39 percent. The extra cacao butter enables a thinner chocolate coating shell to be created providing extraordinary delicacy and control for a Grand Chef’s artistry. And when melted, El Rey Chocolate is beautifully fluid with a workable viscosity.

Each cacao bean is comprised of about 55% cacao butter which carries with it full flavor and aroma. The aroma of El Rey Chocolate and the rich flavor stems from using cacao butter that has not been chemically not "deodorized."

The Gran Saman Dark 70% and Bucan Dark 58.5% are part of El Rey’s Carenero Superior line of chocolates. They are manufactured with the famed Carenero, a type of cacao that only grows east of Caracas , and is renowned for its complex flavor notes of fruit, flower, nut, and spice… and intense chocolate taste.

Caramelized Bananas & Chocolate Bread Pudding

2 cups milk
4 ounces sugar
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cloves
2 eggs
4-6 cups of bread or cake crumbs
6 ounces Gran Saman 70%
2 bananas, caramelized

To Caramelize Banana Slices: Sprinkle with vanilla sugar and splash with rum. Cook 3 oz sugar "dry" in a saucepan to light caramel and add banana slices. Cook for 60 seconds, add 1 T butter and remove from heat.

Bring milk, sugar, salt and cloves to a boil and pour over eggs, whisking constantly. Add chopped chocolate to this mixture and stir until chocolate is completely melted. Add enough bread and cake crumbs to make a thick paste, much like lumpy oatmeal.

Spread half of this pudding mixture into a buttered pan, add the caramelized banana slices, then cover with the rest of the pudding mixture. Bake at 350 degrees in a water bath for 40 minutes.

Tasting is an Art

We bring you chocolates that have appeared on the most prestigious tables around the world for many generations. And we invite you to take your time in tasting them. Of course you can order more… repeated exposures would increase your appreciation and help to educate your palate! And if you’re like me, you’ll require ongoing opportunities to keep your palate fit!

Finer Chocolate is fragile and delicate… and it is always fresh. Tasting chocolate involves all the senses, just a great wine. Notice the difference in how it looks. Exceptional chocolate is perfectly uniform, shiny, dense, and smooth. A Grand Chocolat may be dark mahogany, but never black. A milk chocolate is a warm chestnut, with more brown if it is especially rich in cocoa.

You will be excited by the aroma immediately. When you break it, it will break cleanly, and the aromas will intensify. Take a bite and it will crack and break with a distinct sound. You will notice that it’s texture is fine and creamy without being greasy... that it gently melts in your mouth.

Appreciate its bouquet and notice how long it lasts. Eventually you will learn to distinguish between the subtle but rich notes from the South American Criollo cacao beans and the more full-bodied tones added by the Caribbean Trinitario beans, as they linger deliciously on your palate.

While blending varieties of beans is a time honored tradition, exploring the use of a single type of cacao, as El Rey chooses to do, is a new frontier in chocolate making. The art of tasting chocolate is evolving… and you are there!

Choose Chocolate Wisely

Better Cacao Beans The best chocolates start with Criollo or Trinatario cacao beans. Criollo beans are hard to grow and low yielding, but they produce far more complexly flavored cacao... the world’s best. What you don’t want are Forastero beans, which make up nearly 80+% of global cacao production!

Higher Cacao Ratio As cacao content in chocolate goes up, the percentage of sugar usually goes down. Gourmet chocolates will always list their cacao percentage. I have no doubt you will notice the many differences in the richer flavors expressed in these confections!

Expert Roasting and Melding Flavors Although there are basic characteristics that we associate with a particular variety of beans, the location where they are grown, and the way they have been cared for and processed, no two harvests or roasts are the same. To arrive at a pleasing sensational experience, one must have years of experience and the values we all associate with being the best.

Lower Sugar Excessive sugar has the same impact as too much salt … it hides the flavors of key ingredients. Manufacturers using small amounts of low quality cacao rely on sugar, not chocolate, in attempting to offer a pleasing, if not very flavorful, sensation.

Real VanillaThe alternative is artificial vanillin, which is a byproduct of the wood pulp industry. Guess which one tastes better?

Chocolate Chunk Cookies

2 eggs
½ cup butter
½ cup shortening
1 cup each of sugar, brown sugar and pecans
½ teaspoon water
2 cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon each of baking soda, salt, vanilla
12 ounces of Bucare Dark 58.5%
1 cup of oatmeal (optional)

Cream eggs, sugars, butter and shortening. Add water and vanilla. Add flour, soda and salt, and mix. Chop Bucare Dark 58.5% into chunks. Stir in pecans, oatmeal and chocolate. Bake 8 to 10 minutes at 375 degrees.

Be There Next Year!

The NY Annual Chocolate Show has it all! See and taste the creations of world renowned Chocolatiers from all over Europe and South America, discover what REAL chocolate is all about, and be amazed by chocolate sculptures of NYC landmarks, and even chocolate dresses designed by the likes of Nicole Miller and Cerruti. The show is produced by Paris, France-based Event International Inc. Last years’ show was November 17, 2000, so start planning for this year’s extravaganza!