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June 14, 2005
Pierre Marcolini — 'World's Best Chocolatier'
He's pretty confident, wouldn't you say?
I know of a few or ten chocolatiers who might beg to differ with Mr. Pierre Marcolini's self–assessment but let's not be petty.
Rather, let us look into the basis for this rather extravagant — to say the very least — claim.
In an article on fine chocolate by David Baker that appeared in last Saturday's Financial Times, Marcolini was quoted as called himself "the Hermès of chocolate."
This guy (Marcolini) is pretty full of himself, what?
Read the story and decide for yourself.
- Learning To Talk Chocolate
We start with a taste of Ecuador.
The little square of chocolate in Deborah O'Neill's hand looks expensive.
The colour is deep and warm.
The surface throws back the light in a sophisticated, confident way, suggesting layers of interest.
The edges are smooth and clean.
This, I can tell already, is quality.
I make to pop it in my mouth but O'Neill puts her hand up to stop me.
"Wait," she says.
"First, look. Then, smell. Then, bite."
Welcome to the world of the chocolate connoisseur.
O'Neill is the UK partner of Pierre Marcolini, a Belgian chocolatier who likes to call himself the Hermès of chocolate.
From a small cafe/shop just off London's Kensington Church Street, she is starting a small crusade to lure Britons away from their Wispa bars and Walnut Whips and on to the likes of the single-estate Ecuadorian chocolate we are trying here.
The UK, she says, is the biggest consumer of chocolate in the world - we eat 12kg of the stuff per person every year, compared with 6kg in France - but 80 per cent of that is what she politely calls "high-street" chocolate.
"In France, 80 per cent of the chocolate they eat is quality."
On cue, I sniff the square.
It smells not chocolatey, not sweet, but well, as a novice I have no words for it but I am sure they will come and at last I am allowed to put it in my mouth.
Now the vocabulary starts to grow.
"Earthy", I grunt, as the chocolate starts to melt down the sides of my tongue.
"Soft", "fluid", "engaging".
I realise there is a progression of taste from a gentle, adult beginning to Willy Wonka-like abandon as the chocolate melts and flavours develop in waves.
And all from a single piece!
This never happened with a Galaxy bar, at least not to me.
There is more on the table but after a square I am strangely satisfied.
It has left a creamy aftertaste that lingers long after it has gone down and I just want to sit and relish.
Deborah looks on approvingly.
A convert has been made.
Like coffee, chocolate, or rather cocoa, is a fruit and, like coffee, it raises the same issues of fair trade and quality control.
Sixty per cent of the world's beans come from the Ivory Coast and go mostly to the big players.
But the more interesting varieties can be found in low-lying tropical regions of the Caribbean, Asia and South America.
It is small producers who are teaming up with European and US manufacturers to produce a more sophisticated product.
The only problem is getting the rest of us to buy it.
Chocolate production is long and labour-intensive, taking about eight weeks from tree to bar, but it provides plenty of opportunities for high quality chocolate manufacturers to influence the outcome.
After picking - there are two harvests a year, one in February/March and the main one in October/November - the seeds are removed from the fruit, dried and fermented in the sun.
Much of the basis of the chocolate's flavour is created at this stage and good manufacturers will go out to the region to have a hand in the process.
For many producers this is the end of their involvement (very few taste the final product, says O'Neill) as the seeds are shipped to manufacturers for roasting, pulping, in which the beans are shelled and separated into chocolate pulp and cocoa butter, and finally pressing, when the pulp is squeezed between rollers to make it smooth and elastic.
"This final stage is where the chocolatier exerts most control," O'Neill says.
"The aim is make the biggest particle in the pulp less than 30 microns across, a size that is undetectable by the palate."
Look at the ingredients on a regular bar of chocolate and you will find little that has much to do with the typical cacao tree (including a high proportion of vegetable fat).
Move up to the specialist stuff (£5 for an 80g bar, for example) and the list shrinks.
White chocolate consists of cocoa butter, cream and sweetener, and that's it.
Dark chocolate has the smoothed pulp, some cocoa butter and maybe a little vanilla.
Milk chocolate is as above with milk solids.
The beauty is in the simplicity but the simplicity leaves no room for mistakes that can emerge during mass production.
Instead you have a palette of subtle flavours a winemaker would be proud of, hence the attraction of becoming a connoisseur.
We return to the tasting.
Next is a 72 per cent Java.
As she breaks off a piece for me, O'Neill is lightly dismissive about the 72 per cent.
"You see these percentages everywhere," she says, "but they are not really a good guide of how good the chocolate is going to be. All it is telling you is that the total proportion of pulp and cocoa butter combined is 72 per cent. You don't know how much of each the manufacturer has used and that can make a big difference. Here we put in about 68 per cent pulp and 4 per cent butter but others might do differently. What matters more is the quality of the ingredients. There is no magic number although 66-75 per cent seems to be a good range."
I rinse my mouth out with the mineral water on the table (thankfully, no spittoon in sight).
The Java appears to have no smell, at least not to my unpractised nose, but it has a fine reddish cast that looks more daring than the Ecuador.
I put it in my mouth and wait.
At first nothing happens.
Deborah's eyes fix on me but I taste nothing.
I am wondering if my first grand chocolate experience has been too much for me when suddenly there is an explosion of flavours.
Deborah's eyes meet mine, she has put a piece in her mouth, too, and, together we indulge.
She gasps coquettishly: "Can you taste them? Can you? Cinnamon, vanilla, cherries running down the side of your tongue... ?"
I can, I do and I want more.
It is an almost ecstatic moment.
Java seems too childish to be allowed in this shop, all those fruity flavours coming out of nowhere, but it is a superb chocolate and it is the one I make a mental note of to tuck away for some more private indulgence later.
As the taste subsides, I wonder, in our post-coital haze, if I have simply been taken in by O'Neill's suggestion.
If she had said "liquorice", would I have tasted that instead?
But later I try Java on friends without saying a word and, while some sense raspberries instead of cherries and others trade cinnamon for nutmeg, they all get the explosion.
It really is a damn fine chocolate.
From flavours, we move on to more abstract ideas.
O'Neill is keen on words such as "sour", "silky", "rounded" and "long in the mouth".
It feels a little self-conscious using wine buff terms for a piece of chocolate but that is only because the chocolate I am used to has never warranted such treatment before.
Bite into a single-estate product and you are soon reaching for the thesaurus.
"Like wine," says O'Neill, "cocoa doesn't express itself immediately. It has more than 400 flavours."
We break for a hot chocolate, which chez Marcolini comes in an espresso cup and is made with steamed milk and chocolate flakes.
It falls exactly between the sharpness of cocoa powder and the sweetness of hot chocolate and is a million miles away from bedtime.
This is an adults' drink.
O'Neill says she often serves it instead of coffee at a dinner party - and it probably contains the same amount of caffeine.
The morning's highlight is a limited-edition Porcelana Criollo.
The criollo bean is the Jamaican Blue Mountain of the chocolate world, prized by connoisseurs for its subtlety (and, like Blue Mountain, sometimes a little too subtle for the rest of us).
The tree is usually harvested only about every seven years and its beans produce just 2-3 per cent of the world's chocolate.
We both take a square.
For me, it is complex, kind of sweet/bitter/fruity/creamy and it is rather hard to describe even with my new show-off vocabulary.
The best I can do is "smooth", but luckily Deborah is lost in her own thoughts.
"I've only been eating this a few months and it is so complicated I am still trying to work out when to eat it," she says, eyes rolling in delight.
"For me, it just talks a lot."
I agree, but I am already longing for another run on the roller-coaster with my friend from Java.
We end with a "simple" Venezuelan ("gentle", "slow opening", "almonds") and a white chocolate and raspberry praline from the counter (delicious, but somehow too fiddly after all this single-estate purity).
Chocolate has a long way to go before it is appreciated as widely as wine but as I leave I ask O'Neill if we will ever be seeing chocolate vintages.
"Not yet, but they will come. Different years produce different chocolates. But you need to educate people first. Today we are just at the beginning."
Pierre Marcolini, 6 Lancer Square, off Kensington Church Street, London W8 4EH. Tel: +44 (0)20 7795 6611; www.pierremarcolini.co.uk
Chocolate tastings are usually held on the last Tuesday of every month at £20 per person.
I think all you can determine from the above is that it would a lot of fun to attend one of the monthly tastings at the Marcolini shop.
The next one is exactly two weeks from today, on Tuesday, June 28.
June 14, 2005 at 04:01 PM | Permalink
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» Supper: 6/14/2005 from basil's blog
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Comments
I'll settle for some of Bernard Callebaut's truffles. The Callebaut Chocolate Shoppe is just down the street from here Joe.
Posted by: Robin | Jun 14, 2005 6:41:09 PM
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