Chocovic is a Spanish company that not only makes blocks for Joe Public to buy and enjoy but also delivers huge bags of melts and slabs for serious chefs such as Barcelona chef and chocolatier, Ramon Morato.
His book, ‘Ramon Morato Chocolate’ was awarded the Best 2007 Chocolate Book of the Year and he recently appeared at the Melbourne Food and Wine festival. I made sure I had prime seats and was intrigued when he told us that he was using Chocovic in his recipe and also proceeded to use a bamix whipper to add extra air and zest: that was something I’d never seen done before to melted chocolate.
His broken English and humour immediately endeared himself to the audience when he said, “Chocolate is a mold, like a dark t-shirt. It is easy to combine with other clothes, other ingredients, sorry for my English.”
When asked by an audience member where he found his inspirations, he replied that it mostly came from reading old cookbooks and seeking new ways to update them. “We don’t invent the nothing, we rediscover,” he said.
The delicacy he ended up producing for us was his famous macaroon hamburger:
Using cocoa-flavoured mararoons with caramelised sesame seeds as the buns, the ‘meat’ was a delicious Chocovic dark chocolate ganache. Sliced peach formed the cheese, with mango shreds as the onions, fresh mint for lettuce and a fresh berry coulis for the ketchup.
He was inspiring enough for me to immediately head to the Chocovic stand to buy some of the chocolate. They had four flavours on offer as part of their Selvaticas – Exotic Tastes range that celebrate the lush rainforests that most of their cocoa is sourced from.
Their first block, Jaina, is white but contains 31% cocoa solids. This presented a quandary for me – is it chocolate, or not? On very first nibble, it tasted like all very sweet white chocolate but as the seconds ticked by, the distinct added tang of yoghurt was also present. The wrapper told me that it has “aromas sweeter than vanilla-scented milk, full of the promise of melted caramel you can taste at the base of your teeth. You sense the combination of sugar and acidity.” Nicely said.
I really enjoyed this – for a white chocolate – and found it surprisingly more-ish. I could manage about four squares (or 40 grams which is half the block), but no more because of its sweetness and that’s saying something for someone who can polish off a 250 gram family block without the family being present.
The second block, Nayarit, is a milk chocolate with 37% cocoa solids, and informed me that “as it melts between the tongue and palate is reveals three distinctive flavours in turn: sweet, bitter and salty.”
That’s a pretty big claim for a mild milk chocolate, but the tasting did reveal it to be surprisingly complex, again with a yoghurt tang to add intrigue. The chocolate itself doesn’t have the classic silky smooth, easy-melt texture that you associate with, say, Swiss chocolate, but has a powdery texture that does indeed hint at salty flavours amongst the sweet.
Both blocks are unusual and can’t be directly compared to standard white and milk chocolate. I’d love to see what Ramon makes with these two blocks, but maybe I’ll have to save up for his cookbook to find out.
We seem to have had some pretty ordinary Turkish Delights found and tested, here in the Chocablog Test Kitchen. Or should that be Test Lounge? Either way, Turkish Delight (hereafter called TD) seems to lead to strong opinions – some love it, some hate it. And there seem to be plenty of examples that are worth missing.
Fry’s Turkish Delight has been kicking around for many years, and it might be fairly pedestrian but I quite like it. In a box of mixed filled chocolates, I’ll usually seek them out as second preference after the Cherry Ripes.
So when I found “Authentic Turkish Delight”, made by the “Real Turkish Delight Manufacturer”, it was with apprehension and mixed feelings. But I had to have it. Chocablog: We test it so you won’t have to.
Where to start with this one? Firstly, the plastic pack is reminiscent of so many other cheap nasty things that come in similar plastic packs. The picture on the front conveys another product with nuclear-reactor inspired red colour. First impressions can be misleading though, as we are about to find.
Opening that plastic pack leads to the first big surprise:
Yes, inside is a small cardboard box, nicely printed. These people take things seriously after all. And inside the box, we have two squares of chocolate coated yumminess. Each is about 4 cm square:
The size does not seem much, but it turns out to be just about right. The picture on the outside of the pack still had me worried though. Is the inside really glow-in-the-dark red? A dissection is in order:
Nope. The picture on the pack has a colour shift. If there is any colour there at all, it’s a very pale pink tinge.
Sadly, both of the children don’t like TD. Which means I get to share it with The Lady Of The House. And she’s not super keen on TD either – so YIPPEE!!! I get the big piece!
This is pretty damn good. The rosewater is strong, and the texture of the filling is very sticky. Almost glue-your-teeth-together. Sounds a bit off-putting, but I like it! Much stickier than Fry’s. This is very, very sweet – something I’m not normally keen on – but here it works. I have a benchmark for comparison: Haigh’s not only make chocolate (from beans… the Full Monty method), they also make a TD without any chocolate at all. Just a classic TD dusted with icing sugar. [Health warning for the Haigh’s, though: Inhaling during eating can be lethal.] I think this TD compares very well indeed, and it’s way better than Fry’s. The chocolate does not actually add a heck of a lot – the flavour and sweetness of the TD filling dominate. But so what! For the Turkish Delight devotees out there, give this a try.
Phillip Island is about an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Melbourne and is a favourite spot for Aussie and international tourists wanting to see Fairy Penguins and city folk wanting to have holidays at the beach. Panny’s Chocolate Factory is located at the entrance into the island and has therefore a guaranteed steady stream of folk wanting hot chocolates, coffee and a taste of his chocolate, especially on the weekends or during the motorcycle Grand Prix.
They were doing a roaring trade the day I was there, so I quickly grabbed three blocks – Dark Grand Marnier, Dark Almond and Dark Mocca and a handful of small bars.
I wasn’t prepared to shell out a further twelve dollars for the rather tacky-looking chocolate museum, but would love to hear from anybody who has been inside. Was it worth it to see a 12,000 piece chocolate mosaic of Dame Edna, a chocolate village with working trains, a one tonne block of chocolate and a slow-growing chocolate stalagmite or would I be better entertained by chewing one of my own legs off?
Sadly, whilst the chocolate is Belgian (Callebaut, in fact) what he’s done to it has been very disappointing. The Grand Marnier and Mocca blocks don’t have fillings but have been infused with some kind of flavour that makes them taste overly fake and renders the once-reasonable-chocolate into a cheap tasting product that I couldn’t finish. The almond block was similarly uninspired and very stingy on the amount of actual nuts included.
The individual bars were fine. Just OK. I guess it’s hard to mess up milk chocolate if it’s got nice fillings included like cherry, caramel, honeycomb or nuts in it, but I’m not under any illusion that Panny or his creators are any creative genuises in the world of chocolate or able to produce any ground-breakingly unique additional flavours or be stocked by city supermarkets any time soon. No, but they’ve got a great location – the sole chocolate manufacturer on an island that teems with cashed-up visitors.
I’ve been searching for non-edible chocolate products to write about and today I got a package from Lush, with some of their best selling chocolate products. Lush are known for producing handmade cosmetics with unusual names and natural ingredients (mostly) and I must admit, I am a fan of many of their products, although I’d never tried any of their chocolate things before.
The first two products I tried are a lip balm and a shower gel.
Whip Stick comes in a little silver pot. The first thing you notice about it is that it smells exactly like a Terry’s chocolate orange. In fact, it smelled so nice, I was tempted to actually taste it after I put some on my lips and while I can’t say it tasted quite as good as the real thing, it definitely tasted a lot nicer than other scented lip balms I’ve tried and made me want to keep putting it on my lips so I could have another taste. Unlike the others, it doesn’t taste like Vaseline, which is a big plus, but rather faintly of chocolate with a distinct orange overtone.
The balm goes on a bit heavy, which takes a bit of getting used to, but, thankfully, is free of the sticky feeling you get with some lip balms. It seems to have made my lips nice and soft. While I’m not usually a fan of smelling like food, I have to agree that having lips that smell and taste like chocolate is actually quite yummy. Apparently it’s also suitable for people who can’t use things with lanolin or cocoa butter in them.
The shower gel is amusingly named Sonic Death Monkey, which is apparently to do with the film High Fidelity (warning – strong language!). It’s brown and chocolaty-looking although I didn’t think it smelled particularly chocolaty at first, owing more of its scent to the coffee and lime juice listed on its ingredients list. Once I actually used it, though, the chocolate smell came through rather strongly and the look and feel of it made the experience comparable to showering with runny chocolate sauce (or gravy). It felt pretty luxurious and made my skin really soft with a smell that’s lovely, although not entirely chocolaty, so you won’t end up smelling like a chocolate sundae (which can be both good or bad, depending on what you like). It has a distinct sweetness to it, although the lime gives it freshness and the coffee balances it out nicely. I’d say this is a scent that is really quite unisex and would be quite at home on a man, as long as it’s not the kind of man who wants to smell like a pine forest all the time. The product’s name, plain packaging and the fact that you can use it on your hair as well, adds to its manliness and means even lads will be able to enjoy the experience of showering with it without having their mates laugh at them for being too girly. Be aware, though, that while the lime smell is quite strong to begin with, adding a sort of masculine zestiness, it does fade away after a while, leaving the faint sweeter undertone behind. Inoffensive to most male sensibilities, I’m sure, though not quite Paco Rabanne.
Lush products are not cheap: the Whip Stick costs over four pounds and the Sonic Death Monkey is about the same for a 100g and sold in bigger bottles. Still, if you’re looking for a touch of chocolate goodness that lasts longer than a bar of chocolate, then you could definitely do a lot worse than these.
