Last week I was invited to a chocolate & wine pairing that Rococo had organised at Le Vieux Comptoir, one of their new Marylebone neighbours.
I’ve been to plenty of chocolate & wine parings before, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not much of a wine pairing. I love to see how flavours have been matched, but I have to confess I’m usually more more interested in the chocolate than the wine.
This event was a little different though, and by far the most interesting and surprising chocolate pairing I’ve been to. I don’t want to give away too much about it; suffice to say the wine choices were surprising and worked fantastically well. Some wines were paired with multiple chocolates allowing you to compare straight flavour matches with something a little more thoughtful, while other chocolates completely transformed the flavour of the wine they were paired with.
The tasting will be repeated at Rococo’s shop in Moxon Street, Marylebone on November 7th, and if you’re at all interested in wine or chocolate, I highly recommend it. If there’s enough interest, Rococo tell me they will add more events, but I recommend booking quickly just in case!
Eric Lanlard – award winning French patissier – is a busy man. He runs a successful cake shop, cookery school and baking business which caters for all manner of celebrities – he’s presented four television series – and written five books, the latest – Chocolat – one all about chocolate.
I caught up with him at London’s Salon du Chocolat, right after a spectacular baking demonstration where he’d whipped up a double caramel flourless chocolate cake concoction, dripping with silky ganache and caramel sauce, poured onto the cake – of course – from a pink Himalayan salt brick.
I asked where his interest in chocolate had come from.
“I’ve always been fascinated by chocolate, from when I was a child. I always wanted to be a pastry chef, but chocolate was my other obsession. So I set out to discover more.”
It was a chance meeting during his national service, some 26 years ago, that provided the spark for his future career. Eric managed to spend his time training as a pastry chef on the French Navy flagship, turning down the chance of working in the Elysee Palace because he wanted to travel.
The ship docked in Trinidad, and he got talking to another Frenchman. “It turned out he owned a plantation, and showed me around.” The plantation, it turned out, produced exclusively for French chocolate firm Valrhona. The seeds of that chocolate obsession were sown.
Now, after more than two decades in patisserie, he’s finally managed to write his chocolate book. “Lots of the books out there are really designed for professional pastry chefs. If you’re an amateur baker you really want something much more accessible. I’ve given a bit of history, a bit about technique, but it’s mostly about the recipes and things can easily make at home.”
It’s doing well: even in America, where the book has only been out a couple of months, but is well into its second reprint. That’s because, Eric says, he’s setting out to dispel some of the mystique.
“Chocolate is a very complex ingredient. If it was a real person you’d have a hard time being its friend.”
“Chocolate is a very complex ingredient. If it was a real person you’d have a hard time being its friend – it doesn’t like heat, it doesn’t like cold, it doesn’t like water. And it’s expensive too, so if something goes wrong and you have to throw it away that can be frustrating.”
So what’s the secret? “You have to be gentle with it. Look for a good quality brand, of course – but you don’t have to spend a fortune – you can get good kinds now in the supermarket. Just don’t get it from the baking section!”
But let’s get on to the really serious stuff. “There’s something quite sexy about a ganache. And chocolate fondant – I love anything with a surprise in the middle.”
Ah, the notorious fondant – the bane of many a TV cookery contestant: or perhaps not so tricky after all. “Fondants are so easy to make!” Eric insists. “You can make them in advance and keep them in the fridge all ready in the moulds. Then when you bake them, because they’re cold in the centre they won’t overcook”.
So what’s next for the master patissier? Disney world, somewhat bizarrely – he’ll be cooking for three days at Epcot in Florida as part of his US book promotion. Isn’t America notoriously bad for the quality of its chocolate, though?
“There’s no excuse nowadays: you can find it anywhere. I went there once and made brownies – can you believe that, a Frenchman teaching Americans how to make brownies? They kept telling me how amazing they were, but it was because I’d used a good quality chocolate…”
After that, there’s a new recipe app to launch, 80 recipes and videos explaining how to make them, all very high tech and interactive. And there’s still his cake shop in Battersea, South London – Cake Boy – and a fully booked roster of cooking classes, which he loves to teach.
Eric Lanlard is a busy man indeed: he leaps up, ready for the next assignment – while I manage to sneak backstage to try some of that double caramel chocolate cake – which as you can imagine, was dense, sticky, and rather sinfully rich.
No wonder Eric has made a name for himself as pastry chef to the stars.
As I was browsing the beautiful Rococo Chocolates stand at Salon du Chocolat this weekend, Principal Chocolatier Barry Johnson thrust this little box into my hand. It’s a new small but perfectly formed autumn selection with some interesting twists on autumnal flavours.
So what’s in the box?
Sloe Gin
An old fashioned liqueur filled chocolate. This slow gin liqueur in a dark chocolate shell is deliciously warming and, as you might expect, fairly alcoholic. It brings back memories of the liqueur chocolates we at at Christmas as a child, only this time done right. There’s no thick crust of sugar inside, and the simple dark chocolate exterior is the perfect balance to the sweetness of the filling.
Walnut & Fruit Marzipan
A walnut & fruit marizpan with orange ganache, covered in dark chocolate. I love the texture of this chocolate as much as the flavour. It’s got a praline-like crunch to it, with a hint of orange and marzipan. Possibly a little too complicated, but delicious nonetheless.
Apricot & Lavender Ganache
A layer of apricot jelly and another of lavender ganache in milk chocolate. I wouldn’t have thought to put apricot & lavender together, but it works really quite well. It’s fruity, but with a gentle spice, and really very nice indeed!
Autumn Spiced Apple
My favourite of the bunch. Apple chocolates are where it’s at this autumn, and this is up there with the best of them. Deliciously refreshing apple in perfect harmony with warming winter spice in a milk chocolate shell. I’ll certainly be buying more of these!
Rococo’s Autumn Gaanache Selection is available to buy now from their four shops in London & Chester. I love the simple quality and evocative flavours, but I also really liked the fact that it’s small enough to buy as a treat for yourself without the guilt. Highly recommended.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the nights are getting colder and darker and the leaves are turning. This can only mean one thing – it’s time to start enjoying the occasional mug of steaming hot chocolate (silver linings and all that).
However.
Some of you may remember my past rants about hot chocolate & how much of a rip off it can be, with up to fifty percent of the contents of a packet of drinking chocolate being nothing more than sugar, poor quality ingredients etc etc. Well thankfully there are other people in the world who feel the same way, and some of them have decided to do their bit to rid the world of overpriced sugary rubbish.
When I was strolling around the Speciality & Fine Food Fair a while back, I came across Jaz from Jaz ‘n’ Jul’s hot chocolate company (the one with the pink hair) and after a long discussion about the merits of ‘proper’ hot chocolate (and other yummy stuff) I left with a few samples of their wares.
What better place to begin than with their ‘Perfectly Simple’ hot chocolate – a 60% cacao-based drinking chocolate with a sprinkling of sugar and just a touch of nutmeg. Best break out the posh drinking vessels!
I’m a bit of a cheat when it comes to making hot chocolate. I just throw some milk into a jug & microwave it until almost boiling, make a paste with the drinking chocolate & some cold milk, then add hot milk, stir it through and then put the whole lot back into the jug. Give it another gentle heat through and attack it with a whisk for a minute for frothy, light drinking chocolate. Done.
And the drink? Rich but not bitter, slightly sweet but never sickly, and comfortingly thick and creamy (because one should never use anything other than full fat milk for drinking chocolate), it’s exactly what hot chocolate should taste like. I added nothing to the final drink – no extra tipple of booze and certainly no sugar – and enjoyed every drop.
At just under £3 for a wee box that makes two mugs, it’s not the cheapest drinking chocolate, but that’s definitely reflected in the taste, and of your money isn’t being spent on sugar!
