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ChloX Doutre-Roussel, a world-leading taster, reveals the secrets of a
connoisseur. But first she tells Patrick Barkham how chocolate became her
passion.
Saturday April 7, 2007
The Guardian
It's all elbows on the Paris Metro in rush hour and then ChloX
Doutre-Roussel whips out a small pink tin. "Time for a chocolate," she says,
offering up an alluring heap of dark jewels. Obsessive author and roving
chocolate consultant Doutre-Roussel is never caught short. Every month or
so, she trundles her suitcase to a local chocolatier and purchases 12kgs of
high-grade chocolate, for her own personal use.
There was a touch of Charlie Bucket plucking a golden ticket from a Wonka
bar about Doutre-Roussel beating 3,000 people to the ultimate fantasy job in
2003: chocolate buyer at Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly. For a woman who had
had an "almost religious" passion for chocolate ever since she was a child,
it must have felt like fate.
Her father was a diplomat and Doutre-Roussel, who is now 40, spent her early
years in Mexico, Bolivia and Chile under Pinochet. Her home was packed with
political refugees. "My childhood was very intense, very real life," she
says. "In our house the children had much less importance than the people we
were trying to help. It was a childhood without much mother love."
She looked for comfort in chocolate, but in South America she could get only
Nutella and meagre rations of Lindt when family or friends visited Europe.
Once, she remembers watching her mother at Mexican customs smearing Nutella
all over her face. Bringing in food was banned so she pretended it was face
cream. "Chocolate was precious. It was venerated at home. It was the most
difficult thing to find and we were all very fond of sweets."
Overwhelmed by the variety of chocolate available when she moved to Europe
at 13, she began cataloguing every brand she bought with her pocket money
"so I would get the best ratio of pleasure to money". She ate them alone,
when she first woke up, often at 5am. "Because I tasted them on a virgin
palate in the morning, totally aware of the pleasure it was giving me, it
was an intense relationship with chocolate. It was intimate."
At school she would blind-taste chocolate as a game with friends; she always
guessed right. It was a skill that served her well several years later in
Paris, when she had to blind-test 10 chocolates in an interview by Pierre
HermX, a chocolatier and cake maker dubbed "the Picasso of pastry". He gave
her a job - her first in the chocolate industry after stints in the UN and
as an agronomist - on the spot. When she tasted chocolate made by
chocolatiers such as Valrhona or Domori, it was "a slap", she says, "a point
of no return". Now she'd rather go hungry than munch mass-market bars.
After three years at Fortnum & Mason, she returned to Paris last year,
frustrated by Britain's baffling love affair with "chocolate creams", those
luxury chocolates with soft sugary centres that are, as she puts it, an
acquired taste "like Marmite". One of the few women at the top of the
chocolatier profession, she will launch her own range of "ChloX chocolates"
later this year.
Exactly 160 years after the invention of the chocolate bar, Doutre-Roussel
believes we're experiencing a second chocolate revolution. While she is
scathing about disingenuous "luxury" marketing and adventurous flavours
(according to her there is no place for sea salt, cardamom or chillies with
chocolate), she's hopeful that consumers are arming themselves with a new
knowledge of cocoa beans and demanding better, boutique chocolate.
"If you look at what happened to cheese or coffee or olive oil, there
was a revolution. People went from having no bottles of olive oil to
having 10. At the end of this big chocolate revolution I'm sure the
consumer will have more than just a bar of Lindt or Green & Blacks at
home. This will be positive."
Doutre-Roussel sips water while I scoff lunch. Hers was chocolate. Every
interview with her notes the apparent discord between Doutre-Roussel's
300g-a-day habit and her petite figure and immaculate skin. She swims for
one hour every morning and eats lightly. "If I have a normal meal it will
take three or four hours before I am hungry for a chocolate and that is a
sacrifice I'm not prepared to make," she says.
However, she does not have a sweet tooth. Really. She'll ignore chocolate
deserts - "a delusion version of chocolate", she says - and has no time for
cake - "a day doesn't go by without my mother baking a cake". Unfortunately,
she says, what most people take for chocolate is a confection of sugar,
artificial vanilla flavourings and milk powder. There is chocolate and there
are chocolates. "Chocolate is a chocolate bar and the rest is
confectionery," she says. "It's the difference between an apple and an apple
pie."
It may not surprise you to learn that she gives British chocolate short
shrift. How can it be remotely sophisticated in a country where "national
dishes are a mix of leftovers, like pies"? With equally delicious frankness,
Doutre-Roussel challenges a few other comfortable assumptions about
chocolate. As a Guardian reader you might comfort yourself with a nice slab
of fair trade organic chocolate. Or perhaps you're a chocolate connoisseur
who only buys 70% cocoa chocolate made in Belgium or Switzerland
Well. Doutre-Roussel takes a deep breath. Fair trade is not all it's cracked
up to be, often making cocoa-growing villages dependent on one manufacturer
when the fair trade market may prove as capricious as any other.
And some cocoa growers obtain organic status simply by purchasing a
certificate that says "organic", and anyway, organic chocolate is "quite
poor - badly farmed and badly dried".
Belgian chocolate is worse: "Almost impossible to find something acceptable
to the palette." Swiss milk chocolate tastes nice not because of the
chocolate but because their milk. And the 70% cocoa figure that is taken as
a stamp of ultimate quality is arbitrary. Good chocolatiers should
experiment with different proportions to bring out different flavours.
But if this makes you feel uneasy nibbling what was once a relatively
guilt-free organic bar, don't. Doutre-Roussel would like us to cast off our
irrational blending of chocolate with guilt. She would also like us to
abandon our habit of teaming chocolate with alcohol and coffee ("the
chocolate is not respected"), while chocolates and cigars are a no-no as
well.
Doutre-Roussel does not enjoy smoky places, and shuns all members of the
onion family because of the effect on her taste. The chlorine in her
swimming pool is bad enough but sometimes she has to change lanes because
swimmers near her are sweating out garlic smells.
Her passion for chocolate, which so often marketed as a food of love, is
rather isolating. But she insists she shares an enjoyment of chocolate with
friends who, mercifully, can see beyond her obsession. And while she'd like
a partner who understands her relationship with chocolate she would rather
have someone who can, at times, take her away from it. "I'm not alone and
I'm not lonely," she says. "With chocolate you cannot be lonely."
There is a touch of missionary zeal about Doutre-Roussel's desire to improve
the public's "intimacy" with chocolate but it is very sweet. "Chocolate is a
pleasure we can all add to our life," she says just before she disappears
into the crush of the Metro, tiny pink tin of chocolates clasped in her
hand. "Chocolate is a little treasure we can all carry in this very hard and
long journey that is life."
The thirty steps to connoisseurship
The vast majority of people will only ever have one or two types of
chocolate at home, and they will probably have been buying the same brands
for years. I don't blame them: why deviate from a reliable, affordable, if
often poor quality, source of pleasure?
But what many don't realise is that chocolate is like music - there is an
enormous range of pleasures out there. And as with music, it is possible to
explore, to "listen" to chocolate, to find out what suits you best, and to
keep enough at home to suit any mood of the day. I appreciate that not
everyone will want to do this, but I personally have 100 bars in my
chocolate cellar. Often I may not enjoy them enough to finish them, but
they're useful when it comes to comparing notes. I also keep a database on
my computer, but the fact is that when I taste a bar I am concentrating so
deeply that everything I need to know remains in my memory for years.
Becoming a connoisseur requires discipline, dedication, and an open and
adventurous mind. It is totally unrelated to the number of chocolates you
eat, or even the number of chocolates you taste "properly". Rather, it
should be a joyful process in which you learn to listen to what your senses
tell you.
Shopping for chocolate
Connoisseurship begins with buying bars. Whether you do this from
supermarkets, delicatessens, department stores or specialised websites, the
tricks below will guide you. Chocolate is about pleasure, so do not hesitate
to buy brands you already know and enjoy. Add a new brand or two each week
and begin to explore the wild world of chocolate.
1 Go for plain, dark or milk. Chocolates with flavourings or fillings or
decorations taste mainly like whatever flavouring or filling or decoration
has been used and will teach you nothing.
2 Be ready to spend a little more than on your usual bar. As with wine,
cheese or olive oil, fine products are more expensive. Expensive doesn't
mean good, but good is seldom inexpensive.
3 A tasting will enlighten you only if you compare similar products. So, for
instance, taste 2-4 bars of plain dark chocolate from Venezuela or, even
more acutely, from one region of Venezuela, such as Sur del Lago. Compare
dark and milk chocolate only if they're made by the same brand with the same
beans (Mangaro milk and dark from Michel Cluizel, for instance). Or bars
made through similar processes - those begun from the bean, from cocoa
liquor, from melting bulk chocolate; [61]www.seventypercent.com is a good
place to go for more advice.
4 Ethical values. You are exploring the world of chocolate (taste, texture,
style), not trying to save the world. Organic/fair trade chocolate is only a
very small part of chocolates you can explore.
5 Healthy chocolate. All chocolate made from the basic ingredients - cocoa
beans, sugar, cocoa butter, lecithin, and natural vanilla - is healthy if
eaten in moderation.
6 Check sell-by dates and the temperature of the store. You can never be
entirely sure, but you can reduce the risk of buying stale chocolate, or
chocolate that has suffered from variations in temperature, by not buying in
a shop kept at more than 23C.
Chocolate myths
7 The higher the percentage, the better the chocolate. For the connoisseur,
selecting chocolate by the percentage of cocoa in it is as irrelevant as
selecting a wine by alcohol percentage. All it gives you is the level of
sweetness. People talk a lot about single estate chocolate, but this is also
misleading, just as the fact that a wine is from the Bordeaux region is no
guarantee that it will be any good.
8 The higher the price the better the chocolate. Bright marketing will fool
you and sell you poor quality chocolate wrapped in luxurious packaging at an
impressive price. There is only one way to know what you've got: taste it.
9 The best chocolate is made from fine beans. Well, yes, this is true, but
not all brands work from the bean. Around 99% of the chocolate bars around
began as bulk chocolate that was then marketed as different brands. There is
no shame in melting down bulk material as long as you choose fine
ingredients and the packaging and/or blend is a special experience for the
consumer, and of course the price reflects the actual quality.
10 That there is such a thing as the best chocolate in the world. We all
have different taste buds, opinions, pasts and moods. When you analyse, you
are not giving an opinion, you are analysing. Anybody can detect the
difference between poor quality and a fine chocolate, but once within the
acceptable quality range, we all have preferences.
11 Cru, grand cru, criollo, arriba. The use of any of these words in
packaging should ring an internal alarm, whatever the brand, as there is no
institution (yet) that sets nor monitors such standards.
Words you need to understand
12 Beans. The seed of a fruit called the cocoa pod and the main ingredient
in chocolate. The trees grow only in areas that are always warm and humid.
13 Liquor/cacao mass. Beans roasted, peeled and ground become a thick dark
mass. The liquor is slightly acidic and astringent, and the aromas are still
not at their full potential. They require further processing.
14 Couverture/bulk chocolate. Couverture" is the same as "bulk chocolate"
but adjusted to a lower viscosity than that sold specifically for making
bars.
15 Criollo. A variety of cacao tree that has almost disappeared. It is
impossible at the moment to isolate enough to make a chocolate bar. Any
mention of Criollo on packaging or promotional material should be translated
into Trinitario. Even blue chip companies (ab)use these word.
16 Trinitario. A hybrid between the forastero and criollo, this has the
production and disease resistance of the Forastero and much of the fine
flavour of the Criollo, making it a commercial favourite. It grows in the
Americas, Madagascar and Indonesia.
17 Forastero. These trees produce cacao beans with rustic and flat aromas.
Africa provides more than 80% of the world's cacao beans and all of it is
forastero.
18 White chocolate. It is not legally chocolate in the world of chocolate
connoisseurs. It is confectionery.
19 Blue chip brands. These are the classics every connoisseur needs to know
and must to be able to recognise "blind". They all work from the bean and
employ staff who hunt for a regular, quality supply. In alphabetical order,
the brands are: Amedei, Bonnat, Domori, Felchlin, Michel Cluizel, Pralus,
Scharffen Berger, and Valrhona. There are many new brands working from the
beans all over the world, mainly in the US and Italy, and all are worth
trying at least once: De Vries, Coppeneur, Theo Chocolates, Amano are good
examples. You will most likely have to purchase them online.
20 Tasting. Tasting is not eating. Tasting requires that you are in state
where your mind and body are alert, sharp and ready to listen to the
subtleties of the chocolate.
Tasting
To taste you need to engage all five senses. It might seem obvious, but
don't do it after smoking or eating a big meal, or when you're tired or
stressed.
21 Use your eyes. Look at the piece of chocolate you are about to taste,
evaluating its texture before you put it in your mouth. The surface should
be smooth and shiny, indicating that the cocoa butter is properly
crystallised (tempered). Do not be swayed by colour. The shade is influenced
by many factors, such as bean type and roasting time as well as milk
content.
22 Touch it. Is it sticky, grainy, sandy or velvety? Crisp or crunchy? A
floury texture suggests cocoa powder has been added, a sign of poor quality
chocolate. A clayey feel in the mouth tells you there are probably many
particles of too small a size (the ideal is 16/18 microns) or that the
proportion of cocoa butter added is high. The ideal texture is the one that
melts smoothly.
23 Listen to it. Did it break easily? Neatly? Drily? A chocolate that snaps
without too much effort is a sign that the balance between cocoa and butter
is right. Dark chocolate snaps more easily than milk because, unlike milk
chocolate, it contains no milk powder.
24 Smell it. Taste is 90% smell. It takes practice to describe a chocolate's
"nose", but we do so by relating aromas to those in our past experience. The
problem is that we are so bombarded by artificial smells that we have lost
our database of natural scents. Sadly, when a lot of people smell a fine
chocolate for the first time, they do not recognise it as chocolate, because
for them, chocolate should smell of sugar and vanilla. Fine chocolate, just
like wine, can be described by referring to natural products around us -
fruit, flowers, woodlands or spice. A chocolate that smells smoky may have
been carelessly dried. One that smells mouldy has been damaged in storage.
You can build up your database of smells by using your nose whenever you
can. Experience the scents of wet weather. If you're in the woods, smell the
soil and the leaves. When you go to the market, take a sniff of each basket
of mushrooms, herbs, fruit and flowers. Do all this and you will rediscover
the potential of your sense of smell. We all have the ability, but many of
us have forgotten it.
25 Taste it. When tasting a new chocolate, try just a small,
fingernail-sized piece. Put it on your tongue and chew for a few seconds to
break it into smaller chunks. Then stop and allow it to melt so that all
flavours are released. Make sure the chocolate is spread all around your
mouth - this way you'll taste the flavours most intensely.
Flavours
When you start tasting truly good chocolate, you will find that its flavour
can linger for many minutes. This is the best incentive I can think of to
invest in an expensive bar. It may cost three times as much as your usual
bar, but the pleasure you'll get from it is intense and long. Fine chocolate
has harmonious tastes - you'll need to concentrate to sense their presence.
Look out in particular for bitterness, acidity and astringency. The first
two are welcome, but astringency is a bad sign, often found in poor quality
chocolate, and indicates poor fermentation.
26 Sweetness. My simple rule is this: if you notice the sugar, there is too
much of it in the bar. Excess sugar is used to disguise poor quality or
uninteresting beans, covering up the burnt, metallic or mouldy flavours you
might otherwise taste. Sugar is needed to reveal aromas, however; cocoa
butter has the same effect. To make a fine chocolate, brands need to find
the optimal level of sugar that reveals the aromatic palette of the beans
used at their best.
27 Bitterness, sourness and acidity. When I introduce novices to real
chocolate, many use the word "bitter" to describe it. It's the same word
that often springs to people's lips when tasting tea or coffee. It is their
way of qualifying a new, more intense taste, but nine times out of 10, it is
not the most accurate word. Poor quality chocolate may be astringent or
acidic. True bitterness is felt in the middle at the back of the tongue.
Test it in foods like chicory or grapefruit. Guanaja from Valrhona is rather
bitter, but a mild and elegant way. With some training, you'll even detect
chocolates that begin with one flavour (sweetness, for instance) and evolve
to another (say, bitterness) with a hint of a third (salty) - like Lindt
99%.
28 Saltiness. Salt is not often added to chocolate but you can find it in
some filled chocolates (it enhances the nuttiness in pralines) or in bars
like Domori's Latte Sal or 99% Lindt. Here it would be used to reveal
particular aromas from the beans or the nuts.
29 Describing aromas and flavours. The last part of tasting consists in
finding the words to describe aromas and flavours you detect. This is hard
as we are not used to associating a word with a taste sensation. I suggest
you proceed as for a wine tasting: try to find associations with the world
around you. The tasting wheel below will help. Try it - take a square of
Valrhona's Manjari. Pop a small piece into your mouth and once the initial
burst of acidity recedes, see if you can notice the clear red fruit notes.
In the beginning, if you can at least identify "fruity", that is excellent.
Later on, as your ability to identify flavours and aromas grows, you'll be
able to fit more specific words to tastes. You can move from tasting Java
from Pralus as "vegetable" to something more accurate, for instance, wood or
a wet forest. Find words that sum up what you taste, not what you think you
should taste. On a graph, you could draw up one curve for the "intensity" of
the flavours, in their initial attack, in their development, and in their
finish. You may taste "flowery" followed by "woody" and then "woody flirting
with spicy".
30 Soon all these steps will become second nature. You won't have to think
about it, you will just enjoy the delightful part of the journey - the
excitement and desire, then the delightful, intense and sensual indulgence.
And you can reproduce this experience as many times as you wish, for as many
years as you wish.
The Chocolate Connoisseur is published by Piatkus. To order a copy for X9.99
with free UK p&p go to www.guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
www.chloechocolat.com
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