France -- Traditional Artisanal Products

One of the things I love about France is that you can still find regional items that have been made in the same artisanal way for many decades, if not longer. Walking down the Rue des Archives, I came across Praslines Mazet, which has been making pralines (grilled and caramelized almonds) and chocolates in Montargis (in the Loire Valley) since 1903. Indeed the "veritables praslines"are made daily according to a recipe from 1636 and the company claims the praline is the oldest bonbon in France.

Mazet salted caramel pralines

Although you can buy their chocolates in department stores, there is only one, very appealing Mazet shop in Paris and one in Montargis, and I have become good friends with the shopkeeper, having bought pralines three times this week for people who have been kind enough to invite me to dinner. The pralines come in several flavors: traditional, honey, salted caramel and orange flower. I have tried the traditional and the caramel and they are pretty great. And a good gift because they are not for sale everywhere.

Mazet, 37 rue des Archives

The chocolates are not bad, either, but there are many better ones. Still, gorgeous packaging:

Chocolate bars from Mazet

Bobby Jay

My New Favorite Chocolate Bar: Scharffen Berger Extra Dark 82%

Like almost everyone, I love chocolate, and always have. I used to eat Hershey milk chocolate bars as a child, and while my taste may have become more sophisticated, those early memories persist.

In the last 15 years or so, I have spent a lot of time in Paris and experienced some of the world's best chocolates, but I still love eating it in bar form. Although it is neither the fanciest nor the most expensive, I am partial to Lindt, from Switzerland, and particularly their Excellence series, which combines dark chocolate with various elements: sesame seeds, mint, caramel, fleur de sel, orange, chili peppers, etc.

Nowadays, many chocolates proclaim the percentage of cacao contained within. In general I find that bars above 72% lack the creaminess that I like. I use Ghirardelli 60% or Callebaut bittersweet for baking and various 70-72% choices for eating.
 
As to brands, I have not found one that is perfect across the range of strengths and flavors. Of course Valhrona, Cluizel and Bonnat, but I have to say they don't beat my go-to Lindt. I have never been overly enamored with American brands, except, as noted for Ghiradelli for baking applications. In partiular I never loved Sharffen Berger, until now.

David Lebovitz, in his The Great Book of Chocolate,

writes a lot about Scharffen Berger, the first American bean-to-bar gourmet chocolate (now there are others, such as Mast Brothers), so I thought I'd try it again. I went for the Extra Dark 82% and had a revelation: all the complexity found in a well-made bitter bar with a great mouth feel that lasts and lasts and lasts.

(Available at gourmet stores and through the Scharffen Berger web site.)

Go for it!

Bobby Jay

Paris -- Fun Chocolaterie/Confiserie

My friends Eric and Fabienne took me today to À l'Étoile d'Or, at 30 rue Pierre Fontaine in the Ninth arrondissment. This wonderful shop is a chocolaterie/confiserie, not a chocolatier/confiseur, because they don't make the things they sell. The owner, Denise Acabo, has been in business in this location near Place Pigalle for 47 years, interrupted a few years ago by a gas explosion in her building. She is a pistol, and when you know her, as my friends do, will tell amazing stories about the clients she has served over the years.

After all these years, she is bubbling over with enthusiasm for her extraordinarily fine chocolates and traditional candies, recommending all of them in succession. And she has apparently been wearing the same outfit, including the kilt, for decades: a lovely character.

Bobby Jay with Denise Acabo

A portrait of Denise with a chocolate sculpture of her

(Photos courtesy of Eric Perdrizet.)

This is a great place to go, for yourself or for gifts, much more interesting than À la Mère de Famille or La Cure Gourmande, which have become chain stores present wherever chain stores tend to be.

Bobby Jay

Paris - Organic Chocolate Mousse

I like chocolate mousse, but J does not. I'm not sure how that's possible, but there it is. As a result, I never make it, despite having many many recipes in French cookbooks, magazine cuttings and internet posts.

One of my guilty pleasures in Paris, especially when I'm here alone, is the organic dark chocolate mousse that can be found at Monoprix and at bio (health food) stores. The amazing thing, for a store-bought product, is the list of ingredients: chocolate (42%), eggs, butter. That's it, no preservative, thickener, gelling agent, stabilizer. Well, perhaps the most amazing things are really the taste and texture, which are excellent and quite adult. (The mousse is so thick that it's actually hard to clean your spoon, either with your mouth or in the sink.) Or maybe I just become a child again when I eat them.

Ready-made chocolate mousses, left from bio store, right from Monoprix

When in Paris, go to a supermarket and buy one to keep in your mini-fridge in case of emergency.

Bobby Jay

Happy New Year from Paris -- 2014

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

As always, we are spending the end of the year in Paris. Here are some nice, mostly food-oriented, images from Paris in late December.

Réligieuse at Dalloyau

Snowman at Dalloyau

Dalloyau

Baby bûches de Noël on Île Saint-Louis

Merveilleuses de Fred

Chocolats Marquise de Sévigné

Macarons at Ladurée

Chocolats Michel Cluizel

Au Petit Versailles, a gorgeous boulangerie patisserie

Display at Edwart, a new and quite wonderful chocolatier

Shoe train in Printemps window

Bobby Jay

Homemade Chocolates

When the weather gets bad, some people make cookies, some make brownies, I make chocolate.

Using a pound and a half of Barry 72% Cacao Venezuela that I bought in France, I made an assortment today, including mendiants each covered with a slice of candied ginger, a half hazelnut and a half or whole pistachio nut, depending on size. I was hoping to make them as beautiful as the ones from La Petite Rose, our favorite Paris chocolatier (they use Valhrona). Here you can see that I did not quite succeed -- theirs is the beautiful one with candied orange peel at center left -- but mine are not bad for an amateur.

Mendiants. The perfect one from La Petite Rose is at left center.

The other items were hearts filled with little griottes (Morello cherries) that I got from a jar of preserves from the La Chambre aux Confitures, fluted flat-topped cones filled with toasted hazelnuts, and little disks and leaves of pure chocolate.

Assorted homemade chocolates

Inside of a griotte-filled heart

I tempered the chocolate using Sherry Yard's microwave method, gradually melting the chocolate in short bursts at 50% power until I reached 115 degrees, then adding unmelted chocolate, waiting until the chocolate cooled to 85 degrees and reheating to 90 degrees. For the last step I used my sous vide cooker so I could hold the chocolate at the right temperature until I was ready to use it. As you can see, this method produced shiny chocolate that (you'll have to take my word for it) snaps when bitten.

It is fun and surprisingly easy to do this, and the results are impressive.

Bobby Jay

Paris 2013 - Holidays = Luxury Foods

The weather being clear and relatively mild, I took my dog Sylvie for a walk to the Madeleine, one of the centers of luxury French gastronomy. While I felt this was not the best year for Christmas displays, there were some interesting things in the windows.

Fauchon always has nice windows, and this year took the prize (notice the rare, gorgeous sky reflected in the window - it almost looks like it's done on purpose but the fact is I couldn't avoid it).

Hédiard makes the best pâtes de fruit and here is a nice arrangement.

Maison de la Truffe's window had some naked white truffles (a bargain this year at only $3107 per pound) as well as masses of foie gras incorporating their signature black truffles.

Caviar Kaspia featured an arrangement of, guess what?

Speaking of caviar, Prunier's display highlighted their caviar macarons, which I am now kicking myself for not trying (okay, I was a little put off by the $11 price tag for a single one, but still . . .)

 For chocolates, Patrick Roger featured Christmas tree sculptures . . .

. . . while Marquise de Sévigné took a more elegant, conservative approach.

Mariage Frères, the great tea purveyor, featured a seasonal "Christmas Pudding" blend

but also a tribute to Martin Luther King - "Thé I Have a Dream," in a rainbow-colored package.

Of course, the celebration also includes oysters, game, foie gras, vacherin de Mont d'Or and all manner of wonderful products of the land and sea from around the world. But that's another post.

Bobby Jay

Paris in June

Paris in June is a treat, even if, this year, it is cold and wet. The great thing is the amazing fruit, especially cherries, apricots, strawberries and melons that taste the way they are supposed to.

Marché de l'avenue du Président Wilson

I arrived yesterday but resisted the temptation to shop, preferring to wait until this morning for a trip to the open-air market on the Avenue du Président Wilson, my favorite.

High tech chocolates at Jadis et Gourmande

Later, walking my little Sylvie, I came across a new branch of chocolatier Jadis et Gourmande, where you can buy a chocolate iPhone or iPad.

Moroccan food with my niece later.

Bobby Jay

Trader Joe's Fabulous Truffles

Surely a list of the great edible things in this world would include chocolate, salted caramel and peanut butter.

Imagine, therefore, my pleasure in discovering a package of Trader Joe's truffles outside my door last night, left by my friend Piglet.

These little bites touch all three bases in a perfectly balanced way, and the quality of the chocolate is high by any standards. And all this without having to go to Paris, where you could only get two of the flavors (no peanut butter there) in any event.

Bobby Jay

Mario Batali Meets Jackson Pollack: Anisette Glazed Bittersweet Chocolate Tart

I have been wanting to make this cake, from Mario Batali's television show, for some time, and finally got to it last weekend, when a chocolate lover was coming to dinner. With a hint of Sambuca in the filling, a hint of cinnamon in the crust and the lovely Sambuca flavored icing, this is an unmistakably Italian pastry. It tastes as good as it looks, and is not difficult to make. Here's a link to the recipe.

Bobby Jay

Homemade Chocolates and Sous Vide Cooker - A Perfect Match

My friend Paul came over for one of our periodic chocolate-making afternoons yesterday. As usual, we tried a number of different chocolates: Valhrona Manjari 64%, Callebaut Bittersweet (unspecified percentage cacao) and Callebaut Milk Chocolate (also unspecified) and made a bunch of different shapes, including mendiants as well as six or seven molded shapes.

Assorted homemade chocolates

The challenging part of chocolate-making is tempering the chocolate, to get a snappy, shiny result. This involves slowly melting the chocolate, cooling it to 84°F (81°F for milk chocolate), then bringing it to 90°F (86°F for milk chocolate) and holding it pending use. With a good thermometer, it's not hard to hit the right marks, but it is exceedingly hard to keep the tempered chocolate at 90°F. This matters a lot, because if the temperature drops, it is hard to work with the chocolate.

The solution: use of a sous vide bath heated to 90°F. My friend Piglet and I just got a Sous-Vide Supreme, which is nothing more than a precise thermostatically controlled hot bath, but we have not yet learned to use it. However, I thought, why not put the 84°F chocolate into Ziploc bags and pop them into the sous vide until they reach 90°F? We could then hold the chocolate virtually indefinitely until we were ready to use it, cutting a small hold in the corner of the Ziploc and using it as a piping bag to form the chocolates. (I searched two sous vide cookbooks and the Internet for insights on this idea, but found none.) This method worked perfectly and avoided the need to carefully bring the chocolate up to temperature and then rush to use it before it cooled. (We had to do the milk chocolate without benefit of the sous vide technique because the 90°F temperature was too high.)

A note on chocolate. The easier dark chocolate to use was the Valhrona Manjari, which also has wonderful compexity and spiciness.  The Callebaut Bittersweet has a rich super-chocolaty taste that we really love but is tricky to use; we believe it has a cacao content in excess of 70%, which would suggest using slightly higher temperatures than for the Manjari. Next time we are planning to use Callebaut and Barry Venezuela 72%, which I bought in Paris, and go with a low temperature of 86°F and a holding temperature of 93°F.

Bobby Jay

Paris - Jadis et Gourmande's Autumn Chocolates

Today is my last day in Paris, so I went on my final food-gift shopping spree. Although I resisted the urge to buy their chocolates, I still loved the autumn windows at Jadis et Gourmande (see my post of June 28, 2012 for more on this chocolatier).

Chocolates at Jadis et Gourmande

Bobby Jay

Paris - Chocolate and Hazelnut Spreads

Jean-Charles Rochoux's Dark Chocolate and Hazelnut Spreads

On my recent trip to Paris, I went to Jean-Charles Rochoux, at 16 rue d'Assas, to buy their hazelnut ("l'Enfance") and dark chocolate ("l'Age de Raison") pâtes à tartiner. I suppose the hazelnut's name reflects that this spread is like Nutella on culinary steroids, and I guess dark chocolate is considered a flavor for adults. No matter what, the chocolate is excellent and the hazelnut is far better than that!

Bobby Jay

Paris - Gorgeous Chocolates

The French have a great expression for window shopping: faire du lèche-vitrine, literally to be a shop window licker. Here's a scene from a store window that invites that kind of conduct.

 Chocolates at Jadis et Gourmande

Jadis et Gourmande, 56, rue St-Placide, 75006 Paris (Métro St-Placide or Rennes) and elsewhere in Paris.

Bobby Jay

Joyeuses Pâques

It's Easter in Paris. Although this does not affect daily life much (Good Friday is not a holiday, but Easter Monday is), it is reflected in the windows of the city's pâtisseries and boulangeries. Here are some images.

Joyeuse Pâques cake at Dalloyau

Chocolate Easter eggs at Dalloyau

Breads at the famous Poilâne bakery

Bobby Jay

Sampling Chocolates

My friend Paul and I had another chocolate making session, sampling various chocolates in different applications. We tried Callebaut Bittersweet, Jacques Torres 60%, Ghirardelli 65% (obtained by mixing 60% and 70%), and, in deference to Paul's wife, a 40% milk chocolate called Jade that I found at Fairway.


The results: Jacques Torres produced a beautiful, somewhat complex chocolate that was easy to work with. Callebaut was denser, harder to work with, but deliciously bitter (my wife's favorite); it also had the snappiest texture. Ghirardelli was not easy to work with and did not have the complexity or pungency or texture that the others provided. Neither of us likes milk chocolate, but it is easy to work with once you get over how liquid it is, and produced beautifully defined shiny molded morsels, assorted leaves in our case. Paul's wife loved it.

So, Callebaut or Jacques Torres for now, but research continues. The best we ever used was the hard-to-find and expensive Valrhona Manjari that we used last September for my birthday party at the Institute for Culinary Education. It had a complex series of earthy and spicy notes that the others don't match. We need to try that one at home.

Also, there are people who swear by Scharffen berger, so we also need to give that one a try.

Bobby Jay

Paris - Salon de Chocolat

Is is possible to have too much chocolate? In a word, oui!

I went to the Salon de Chocolat in Paris last week and found it to be boring. I love chocolate, but it turns out that there are only so many things to do with it, and there is little regional or even national variation. So what you are left with is a huge number of displays by chocolate makers from France and all over Europe, most of which look like what you'd see at their shops or even at the big department stores. The saving grace is that you do get a lot of free samples.

















My big discovery was not chocolate, but rather an artisan pain d'épices maker from Aix-en-Provence, whose pain d'épices was the best I have ever tasted. Light (for this kind of mostly-honey cake) and incredibly perfumed, especially the orange, which I favored over the plain or the chocolate-flavored. I brought a chunk, cut from an enormous boule, to a friend the next day and she confirmed my high opinion as we gobbled it down for dessert.


My advice for chocolate lovers. Spend the 12.50 euros on chocolate, not admission to the Salon de Chocolat.

Bobby Jay