CREATIVE COUVERTURES

Chefs experiment with new, intense flavors and vivid colors in the world of chocolate // By

Robert Wemischner

Like kids in a candy store (pun intended), pastry chefs are eagerly experimenting with the latest creations from chocolate companies: flavored chocolates (more properly called couvertures), which, by definition, must contain a minimum of 32 percent cocoa butter content. Here, flavor, color, texture and innovation are all wrapped up in an easy-to-use package — a boon to the often understaffed pastry chef.

Although quite different in composition, new lines of chocolate from Valrhona and Callebaut’s flavored callets allow chefs to amplify and contrast flavors in everything from mousses and bonbon fillings to vibrant plating sauces and accent glazes on pastries and cookies.

Valrhona’s line includes three flavors — strawberry, passion fruit and almond, each made with cocoa butter, sugar, added fat and flavorings. Yuzu and raspberry varieties are on the horizon. The passion fruit flavor is based on powdered passion fruit juice; the strawberry one gets its intense fruity flavor from freeze-dried strawberries. For the almond variety, defatted almonds are mixed with cocoa butter, sugar and lecithin.

“With its toasty flavor profile, it’s a bit like white chocolate aspiring to be milk chocolate when it grows up,” says executive pastry chef Miro Uskokovic of New York City’s Union Square Hospitality Group. “I like to use these as the basis for ganache filling in bonbons.”

Callebaut’s line also offers a range of flavors, including orange, lemon, cappuccino, honey, strawberry and lemon with the most recent additions being yogurty-tart Ruby made from pink-hued cacao beans and Gold, a pale, amber-colored couverture with caramel notes. In addition, they contain cocoa butter, which means that the callets can be more easily tempered. When properly done, the resulting shell of a confection or glaze on a pastry or cookie made from these will have a snap and a shine — like all truly tempered chocolates have. As a bonus, many of these new lines of chocolate are also vegan, which allow pastry chefs and confectioners alike to appeal to that growing segment of the population.

David Chow, an artisanal chocolatier in Toronto, who creates seasonal collections as well as a core array of year-round confections, is very inspired by flavored chocolates. “I find that the Inspiration products react similarly to white chocolate,” he says. “I combine waffle cookies with the strawberry Inspiration as an accent and use this blend as a filling in my molded chocolates. I love the natural color that it brings to my fillings.”

Sean Considine, pastry chef of Jean-Georges restaurants in New York City, likes that many of the new flavored chocolates on the market are fat soluble. He often adds a bit of oil to thin them down, and then uses it in brushstrokes to complement the flavor of the main elements of a plated dessert. “I also like to use strawberry flavors as a filling for a pistachio financier, a rich slightly dense, sponge cake-based cookie, which is served as an after dessert mignardise plate at the restaurant,” he says.

Kriss Harvey, the creative mastermind behind andSons Chocolatiers in Beverly Hills, Calif., uses Callebaut’s Inspiration line to create a thin, shiny shell containing a nutted filling for her chocolate creations. These treats are created in a revolving angled pan in which the melted flavored couverture is gradually added to coat the centers, not unlike the process for making malted milk balls. With this product’s relatively high price point, Harvey likes to use it sparingly as an outer finishing layer on items that already feature other white or milk chocolate products.

Patrice Demers, creator-owner of namesake Patrice Pâtissier in Quebec, has made creative use of the Valrhona’s Inspiration line for a vegan-friendly, passion fruit and almond cream dessert, based on almond milk, pectin and a tropical flavored couverture. Demers also uses the flavored couvertures in a 2-to-1 ratio with cocoa butter for thinning out to coat frozen parfaits on a stick. Through his in-house research and development department, he has found that desserts based on the Valrhona line can be frozen with no change in texture or flavor intensity. This helps the production bakery turn out a wide variety of products without artificial flavors or colors daily. Both lines are sought by chocolatiers and pastry chefs wishing to add layers of flavor or complement the flavor of their base desserts.

Adding flavored couvertures to a crème anglaise or non-dairy base, stabilized by gelatin or a seaweed-based setting agent (for vegan or vegetarian desserts) is a first step to many new wave desserts. Lightening the mixture with either an Italian meringue or whipped cream, or both, or even an aquafababased meringue made from the liquid used in canned legumes leads to a whole new world of fillings, verrine layers, puff pastry-based napoleons and so much more. The arrival of these new couverture products on the ingredients scene no doubt helps forward-thinking pastry chefs remain open to new ideas when it comes to creating arrays of sweets with new flavors and textures.

Robert Wemischner is a longtime instructor of professional baking at Los Angeles Trade Technical College and the author of four books including The Dessert Architect and Cooking With Tea. He also teaches a course in restaurant management.