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Originally posted by Montegrano

I think it’s quite obscene and wasteful, more so than the following recipe I incidentally received in an E-mail this afternoon about a hot chocolate recipe served in a B.R. Guest restaurant (in NY). It calls for 1 cup of Amedei Chuao chocolate, then of all things: 1 cup cocoa powder, 1 cup brown sugar, 2 cups cream, 1 cup sugar, 2 tbsp. water. This is just disgusting, folks, so let’s end it at that.

In the Serendipity 3 case, why bother blending 28 “cocoas,” and more to the point, 14 of the world’s rarest and most exotic? In no way possible will one ever taste the unique flavor of each “cocoa.” It’s maddening.

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Yeah, I’ve always wondered about that. What makes so many people thing a greater number of *types* of cocoa in the same recipe will somehow make things better? More often than not it just ends up confusing flavours, and with 28 the end will be nothing but generic. Furthermore, note that 14 are apparently *not* in the “rarest and most exotic category… could these be Callebaut bulk couvertures?[;)]
I also think that unless they’re prepared to state exactly what the identity of the 28 are this is useless information. For anyone interested in chocolate, unless you actually can know which chocolates were used, knowing that there were 28 doesn’t help you appreciate the result in the slightest.

There *is* a place for different chocolates in a dessert, when you have a piece built up of components, where each component is different and works best with a different chocolate – but here this requires careful skill in selection and matching.

An equally perplexing thing I see all the time is people trying to come up with the “ultimate” chocolate recipes for chocoholics – supposedly the most intensely chocolatey experiences – and seek to achieve this with different classes of chocolate, so that the piece will claim to use 3 chocolates, bittersweet, semisweet, and milk. Of course if you want the most intensely chocolatey experience this isn’t what you want to do at all – you want instead to triple the amount of bittersweet.

I note also that the chocolate dessert in question is frozen. While there is a place for chilled chocolate desserts, the most intense and involving chocolate desserts are warm, because chocolate’s flavour fades when chilled, and it seems especially bizarre to introduce this with winter coming on. Notice also that the price is artificially inflated – in the sense that a great deal of the price isn’t in the chocolate itself or in the labour that went into the manufacture but rather to non-chocolate ingredients (gold) and paraphernalia.

One proposal that I might make, though, to counter such absurdities: Why not round up a really good celebrity chef with a passion for chocolate desserts to create something truly special and extraordinary without the use of extraneous and unessential ingredients, with a price tag to beat the aforementioned item, the proceeds of the sale thereof to go to a fund to improve working conditions in chocolate-producing areas? That would be a positive way to make a record.

Alex Rast
Alex_Rast_Alternate@hushmail.com