Tags
bars, beans, chocolate, clove, cocoa, experience, fun, gluten free, London, Paul A. Young, peppermint, rose, Soho, spice, truffle, workshop
Do you remember way back when I started this blog, I made a cake for my sister and the cake had chocolate writing on top? The cake was great, but what annoyed me was that instead of being smooth and glossy, the chocolate writing was dull with white streaks in. Since then, I’ve developed a bit of an interest in chocolate (working with it, rather than just eating it) starting with a chocolate truffle class I went to last September.
Following that class, I’ve dramatically expanded my knowledge (realising some of that post needs to be updated/corrected). Ever since dropping in to another truffle class with Paul A. Young at The Cake and Bake Show last summer, I have wanted to go to one of the chocolate making workshops that are run at Paul’s flagship store on Wardour street in Soho, London.
A word of warning:
I have no idea how I’m going to keep this post short, but if your read no further, all you need to know is that it was a fantastic afternoon and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in chocolate.
Got a little more time to know why?
It may seem a little pricy at £175, but if you break that down it’s just £35 per hour, with the true experts teaching you and involves a lot of ridiculously good chocolate that you wouldn’t get access to on the high street/wouldn’t want to pay for to just experiment with. You also walk away with a goody bag filled with treats. So really, it’s a bargain.
The day – tasting
Head chocolatier Michael Lowe ran the afternoon with the help of assistant chocolatier Chip, and apprentice Caesar. We started off with an introduction to chocolate, how the beans are grown, farmed roasted and turned into chocolate, before moving on to taste 8 different chocolates of different origins, percentages and from different companies.
As soon as you start paying attention to the different flavour notes in chocolate, you realise just how interesting and complex chocolate can be – like fine wine or really good coffee. Contrary to popular opinion, the percentage of a chocolate doesn’t indicate anything other than the amount of cocoa solids in the chocolate, and cocoa solids are made up of a combination of the cocoa mass and cocoa butter. You can have an 83% chocolate that is going to be one of the smoothest chocolates you’ve ever tasted and a 64% that has a much stronger distinctive flavour. As with wine and coffee, the flavour of chocolate completely depends on the region it originates from and the way that it is roasted. If it tastes bitter, the chances are something’s gone wrong in the production process; no matter what the percentage, good chocolate should never really be described as bitter.
Getting messy – Ganache
After we’d tasted a number of chocolates, we moved on to the messy stuff. Obviously, not until we’d had a salted caramel chocolate as a palette cleanser. First up we made ganache, but good ganache. Simply put, bring cream and sugar to the boil and add to chocolate that has been broken in to smaller chunks. Whisk by hand and the heat from the cream will melt the chocolate. The bit that was new to me though is next; crack out the hand blend and blend it. Why? It helps emulsify the ganache and breakdown all the crystals in the chocolate, making it lovely and smooth.
When it came to flavouring the ganache, we got to go nuts in their flavour store. So. Much. Fun! Think of the most random flavour you can and the chances are that they will have it. Having said that, they had run out of my first choice of bergamot so instead I went with clove and peppermint. Yep, you read that right, clove and peppermint. Trust me, it works.
The REALLY fun bit – Tempering
Having made ganache we moved on to tempering. I’ve touched on tempering before, and I now know I was way off point with what I’ve previously written. Tempering is fairly technical, a bit of a tricky art form and definitely deserves it’s own post (I’ll link it up when I’ve written it up). However I will say this – I will never get bored of pouring lots of lovely melted chocolate out onto a table and smooshing (yep, that’s totally a word and you now exactly what it means) it around. What learnt from my day at Paul A. Young was that speed is of the essence when working with the chocolate on the table, and it is MUCH easier to temper larger quantities of chocolate. Also, heat guns (or a hair dryer) are really useful for keeping the chocolate warm and at a working temperature.
As well as making truffles from our ganache, we used the tempered chocolate to make bars and again got to flavour them ourselves – I went with rose petal masala and cocoa nibs. When making bars, make sure you remember to tap the mould hard on the work surface to get rid of any air bubbles.
The Fridge – friend or foe?
Something else I learnt was that the fridge can actually, sometimes, be your friend. Shocker, right? I’ve always worked under the assumption that the fridge and chocolate do not get on. Turns out, when you’re working with chocolate the fridge can be very useful for chilling your bars in the first instance, but only for a short period of time. I would, however, always chill the ganache in the fridge, preferably overnight, as this will make it much easier to roll.
Home time
Before I knew it, we had rolled our final truffles, dusted our finished chocolate bars and packaged everything up ready to take home. We left with the best party bags ever (filled with chocolate) and my only complaint from the day is that time just went too damn quickly.
Workshop Details
The workshops run on the first Saturday of every month and are for anyone with any experience in chocolate – even if it’s just eating it!
If you’re interested in going to one of the workshops, check out their website or give their Soho shop a call on 020 7437 0011.