Chocolate has the feelgood factor
Oct 14 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post
Others range from curious to positively eye-watering, frequently with savoury ingredients which she insists chocolate complements perfectly. “I add chocolate to chilli con carne and over roast chicken with balsamic vinegar,” she says. “I’m always experimenting. We were asked to do dairy-free truffles, so we made them with water instead of cream.
“To give them creaminess, I added coconut milk. We’d had a Thai curry and I thought, lemongrass would go, and that’s how we got Thai Temptations.”
Current truffle flavours she makes include lemon and cumin, whiskey, black pepper and chilli, chilli and rose, and, in the summer, Moroccan mint – grown at home – and lime.
The only flavour didn’t work with chocolate, she says, was rosemary. “We tried it as a bar and as a truffle and it was quite gritty,” she admits.
But she insists her goats cheese and chocolate pizza – yes, on a proper pizza base – is a best seller.
Her adventurousness with chocolates is surprising, since Bala disliked chocolate until her 30s, finding it overly sweet and over-rated.
But being instructed by her doctor to take time off and rest, while she was pregnant five years ago, marked a U-turn.
“I was so bored I ended up reading this book called Real Chocolate,” says Bala.
“It encouraged chocolate tasting with all five senses – how it felt on the tongue, how it sounded, how it looked and how it tasted.”
The book piqued her interest and she signed up for an internet-based course called Ecole Chocolat, and learned how to make chocolates herself.
“Part of it was thinking I could use it to make cheap Christmas presents,” she admits. “Friends and family said I should sell it.” She set up two tables at Wirral Farmers Market and kept on getting awards. In 2006, she opened her first shop, the Chocolate Cellar, in Hamilton Square, Birkenhead.
On Nov 1,3 she’ll open an new venture in Hanover Street, Liver- pool, with a kitchen, a chocolate workshop, and a hot chocolate cafe.
“Even now it feels like a hobby because it’s still in the house,” she says. “Also because I love every minute of it and I can’t imagine doing anything else. But I love chocolate now than ever before.”
What is chocolate?
THE quality and flavour of chocolate starts with the Cacao plant.
There are three major varieties of Cacao bean – the Forastero, the rare Criollo, prized because it is less bitter and more aromatic than other varieties and used by the Maya, or a blend of the two called Trinitario.
About 80% of chocolate is made from cheap to cultivate Forestero plants, and about 10% from Trinitario.
After harvest, the cacao bean is dried or roasted, the husk split open and the nibs produced.
“If a farmer uses banana leaves to dry the beans on, it can infuse the chocolate with a subtle fruity flavour,” says Bala’s husband, Marcus, “but they might even use Tarmac where the process leaves a less appetising flavour.”
The cocoa nibs are ground until they yield cocoa powder and cocoa butter. Here the butter is often removed to be used for cosmetics and replaced with cheaper vegetable fats. Belgian chocolate also has the addition of vanilla – Bala advises buyers to read the ingredients to check yeast-derived artificial version, vanillan, is not used instead.
Dark chocolate is cocoa, cocoa butter and sugar. Milk chocolate has the addition of condensed or powdered milk, and more sugar. Generally, the lower the percentage of cocoa solids, the more sugar is added.
“The percentage you see is the percentage of cacao bean material, cocoa powder and cocoa butter,” says Marcus.
Bala’s favourite is El Rey – Venezuelan chocolate made from Triniterio beans, with 73% cocoa solids – intense but not bitter.
Share
