PARS.- Traditionally, the chocolate It comes in three colors and flavors, black, white and milk chocolate, and now a fourth version is the cause of a culinary and commercial fight between France y Swiss.
Blonde chocolate, whose tone may remind you of Argentine dulce de leche, has a flavor between caramel and toasted and is the result of a mistake, explains French chef Frdric Bau.
In 2012, this chef was in Japan, giving some courses, when he left a white chocolate in a bain-marie for… four days. “It was something between chance and magic, he became blonde. And I discovered a chocolate with an incredible color and smell,” explains this creation director of the French chocolatier Valrhona.
“This chocolate is like me, the result of a mistake!” adds this chef, who immediately saw the commercial potential of this discovery.
Recipe for success
Valrhona needed seven years of trials to stabilize the formula for this new chocolate.
The recipe is secret, but the origin is known in the world of cooking: it is known as the Maillard reaction or glycosylation, a chemical transformation that colors the raw material with a brownish tone that can range from coffee with milk to dark brown ( for example, the crust that forms on a piece of meat).
Blonde chocolate maintains the higher fat content of white chocolate, but contains less sugar, which gives it a softer, caramelized flavor, with a background of roasted coffee.
Pastry chefs are not very addicted to white chocolate because it is fattier and more difficult to work with.
With blonde, a whole new range of variations opens up, for example associating it directly with hazelnuts, as does the French pastry chef from Nice Philippe Tayac, or as a fondant that accompanies some baked apples, a suggestion by Frderic Bau, who also advises Break up the flavors with some forest fruits, for example, strawberries.
Obstacles
Valrhona has not, however, managed to overcome an administrative obstacle in France: an official decree from 1976 that establishes that chocolate, to be considered as such, must have a minimum of 35% cocoa, and that establishes the three current categories.
There is no consensus to modify that decree at the moment. Consequently, blonde chocolate, which other manufacturers are already imitating, is still legally a derivative of white chocolate, a color that was invented in the 1930s by Nestlé in Switzerland.
And at the same time, there is another competitor in the battle to one day become the fourth official color of chocolate: pink or Ruby, promoted with large doses of marketing by the Swiss giant Barry Callebaut.
That color comes from cocoa pods with a particular color and flavor.
The battle for the fourth color is underway, in a context of historically high cocoa prices, at 10,000 dollars per ton.
FUENTE: AFP
