Chocolate News

I really have nothing against chocolate.  In its bar form, in fact, it is something I enjoy with all the savor and associations of great wine.  In it’s bar form I probably eat half a pound a day, or maybe more when the stars are in alignment.

But chocolate as a theme, as a concept, as a pattern, a fashion, a mode — no.  Nay.  I do not like it.  My initial, invertebrate response when my personal friend and professional chocolate supplier David Briggs said he was making a chocolate dinner was to recoil into a dark crevice somewhere, staring through the briny depths of my eyes with octopus horror.  Sucking cold brine through my gills, my brain is reduced to its bivalve origins.  Chocolate, my dear friend, is a food.

But immediately after that my knowledge of Dave, who owns and operates Xocolatl de David and is also Sous Chef at Park Kitchen, returned to assure me.  Mr. Briggs’s unassuming manner cloaks a sophisticated palate, unflinching creativity, and an ever-expanding set of skills .  So why not?  A seven course chocolate-based meal paired with seven beverages, served at Park Kitchen, one of Jennifer and my favorite restaurants in town, and a place we freely recommend to out of town visitors and locals alike who visit The Meadow.

If Jennifer had qualms she didn’t express them; she just grabbed my hand and dragged me to Park Kitchen where 14 people (two cowardly louts failed to honor their reservation) were seated with the preliminary awkwardness that inevitably attends such public-private group encounters.

“Aren’t we all suppose to be friends now?” I wondered, aloud, trying to hide my agoraphobia.  “Can’t we all just sort of snuggle?”

Eventually (at my request) the empty chairs of the two no-shows were removed and I managed to coax two of the several attendees at the far end of the table (Western Culinary Institute students whom I soon came to adore after one of them plunked down $100 bucks cash to go Dutch on a chicken-infused mescal) to move in closer.  We soon had more of a hive of hushed buzzing buzz of expectation going.

My only complaint of the entire evening had nothing to do with Dave, and happened right at the start.  Strangely, the cocktail waitress asked Jen and I if we wanted a drink (which prompted the involuntary response of “YES”) from both of us.  Then, strangely, she brought the cocktails, and then, within 15 seconds (because I do drink fast enough that any later and I wouldn’t have noticed) she served champagne intended as a pairing for the amuse bouche that was about to come out.  There I am, listening to the sommelier’s explanation of a Jose Michele Pinot Meunier Champagne, fist still gripped around a very pickly and aromatic martini, and wondering how I am supposed to taste either.

Out of deference to the flow of the evening, my beautiful martini was left to grow gradually warmer, eventually exiting the table at the end of the evening as an undistinguished swill of grain alcohol and oil and brine and herbs.  Poor thing.  Jennifer was in the same predicament of cocktail-interruptus as I, the experience for which we paid something on the order of 24 dollars!

The Champagne was a distinctly forgettable Jose Michele Pinot Meunier Champagne, but on the heals of it service came Dave’s first creation–ingeniously conceived and masterfully executed: a smoked cocoa butter and olive oil emulsion on toast.  What the hell?

That, topped with a few flecks of Iburi Jio Cherry cherrywood roasted deep sea salt from Japan.  What the hell?

It looked like a slightly scary pat of butter; sort of a redolent beige reminiscent of some of the truly evil cheeses of southern England or the Alpine regions of France.  Upon touching the lips, the thing melted into nothingness, bypassed the mouth’s organs of taste altogether and rocketed straight to the olfactory nether regions where it did unfamiliar and delightful things to the brain.

Next up was a HUB lager chelada, a sophisticated version of what I always knew as a Michelada — effectively a bloody mary with beer substituting in for vodka, and maybe some habenero peppers tossed in for good measure.

Dave then served corn milk ganache fritter with piperade.  The corn was sweet, so he used 100% dark chocolate, for a crunchy beignet-like thing with the rich, corny, sweet pleasantly gooey inside.  Very un-chocolately and yet very chocolately at the same time: an achievement in it’s own right.

Next up came a “chocolate panzanella” that was just that.  But this was possibly the most beautiful panzanella imaginable, chocolate or otherwise.  Crusty chocolate brioche, multicolored cherry tomato halves, string beans (haricot verts?), and certainly among the finest fresh-marinated anchovies I’ve eaten outside of Italy; all of which was drizzled with a harisa-like dressing of tomato reduction and cocoa.  Citrusy (from the anchovies and tomatoes), teetering toward hearty, and at the same time garden fresh-tasting, served with an acceptable La Bota de Manzanilla Sherry.

Then came the pork belly confited in non-deodorized cocoa butter, which retains its characteristic earthy, musty, woodsy smells.   It was served with chanterelles and white beans and was just totally over the top in the way of classical French magic acts, suspending richness, subtlety, and body in midair and gliding hoops over it: see, no strings attached.  (Granted Dave says he was inspired by a recent trip to Spain.)  The dish was served with a 2006 Chateau de Segries Lirac, which had all the friskiness of a late-model Oldsmobile sedan with no gasoline.  The pork belly was so compelling that I hardly noticed.

Next up came what, if I must name a star of the show (and why not), fit the bill.  Chilled chocolate consommé and a dollop of crème fraîche-like goat cheese, sprinkled with crunchy green nutty pepitas.  Again, so delicate, so nice, so jam packed with je ne sais quoi I really don’t think I’ll even bother.  It was bliss.  Everybody freaked out.  And then to top it off, the sommelier hit one out of the park, pairing the dish with a Del Maguey Chichicapa Mezcal that just…  destroyed.

“Chichicapa is 2 hours south of Oaxaca, and 2 hours to the west on a dirt road. The pueblo elevation is about 7,000 feet. Chichicapa is separated from the valley of Oaxaca by a mountain range. The valley is broad, about thirty miles deep and ten miles wide. The climate is desert and tropical, with banana trees, guava, mangoes and other exotic fruits. Faustino Garcia Vasquez is the maker of Chichicapa. He is a humble and talented craftsmen with great respect for the ancient processes.”

Faustino is a god, or perhaps, rather, a fallen angel.  Faustino probably parades around Chichicapa in a kilt, speaks Spanish with a thick brogue, lullabies his bambinos to bed with the bagpipes, and eats haggis, neeps, and tatties for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I am a passionate lover of mezcal and tequila, but my passions are alloyed with an irrepressible manly need for dalliance with single malt scotch whiskey — particularly of the highland variety.  If Faustino bartered his soul to the devil in exchange for the powers to concoct mezcal, he most assuredly came away with the bargain.

The mezcal, for all its fulminations and flourishes, just purred like a kittycat on the lap of the ineffably yummy chocolate consommé, chilly-aromatic goat cheese, and pepita bits.  Women squirmed in their seats, dissolved into the ether.  Men fashioned spears from chair legs and went out spearfishing for barracuda.

Next to last was a trio of mostly single origin chocolate ice creams: a Claudio Corallo 75%, something or another from Madagascar (Valrhona?), and a milk chocolate that I cannot recollect.  Each was served with a few crystals of a different sort of finishing salt.  The ice cream was served with a “chocolate soda” that was crisp and refreshing and “more or less” non-alcoholic.

Last came chocolate milk and a nougaty-nutty cookie, which was starting to be more food than I needed, but which I obligingly wolfed down.

And I forgot to mention that maybe every dish was sparked to its fullest expression with a few grains of strategically selected finishing salt.  Be still my heart — there was the regal Pangasinan Star, there was glowering Halen Mon Gold, there was the trusty Fleur de sel de l’Ile de Noirmoutier.

Dave, enough already.  Open your own restaurant.

Mark Bitterman :: Sep.19.2008 :: Chocolate Happenings, Chocolate Musings :: 1 Comment »

Edging my rental car through Barcelona’s rush hour traffic at eight in the morning, a light mist is falling, my window is down, and the roaring freeway air carries the distinctly European aroma of diesel exhaust blended with two-stroke exhaust, cigarette smoke, and urine. After the 16 hours of travel it took me to get here from Portland, the snug, stylish seat of the Leon 2.0 TDI car hurts my rear, which has already suffered enough abuse after successive transcontinental and transatlantic flights. I remember the bar of Michel Cluizel chocolate the bag beside me.

I’ve not yet eaten the Vila Gracinda chocolate, which Michel Cluizel recently substituted in for the Tamarina bar as its representative for the company’s São Tomé origin bar. Chocolate’s intrigue for me is bound up in its power to surprise, and in the way it enlists the sensualist, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet in us to taste and make sense of it. The importance of a chocolate bar is not in its flavor, but in the experience it evokes in us. A good chocolate bar is travel, sex, and mescaline in a foil wrapper; it imparts exotic knowledge, alerts our bodies, and exalts the mind. Through our experience of chocolate we trace the lineage of our private and collective histories.

Tired, suddenly strangely lonely, but with the metallic tingle of adrenaline from the abnormally rough 767 landing just half an hour ago, I pull Michel Cluizel’s Vila Gracinda from its black box, peel back the foil, and snap off a piece. The gray sky above fades. The smell of fennel pollen and alkaline rock, the palm of one hand pressed hard into the vanilla-flaked bark as I climb along the vast trunk of a fallen oak. Eight years old, I leapt toward the small gray lizard with a blinding flash of optimism; the beasts, warmed by the early afternoon sun, were fast, like self-firing bullets invented by some once-famous but now long-forgotten Chinese firework master, a reptile blend of charcoal, sulfur, and salt peter. Dispersed among the toppled wreckage of ancient oak trees, these dragons in miniature were the proud sentries of the valley oak savannah where I conducted reconnaissance virtually every day of my childhood.

The lizards and I shared an uneasy relationship. We probably desired a similar notion of peace, or at least détente–but at the time their reptilian cortex and my boyish fixations were unable to merge sufficiently to establish the proper metaphysical framework for advancing such a union. As the years passed, I became skillful at hunting these reptilian projectiles–which is to say that I did in fact occasionally catch them, as I did this day. Under my hand, the animal struggled madly, but once lifted in my palm, it calmed, cocking its head, and looked at me with its eagle eyes.

The pursuit of lizards was the chief solace I found in the cruel span demarcated on one side by the day I realized (at the tender age two) of my mother’s breast was now irretrievable reserved for my baby sister, and on the other by the day my alert fingers discovered the intriguing parts of the first, miraculous female who agreed to be my girlfriend.

I recall my sister’s ascension with perfect clarity: on vacation, our wood-paneled station wagon trundling through the desert to Palm Springs, my little legs dangling from the vinyl bench seat, unable to reach the floor, an Oreo dissolving on my tongue. My father had just bought me–probably at a truck stop–a fabulously long armed, white furred stuffed monkey whose arms I was wrapping in knots around the head of my baby sister, who was sitting beside me. This blissful moment tormenting my sister with monkey love was interrupted when my mother reached back and lifted her to the front seat. My brother, who was younger than me by a year and older than my sister by as much, said he wanted to go up front, too. My mom had replied, “Mommy is for baby now.” The scales fell from my eyes. Baby sister snuggled to my mother’s bosom, little brother rebuffed and stunned with a paste of Oreo cookie crumbs around his trembling mouth, myself, forgotten. The clammy lagoon of time yawned open, and into it I plunged, left to struggle in murk until my little legs grew long enough to reach bottom.

I was allowed at a blessedly early age to set out alone with my dog, patrolling the fields that ranged from the back yard garden to swaths of coastal sage scrub and ceanothus chaparral. In the purple dusk coyotes would flicker like shadows, killing cottontails. In the morning bobcats would perch on rocky outcroppings, keeping a weather eye out for the puma that occasionally came down in search of water—a massive animal that had once sized me up from a distance of no more than 30 feet. I was wild then, for moments.

Warm air filled with mustard flower and the fragrance of thirty species of drying savanna grass, moist cool air emulsified with chanterelle spores, loam, and wet rocks: these were the climates in which my animal senses waged their long, unsuccessful insurrection against the formidable contours of logic, psychology, and even pathology which, even at the tender years of my life, gripped me. Given their way, the mountains would have had me emerge a sage or a prophet, but I had issues. Tant pis.

Still, the universe of arid silence, the tactile cappuccino laying of thermals rising from the sea, the stern hues of avocado and olive, the yeasty flavor of a stem of helicopter grass–this was the brew on which my senses were honed. The warm scale of my lizard captive, his iridescent blue belly, the surprisingly strong musk–all ineluctable pleasures of predatory boyhood. Had his not smelled so bad, I might have tried to eat him: his blood driving me to madness, I would have gone feral, fashioned myself an elaborate headdress of mud, sycamore leaf, and peacock feather, the wolf-boy of Santa Barbara. Biology had other ideas. The transformation of my ascetic sensibilities into the more fecund desire to dally in drugs, sex, and food took place with the discovery of the female.

The unexpected import of these beings was revealed to me a few weeks after I met a girl who, dark eyes and pale skinned, beautiful as stained glass, was playing Space Invaders at the video arcade not far from my house. I cannot remember a single word we ever spoke to one another, but I remember her body like a terse poem. Her oblivious parents would feed me chili dogs whenever we emerged from the bedroom. My sense of those days consists principally of her female taste and the smell of Hormel wafting in from the kitchen. We spent a year together before I grew arrogant, and ended it in the delusional belief that my lonely lizard-hunting years were behind me, and that I was now free.

The brake lights refracted in pellets of moisture on the windshield go abruptly silver. The elaborate camphor of licorice and fermenting fruits and baking spice dissipated by the Vila Gracinda chocolate bar dissolve past decades into the present. Traffic is letting up. My sore butt returned to me, suggesting some walking, and when I get out of the car at the next rest stop, the arid landscape of Catalonia carries the smell of sagebrush and almond blossoms.

Mark Bitterman :: Oct.05.2007 :: Chocolate Musings, Dark Chocolate, Single Origin Chocolates :: No Comments »