Being the Third Wheel in Chocolate Class
Belgium is known for many things – chocolate, beer, waffles, the EU, protests about the EU… The Belgians do chocolate differently than the rest of the world. I’m not sure how or why, but Belgium has the best chocolate that I’ve found in my travels. Marriott, the hotel chain, gave me $100 to spend on a Marriott experience for my recent birthday. This was basically a tour or other excursion that I could book through the Marriott website. When in Brussels, I had no real choice but to take a Belgian chocolate workshop.
The first sign that this was going to be awkward came when I signed up and the website defaulted to two people instead of a single person. Second, I’m a single guy in Brussels on a weekend. When I arrived at the workshop site I quickly realized that there were a lot of couples or groups of sisters present. Everyone came with someone else. As people took their cooking stations, I had the awkward moment of having to select which group I was going to crash. Would it be the two Serbian sisters closest to me? The couple from Paris? The couple from Antigua? The other couple from France? Or the big group of sisters from Alaska.
First I tried the Serbian sisters. After successfully tempering the chocolate for them, it became clear that they wanted me out. I couldn’t get the spoon and they told me to find somewhere else to go.
The French couple next to them also told me they didn’t have room at their table. The Antiguans had a selfie cam running the entire time, and it would be awkward being the white guy crashing their Instagramable moments. The Alaska sisters were my last hope.
I should probably say now that I grew up working with chocolate, tempering and making chocolate treats with my family each year. I may not be able to bake a cake from scratch and my caramel skills need some work, but chocolate is a medium I understand.
The Alaska sisters were modest to the extreme. They didn’t want to get chocolate on their hands. They didn’t want to make a mess. It’s chocolate. It is the ideal medium for making delicious messes. It belongs on hands. They also couldn’t figure out the tempering thing. The chocolate we were using was some of the best quality chocolate I’ve ever worked with. Tempering this stuff was easy – it wanted to come to temperature and then cool down to working temperatures. It flowed off the spoon like silk. This was chocolate anyone could master.
After tempering the chocolate, we had to coat the insides of our molds. This was a process I hadn’t done before, but I’ve seen it done enough times on TV that it looked fairly easy. The two sisters took a shot at it first – they very carefully put a little chocolate in the mold, tapped the bubbles out and poured out the excess. I took a different approach. I ladled the chocolate into the mold so I got plenty of coverage, aggressively tapped it to cover all the corners, poured out the excess chocolate and scrapped it clean. My hands got chocolate on them. It was wonderful.
The molds were taken away to cool, and then we made blobs of chocolate with nuts on parchment paper. I made three blobs, let the chocolate set a little, then curled my parchment paper into a tube and sealed the seam with chocolate. The instructors hadn’t see this done before and were skeptical. I saw it on Netflix once and thought it looked cool. It was placed in the freezer with the rest of the creations from our class to set.
Going into the class I knew I couldn’t take this chocolate home with me. I don’t have enough room in my suitcase for chocolate that isn’t professionally packaged. Also, I want to give my friends and family the good stuff – not the stuff I made in class that may or may not have too much filling and leak.
The instructors made a simple ganache for us to use as filling in our molds. Then we were given syrups and nuts we could use as well. They provided salt for us, because salt and chocolate and nuts are amazing together. The salt doesn’t mind being the third wheel in this creation.
Again, the sisters took their fillings seriously – making sure the chopped nuts were the right shape and that they filled everything just right. I chopped some hazelnuts, put some strawberry syrup in some of the molds and caramel syrup in the others, topped it off with ganache, added a little salt and then sealed it with tempered chocolate. I tapped to remove any air pockets, and then scraped of the excess chocolate. I started last and was the first done in the entire class. And my stuff looked great. The sisters asked me to take a photo of them. I took their phone and got some candid shots that they will probably not be sharing on Instagram. Shaking chocolate molds isn’t the best look for most people. At least they now have the experience documented.
With the class done, the last couple from Paris who I hadn’t talked with started talking with me. It turns out they are really cool people and spoke better English than the Alaska sisters (or it was at least louder). Damn they would have been great to work with…
As a final note, I’m writing this from the 27th floor of my hotel, in my room overlooking a square and trying to figure out how much chocolate is too much chocolate to eat and still be able to sleep tonight. I think that threshold may be well behind me. This chocolate is too good to waste…
Chocolate...
