Pierre Hermé | Choqoa

If you really get into the sources and processes of the chocolate you eat, you’ll be likely to start feeling the tension between chocolate farm, manufacturers, and ‘chocolatiers’. To me it somehow became a playfull quest to figure out wether a ‘chocolatier’ works with his own bean-to-bar process (like Amedei, Bonnat etc) or if he is ‘merely’ a ‘pralinier’ who buys source material from e.g. Callebaut or Belcolade (eg Dominique Persoone). There’s nothing wrong with the latter, except off course if they’re trying to hide too hard. Like where would La Maison Du Chocolat buy theirs? I know where Galler is buying most of theirs

The other time when I was in Paris I finally had the time to visit the small shop of Pierre Hermé at Rive Gauche, St Germain. It was at that time when I got intrigued by hunting down what chocolate these world class chocolatiers were actually using. Previous efforts trying to demistify a Callebaut, Belcolade or Chocovic in chocolatier stores got me angry faces more than once
People queueing outside the street made clear where the action was. The store was looking gorgeous: small, clean, modern with a lot of sobrely designed wood putting all of the macarons and chocolate creations right in the centre of your attention. What caught my attention really were the prices! I don’t even dare to mention some of the ganache and truffles! On the shelves I spotted some bars including a “Origine Porcelana”, priced at a fat 10€. Wow, that is what I’d start to call really expensive stuff! I’ve bought Amedei at that price knowing that it was worth it, but here it was an investment for the truth. Turning towards a employee asking what the bar was made of, to my pleasant suprise he instantly revealed it was from Valrhona. I was struck by his open attitude as if he was used to answer the question. It even made me buy the overpriced Porcelana and some other bars to check out this Valrhona creation.

I don’t know what Hermé or Valrhona did wiht the bar, but I frankly was dissappointed. Where’s the taste gone, even the pacaking was rather cheap, with a bar coming wrapped in plastic foil. I had tasted much better Valrhona from their Plantation series in 2005 and 2006, but this one didn’t even come close to Porcelana As Magritte would say: ‘This is not a chocolate bar’. Lesson learned: if you want bars, buy bars from passionate bean-to-bar manufacturers.

That was the title on the cover of a magazine. The founder of El Bulli had a chocolate secret? Even for half an interesting page I had to buy that magazine! The article eventually is a nice introduction into the world of the purest fine dark origin cacao, and breathes my observations on the evolution chocolate has gone through during the latest years.

For long the label ‘Belgium’ evoked an atmosphere of best quality chocolate, linked to the craftsmanship of artisan chocolatiers that made ‘pralines‘, chocolate shapes filled with all kinds of flavoured fillings ranging from elaborated nuts, marzipan, pastes to liquor creams. And with a bunch of world class cacao producing brands on our soil too, we sure have a heritage in chocolate that would fill more than one book. Moreover even a lot of our tourism is driven by this chocolate attitude.
However times change, and since long to me Belgium is no longer a country of dark chocolate, but one of ‘just’ sweet chocolates. This small re-interpretation of the word “chocolate” vs. “chocolates” in English implies a whole lot of differences, it are even to very different worlds. Even our most famous “praliniers” like Pierre Marcolini and Dominique Persoone have actually (very) little to do with cacao or chocolate: they all focus on pushing and experimenting with flavours under the thin chocolate umbrella.

This article in Gentleman’s magazine appropriately puts one of the world’s top cacao brands in the spotlight: Amedei, the house of Alessio and Cecilia Tessieri. Brother and sister Tessieri build their brand after their learning period at the french master chocolatier Valrhona. For the record, Valrhona was the first chocolate brand ever to label a bar ‘Grand Cru‘. The marketing term was coined when the company launched the first single origin bar in 1986 (Guanaja 70%, a mixture from South America).
Since Tessieri left Valrhona and to take revenge for their split, they started to work from Tuscany on what became the world’s premium on chocolate, based on the finest single origin selection of Chuao and Porcelana cacaobeans. Since long Chuao is a tiny village located in the northern coastal range of Venezuela, where beans of a very rare quality are harvested. Valhrona used to be the main taker of the Chuao yields, bit through very hard negotiations and a diabolic price war, Amedei kicked Valrhona from Chuao and obtained the monopoly on the most desirable cacao beans in the world. It’s still unclear where brands like Bonnat get their Chuao beans from now for their signature bars.

In this niche of top level chocolate we also find competitors like Michel Cluizel, Domori, ScharffenBerger, Pralus and some more, but what makes them special is the fact that they work with single estate cacao, and control the process “from bean to bar”. They control the quality of each harvest, buy at the source or even run their own plantations. Secondly they do not rely on blends to maintain a stable taste pattern, but work with the yields of a single harvest. This results in a pure uncontaminated taste that allows variations in aromas depending on the harvest, just like in wine vintages. Valrhona effectively has 3 bars that are launched by single estate and by year: the Grand Couva, Palmira and Ampamakia. I’ve been buying them since 2005, and I’m looking forward to buy the 2008 edition on my trip to Paris later this year.

For connaisseurs, the Amedei is range is estimated to be the best in the world, lauded by the french Maître Chocolatier Pierre Hermé and the bespoken Ferran Adrià, chef of the world famous El Bulli restaurant in Spain. When I checked the Wikipedia entry for Amedei, to my surprise and pleasure the picture that accompanied the article was a photo of me that I actually took for my Afficionado collection! I bite that one