Persoone (pictured) is the most famous chocolate maker in Bruges, a city of chocolate makers. Among foodies, he’s the most famous in the country, and one of only three chocolatiers featured in the Michelin Guide. He’s the most adventurous of all of his celebrated neighbours because he’s working on a limited playing field: Persoone pairs everything with chocolate. Where three-star chef Peter Goossens puts curry in his langoustines, and Dutch master chef Sergio Hermans uses oysters with cockles and sake jus, Persoone pairs both ingredients with chocolate.
“I’m a cook, not a real chocolate maker, so that’s why I have a little bit of a different vision of making chocolate and of tastes,” he explains. “In the beginning, when you make chocolates with cauliflower or peas or smoked eel, people look at you like, what’s going on? But after a while, particularly since we made it into the Michelin Guide, they took us more seriously.”
Since starting with a cauliflower praline, his range has expanded in ever more unlikely directions: chocolates with wasabi, olive oil, saffron (see sidebar). He makes chocolates for some of the country’s most famous restaurants, including the Comme Chez Soi in Brussels and Hof Van Cleve in Kruishoutem and for Hermans’ Oud Sluis. “Its very important to listen to the chefs – to how they see a great flavour combination. And of course the vision of Mr Wynants from Comme Chez Soi and the vision of Sergio Hermans from Oud Sluis are very different.”
Persoone also works with Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck in England, considered one of the best chefs in the world. And he made his own expeditions to Mexico and other chocolate-producing countries. That brought the rustic recipe of the Aztecs together with molecular gastronomy.
“I really wanted to make the mole poblano,” he explains, referring to the Mexican chicken and chocolate sauce recipe. “I was thinking, how can I make a chocolate with chicken inside? This is why its very interesting to work with the great chefs – one of the latest things in the kitchen was a device to make crunchy chips with the skin of chickens or duck. So we took a big fat chicken, took off its skin, boiled it in salted water, dried it and fried it. You get a kind of kroepoek made of chicken skin; you smash that up and mix it with the herbs, and you have the mole poblano inside of the chocolate.”
It sounds slightly mad. But that madness is in big demand.
Persoone was the only chocolatier invited as a guest to the recent Flemish Primitives event in Bruges, at which food professionals from around the world learn about new techniques in gastronomy and especially food pairing. The event is organised by Bernard Lahousse, founder of the website www.foodpairing.be, where anyone can find out which two foodstuffs, on the basis of molecular analysis, go together.
Events like the Flemish Primitives allow Persoone to give full rein to his Willy Wonka tendencies: last year he had the audience watch a film of a baby and listen to a baby cry while they ate a praline in the shape of a breast leaking sweet milk. They also tasted a praline containing the essence of cut grass while viewing scenes from an English garden.
Isn’t there a danger of innovating for innovation’s sake? “The problem is that people are judging before they taste,” he responds. “In France when I say I make chocolate with fried onions, their faces go grey. If you’re about to eat something, and your brain’s already telling you it’s going to be disgusting, well, it’s going to be disgusting. But if you say hmm, maybe that could be fun, you’ll try it and find the right balance between chocolate and the product, whatever it is, tomato or olives let’s say.”
He sets out a tray with two kinds of chocolate nibs –fragments of the roasted cocoa bean. One is a standard Forestero bean, which makes up 95% of world production. It tastes of rough, slightly woody, unrefined chocolate. The other is a Criollo bean called Marfil de Blanco, so called because of its pale appearance.
The taste is one of the most profound I have ever experienced, with layer after layer of wood smoke, leather, black pepper, tobacco and, of course, chocolate. One tastes of chocolate; the other tastes like the history of chocolate, told beside a dying campfire.
“The unbelievable noble Blanco Marfil – its very tasty and very healthy,” Persoone says. “It has a lot of antioxidants, a wonderful product; but its almost finished. Last year the whole world production was 120 kilograms. And nobody talks about this; it makes me mad. When I talk to the farmers, I ask them, why do you stop producing? They tell me the big factories don’t care – for them, there’s one price for cocoa. And the varieties? Nobody cares about that. I’m trying to change that, but its still a long way home.”
Dominique Persoone's book Cacao: The Roots of Chocolate is published in Dutch, English, French and Spanish by Françoise Blouard Éditeur
www.francoiseblouard.com
A selection of the following would be perfect for an intimate little tasting session. Go from the popping cola jelly via the boozy chocs to the hot and spicy exotics.
The Hof Van Cleve The praline made for Flemish chef Peter Goossens’ three-star restaurant is a long strip that looks, as Persoone says, “like a piece of Kit-Kat”. Inside is a jelly of griotte, a very sour cherry, on a ganache of samba tea. It’s a very grown-up, subtle flavour with an expert balance of acid and sweet.
The Oud Sluis The chocolate made for Sergio Hermans is more flashy, a bombe filled with ganache of Cabernet Sauvignon vinegar on a bed of pine nuts. The vinegar is strong but not overwhelming, with an almost digestif quality.
The Yuzu ball Also made for Sergio Hermans, this chocolate has a ball made by the modern technique of spherification, containing an unctuous salve of yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit of surprising intensity. The other half contains crunchy puffed rice.
The Chocolate Shooter Two tiny doses of powdered chocolate laced with mint and ginger. Snuffed up the nose, the immediate effect is to open up the nasal passages, like a pinch of mild snuff. When that dies down, you’re left with chocolate on the brain: it’s not a taste or a smell, but more like the idea of chocolate.
The Tequila Choc-tail A chocolate with Maldon salt flakes on one side and a plastic pipette poking out. You lick the salt flakes, squirt the tequila from the pipette into your mouth, then round it all off with the chocolate, which contains the lime, for the old Mexican one-two-three.
Other highlights Dark chocolate containing black olive, tomato and basil filling or, in other words, a pizza. Cola chocolate containing cola jelly and pop-rocks. Fried Onions: you might recoil in horror, but it’s a delicious umami foil to the bitterness of the chocolate. Pralines containing wasabi, chilli, saffron or curry. Chocolate was never meant to be this way, but once you’ve tried it, it’s hard to go back to boring old butter-creams
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