Chocolate in Provence

Found Chocolaterie Castelain in Chateauneuf du Pape, deep in the heart of Provence, France.  Ok, I lied a little, but doesn’t everybody.  Not about the Provence part, but the finding it part.  Actually, a friend found it and managed to sober up a group of choco-holics enough to get us to chocolate land.

Came as a surprise.  Not the sobering up part.  Unintended, but it happens.

The chocolate and France part. After all, where do you think of when you think of chocolate?  Belgium?  Yes.  Switzerland?  Yes.  Germany?  Of course.  Which country produces the most chocolate?  Pennsylvanians know the answer and I can explain it with one word: Hersey.

But France?  Mais oui!  A chocolate paradise in Provence.  Should have expected it in this bastion of creativity.  Van Gogh country.  Cézanne country.  A wonderland of olives and cheeses and especially wines.  What?  You don’t count making cheeses and wine creative?  Every wine and cheese is different, with different flavors. Or olives?  Just try curing them yourself without swearing and smashing crockery on the kitchen wall.

Chocolate is just one more form of creativity, with endless variations.  It’s one of the most complicated of foods.  Start with the Cocoa beans, most of which are grown in West Africa.  Picture men and women hacking pods off trees with machetes.  Picture people barely making a living….wait a sec.  A large Swiss corporation, Nestle formed the World Cocoa Foundation to see that farmers get properly paid for their labor and to ensure healthy farming practices that mean your grandchildren will still be biting into chocolate bars. Next time you take a bite, give Nestle a shout out.

Ok, you’re saying, but what’s the big deal?  The cocoa beans are squashed and then you have chocolate, right?   Think so?  Check my simple (I know my readers) synopsis of the bean to bar process:

Pods are harvested with machetes sharp enough to shave your beard, and the beans and pulp are scooped out. Just as with wine, climate and soil have a lot to do with the flavor of the final product.

Beans and pulp are put in a vat to ferment. (with lots of hands-on help from the farmers)

Next step is drying, then roasting.

Winnowing separates the beans from their shells.

After fine grinding and conching (surface scraping and coco-butter separation) you get chocolate liquor, with the solids being chocolate and the liquid being cocoa butter.  Here’s where the quality comes in.  First class producers will add some cocoa butter back into their chocolate to smooth it out.  Eat some Belgian chocolate and you’ll see what I mean about smooth. Cheap producers will add lesser oils.  Hint:  read the list of ingredients.

Now that you’re an expert on Chocolate, let’s head to a fabulous chocolate maker in Provence.  You’ll learn all I’ve written and more importantly, get to make your own, plus gobble chocolate until your blood sugar level goes in the Guinness Book of World Records.

https://www.chocolat-castelain.fr/

The chef and his assistant led us down the chocolate road.  First thing to remember is there are essentially three types of chocolate:  dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate, the latter being only coco butter, milk and sugar.  So is white chocolate really chocolate?  The other two you can figure out yourself.  Dark  chocolate has a million variations, depending on where the beans came from and how much sugar is added.  The most chocolate of chocolates is 99% chocolate, with the percentage printed on the wrapper displaying how much coco bean (by weight) is in the bar. As the percentage of chocolate decreases, of course the amount of sugar and coco butter increases.

There’s nothing like hands-on to teach you how difficult a skill…any skill…is.  We poured chocolate into molds to create hollow hearts, plastic pastry bags to make chocolate drops, and dipped fruits and caramels.   The chef made it look exceedingly easy and I suppose if you make it your life’s work to get good at something it does get easy. For me it was messy work, but we had a great instructor and came away with bags of chocolate.

Here’s a pairing tip for you:  Dark chocolate goes well with Guinness.  I know that will come in handy.  It did for me, as I reconciled alcohol and gluttony.

Tip number two:  If you bring bags of chocolate home, you will eat them, especially if they come from Chocolaterie Cstalain..  Be warned and stand by to loosen your belt, or just switch to the chocolate- Guinness fitness diet.

A Visit to Wissembourg/Weißenburg

Ancient Wall and Watchtower 

Church of St Pierre and Paul

Bakeries abound

Maison du Sel

Inside Daniel Rebert

Daniel Rebert's frozen treats

Off the beaten track

Asparagus season is almost here

The Alsace is just across the border from Germany, or what used to be the border before long standing enemies joined Euro hands and decided to let bygones be profitable.  Now when you travel from Germany to France, there are no customs houses, no pulling out of passports, no men in uniform sending a slightly nervous chill down your back.  Do I need to declare the trunk full of wine?  Will the guards glance at my girlfriend’s unnaturally low bosom and suspect bottles of brandy?  Did I buy enough French Francs? Does adultery count if I don’t smile?

Nowadays, a drive to Alsace is just a drive, through beautiful countryside and quaint villages with German sounding names, spoken by French speakers.  Wissembourg is pronounced Viz-em-bourg in France, while being spelled Weißenburg in German and pronounced Vice-in-burk.  Weißenburg, by the way, means White Castle, although I failed to see one.  But, then in my BMW with the top down, I tended to concentrate on the next curve and keeping maidens from leaping into my car.

Another thing you’ll notice as you gently glide through the twisting forest roads into France is that the line between quaint and shabby begins to blur.  Germany also has half timbered houses and small picturesque villages, but kept spotlessly clean, everything in perfect Teutonic order.  The French seem to value the romance of casually drinking coffee under a roof that’s about to collapse, and forgiving a loose window shutter or two with an air of Je ne sais quoi.  Smoke another Gauloises, find a new girlfriend, despise her, and order an espresso with a twist of lemon.

Please don’t let me digress like that.  Ah, yes, Wissembourg, a lovely, flower-strewn municipality that dates back over a thousand years.  A small river, the Lauter, weaves through town in charming canals, giving the feel of that long ago world, when water was the main commercial thoroughfare and source of power.  Wissembourg was once a walled city. Traces remain, but don’t dominate. Wander the narrow back streets and you’ll find the traces and dozens of half-timbered, 15^th Century buildings.

The architectural jewel of Wissembourg is St. Peter and St. Paul's Church (French: Église Saints-Pierre-et-Paul).  Dating from the 7^th Century, it was in centuries past the site of a Benedictine abbey and now serves as the main Roman Catholic parish church of the town.  Most of the present church dates to the 13^th to 15^th Centuries.  During the exuberance of the French Revolution, the church was looted.  As a result, some of the windows are original and some not.  Some were even moved to a museum in Strasbourg.

Another interesting building is the Maison du Sel, the salt house, constructed in the mid-15^th Century.  It was first a hospital and then a salt storage and slaughterhouse.  No doubt all three uses somehow string together.  Now, the building, overlooking a canal, is split into tiny shops, including one belonging to an interesting ceramic artist who wouldn’t allow me to photograph a blessed thing.

Plenty of restaurants and cafés line the streets, along with fruit and flower shops.  There are also a couple of nice chocolate shops.  As drizzle turned to downpour,  we dashed into one for a quick pick-me-up of dark sweets and other delights.  What I didn’t realize is that the Pâtisserie-Chocolaterie Daniel Rebert serves unsweetened hot chocolate.  My taste buds were as surprised as a virgin bride and I had to stir in a pound of sugar to calm them down.  It was with some trepidation then that I bit into my first hunk of éclair. Fortunately, it was as expected, excellent.  I smiled.  My nose unflaired, my knuckles returned to their original pink.

The rain had stopped, the sun returned.  It was time to hit the trail.  Farewell then to the lovely, formerly walled city of Wissembourg.  A most charming place to enjoy the pleasures of small town Alsace.