Tuesday 18 December 2007

Fresh mint and green tea



The truffles are flying out of the shop at the moment so it’s a good opportunity to do some of our more unusual chocolates. At this time of the year people tend to want to play it safe…rum truffles, champagne truffles, violet creams (sigh…I will write about violet creams on a post after Christmas). So it’s nice to push the customers a little and show off what chocolate can do, or just offer the epicures a treat.

The fresh mint and green tea truffle is based on a chocolate called Orient by Jean Pierre Wybauw.

We’ve made some changes…so I can’t remember the original recipe but basically as we do it it’s an infusion of green tea (we use organic) and fresh mint (leaves and stems can go in) we allow to stand for 90 minutes. You can play around with the proportions but for reasons I’ll go into below, I tend to up the green tea so that at the infusion stage it’s the dominant flavour.

As always, we use double cream for the infusion, in almost equal volume to the melted chocolate.
We only sample this one to customers who (we think!) have palettes that can appreciate the subtleties.

Most people overtaste on the fresh mint…that’s because they’re more familiar with the taste and they can recognise it immediately. The green tea some customers tend not to be able to recognise until we let them smell the (dry) green tea. Then they recognise the clean, slightly smoky taste. Some people find the taste reminiscent of fresh grass. Certainly we always like to put it in one of the medium or larger boxes so that when people are having all their boozy truffles and caramels and pralines they have something to refresh the tastebuds a little. Something a bit more sophisticated than a caramel.

We dip in dark chocolate and then sprinkle with crystallised mint...it adds colour, texture and indicates to the customer the taste the chocolate will have.

No comments: