Culinary Trends | Mid Winter 2011
popular dessert is The Irish Car Bomb, which pairs chocolate cake with an Irish stout. Daniels describes it as “a chocolate stout cake that is made with Irish Stout and Cordillera Cocoa Powder. We top that with Irish Stout Ice Cream, Irish Cream Chocolate Sauce, and Irish Whiskey Caramel Sauce. We think we’ve made a great dessert to mock the shot that many people have enjoyed in bars around the country.”
Similarly in San Diego, the Firefly restaurant at The Dana on Mission Bay features the American Strong Ale Chocolate Cake. Chef de Cuisine Eric Manuel describes the creative process behind the dessert saying, “Port Brew- ing Company in San Marcos makes a great beer called Old Viscosity that I am a big fan of. So it started with the beer then we thought that this would go great with a chocolate dessert, and then we just decided to try to incorporate the beer into the cake batter. The result was a rich chocolate cake with sweet malty notes.” Along with combining alcohol and incorporating
unusual ingredients into the batter of chocolate desserts, chefs are exploring the pairing of nontraditional spices and even vegetables into new and tempting creations. Veronica Laramie, the Pastry Chef and co-owner of eVe in Berkeley, includes a dessert simply entitled “Dark Chocolate” on her menu, “Because people can have a chocolate flourless cake with vanilla anglaise and berries anywhere. We like to think outside the box, using new flavor combinations with new techniques to make a unique dessert that shows my profile as a pastry cook. I always create my desserts from a familiar technique for the customer, and then build the rest of the components around it. For example, in Dark Chocolate, we have a carrot-honey-grains of paradise-cocoa nib dessert, which includes a simple and delicious brown butter carrot cake with a deep dark chocolate cream (that is almost pud- ding like) with a honey crunch, a cocoa nib and carrot sorbet, and a pickled carrot, finished with honey gas- trique and cocoa dust.”
When trying to create a distinctive out-of-the-box chocolate dessert, the most successful approaches are con- structed by chefs focused on the careful building of flavors and textures. At Junnoon, a modern Indian restaurant in Palo Alto, Executive Chef Kirti Pant incorporates cumin into his desserts. Additionally, to put his own spin on molten chocolate cake, Chef Pant blends Indian spices into this dessert staple.
Other recommendations for chefs looking to create an
out-of-the-ordinary chocolate dessert include ESTATE’s Chef John Toulze’s suggestion of “playing with the differ- ent cocoa contents for an interesting, bitter edge and to get a better understanding of how different chocolate percent- ages can change a dessert’s flavor. It really depends on what ingredients you are mixing. One thing I love to do is to burn chocolate and then create a dish that goes with it. While it goes against all the rules, it really can add a unique flavor and style to the end product.” From hot chocolate to frozen gelato, no matter what percentage the cacao con- tent, chocolate is the one dessert ingredient that will remain à la mode in every season.
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