“I found the golden ticket,” he said as he handed me a caramel. Brian Pelletier remarked more than once during our interview that he has the best job in the world, and I believe him. Pelletier is the chocolatier behind Kakao Chocolate, which until this month was available at just a few shops and farmers’ markets around town. Now open on Jefferson Avenue, Pelletier’s new shop carries Kakao’s entire range of incredibly flavorful, truly handmade confections. Ranging from mellow mint to fiery chile, the truffles are center stage, but don’t overlook the barks, the marshmallow pies, the pâtes de fruits or the salt-topped caramels.
You’re doing creative stuff, not just re-creating what most other chocolate shops carry, like your take on the chocolate-covered strawberry. Everybody makes a chocolate-covered strawberry. I wanted to do something different. So I started with [strawberry] pâtes de fruits, fruit gels that we make with different flavors. I put that in a frame, and when that’s set … I just spread ganache on top and let that set. Then I cut that into cubes and then I dip it in a semisweet chocolate.
What have you added to the truffle lineup? Quite a bit. We want to do things that are really interesting, that are challenging in some ways. One of the truffles is a smoked-tea truffle with lapsang souchong. It has just a little bit of smoked salt on top. I have to use just a tiny, tiny amount of salt because the salt is really strong. The flavor of the tea is just accomplished by steeping the lapsang souchong in cream while it’s heating up.
You are so focused on quality – in your ingredients and also in your methods. Everything is handmade. With all the equipment you see here, you don’t see an enrober. You don’t see those Lucille Ball machines where it’s coming through and dumping it in chocolate. Each of the pieces is made individually by hand.
So is it just you here at the shop? I have a couple other people that work with me. Teresa Lo, I taught her how to make marshmallows for the marshmallow pies – those have taken on a life of their own; people are mad about those. But she wanted to make a regular marshmallow that you could put in hot chocolate or roast over a fire. So she made one. We liked it; we thought it was good. So, we thought, “What else can we do with this?” and she came up with the idea of [putting] fruit in it. She started putting fruit purée in the marshmallow and again, it just took on a life of its own. It was just this whacky idea and people loved it. Those ideas come from all over the place.
What are some other sources of inspiration? The Earl Grey tea [truffle] was something that I had in my mind that I wanted to do, but when a bride came in and wanted to order truffles for a wedding, … she saw the chai tea and asked if I made other tea truffles. And I said I was thinking of making an Earl Grey and she said, “That’s what I want.” I worked with a woman who sells tea here in the city and we tasted three different kinds of Earl Grey to find the one that we thought would work best.
It’s a subtle flavor, but not too subtle. It’s very well-balanced. How many tries does it take you until you hit the right recipe? I mean, steep tea too long and it gets bitter, too short a time and you can hardly taste it. It all depends on what kind of flavor I want to get out of it. The lapsang souchong doesn’t take much at all. We do a lavender truffle; it’s a much milder flavor that goes better with milk chocolate. That steeps for a long time because you want to get as much flavor out of those lavender buds as you can.
What other factors go into creating the exact flavor you’re looking for? There’s a lot that goes into figuring out how is this going to work. What percentage chocolate are we going to dip it in? Is it going to be a semisweet? Bittersweet? What is the flavor inside going to work best with? The chile truffle [needs] a strong bittersweet chocolate.
What types of chocolate do you use? All told I’ve got nine different percentages, not counting the white chocolate. I use four different [brands] of chocolate. Two of them come from California, one comes from Switzerland and another one comes from Columbia, Mo. – and that’s Alan McClure’s Patric Chocolate.
When choosing the base chocolates that you use, what are you looking for? One of the chocolates that I have is what I would consider a neutral chocolate. When I taste it, it tastes like chocolate. A really good chocolate, like Alan McClure’s chocolate, when you taste that, there’s citrus and a tang and smoke and nuts and coffee and all kinds of interesting flavors. But sometimes you don’t want to have really interesting flavors. With the lavender, for instance, you want to taste the lavender. You don’t want the lavender to be competing with smokiness. So it’s finding the right combination.
You use salt on a lot of your chocolates, including your wonderful caramels. Some people don’t get it, they’re not sure about it. Well, a lot of people like chocolate-covered pretzels or chocolate-covered potato chips. It’s because of the salt. In the caramels, you get that little bit of salt that opens up your taste buds to get all that caramel taste with the chocolate.
This article appears in Jun 1-30, 2009.