BELGIUM: A chocolate egg covered with gold leaf is the star of Belgium's Easter

The best chocolate beans make the best chocolate pastries: our Easter present is a pastry lesson by one of Belgium's top chief. Belgium chocolate makers are ready for Easter, and this year they mixed two star ingredients for the best effect. The star of the 2007 Easter collection from chocolate maker Marcolini is a chocolate egg covered with seven golden leaves of 23 carats each. It is the ultimate present for any chocolate fans, but you will have to be quick as only one hundred and fifty have been produced. Made of three different beans from Venezuela and the 'avola' almonds from Sicily, it will be yours for 90 Euros (120 US dollars). Pierre Marcolini, a Belgium citizen of Italian origin, travels the world to find the best beans. For his modern pastries, Marcolini uses beans from Madagascar, Ghana, Trinidad, Mexico or even Java in Indonesia. Pastry chief Alain Hinnes has been working with Marcolini for thirteen years, overseeing the development of the small family enterprise into a multinational that has expanded to Paris, New York, Japan or Kuwait. ''You have beans of different quality. Here, we work with the Carenero bean from Venezuela, which is of very good quality, so we will get the best chocolate. It's a bit like a cake, you take the best ingredients, the best cream, the best vanilla. It all depends. If you want to produce good pastries, you have to have the best ingredients,'' Hinnes enthuses. The beans arrived from Venezuela only a few days before, by boat, and are being roasted at about 140 degree Celsius during some thirty minutes to dry them. Mixed with sugar, cacao butter, lecithin and vanilla, chocolate beans give way to dark chocolate. Hinnes says one hundred and fifty kilograms of beans produce about two hundred kilograms of chocolate. For more than thirty hours, the ingredients will be processed through temperatures ranging from 40 to 65 degree Celsius (104 to 149 degree Fahrenheit) to release the full potential of the beans' aroma. Thirty people work at Marcolini factory, producing 1,200 kilograms each week. It's a job for early risers, as pastry cooks start their shift at three of four in the morning. Marcolini puts the emphasises on design and innovation. Like a fashion designer, he creates two chocolate collections each year, one for spring/summer and another for winter/fall. ''We reinvent. We try new products, different herbs, try out new things. We are different from other chocolate makers because we are trying to elaborate new tastes... You can make chocolate with pepper, with Sishuan (or Szechuan) pepper, with Cinnamon, with Earl Grey tea. You can invent anything, but you have to be daring, that's the main thing,'' Hinnes described. Hinnes says dark chocolate is back in fashion, and clients' tastes have evolved towards more bitterness. For him, white chocolate is not really a chocolate but more a paste made of cocoa butter, milk powder and vanilla. His preference goes to the dark chocolate that is made strictly from the beans, with no added milk. Hinnes says one has to be meticulous to work with chocolate. ''I think that you have to be meticulous in all jobs, but even more in chocolate-making. You have to be respectful a lot of small things, from the beginning until the end,'' Hinnes points out. Next door, Japanese pastry cook Yasuo Muto is carefully preparing decorations for cakes. Muto is spending two years in Belgium to learn all what he can about European pastries. His father owns a pastry shop in Tokyo, where Muto hopes to work after his return. With his cake 'Envol' or 'Take-off', Marcolini won the world cup for pastries in 1995 in Lyon, France. But the finest job of all is applying the tiny golden leafs on the Easter egg, a gesture that reminded me to the one accomplished by Bhuddist devotees in temples accross Asia when they display golden leaves onto Bhudda statues. ($1.3368 = 1 euro)

ITN Source | April 13, 2007

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