Chocolate and curry might strike some folks as an odd couple, but not Brian Pelletier.
In fact, Pelletier, the owner and chief chocolatier at Kakao Chocolate, added a curry truffle to his Fox Park shop’s offerings just last month, and he told us, “We’ve had nothing but a positive response on it.”
The new confection started as a vegan ganache made with coconut milk for a local restaurant. “As soon as I tasted that,” Pelletier said, “it just struck me that what would be really good with this is some curry. … One of the chefs over at Designing Chefs Catering contacted me, and she said, ‘I heard you were working on this – I’ve got some curry.’ She brought it over, and it is just extraordinary.”
The combination of sweet curry and semisweet chocolate has a unique flavor, Pelletier said, but the confection did present one small complication. “Normally in the truffles, in the ganache, we put butter,” he noted, “but because this is a vegan one, we put a really nice olive oil …, and that gives it a little bit of the creamy texture that we would get in the other truffles from the butter.”
Pelletier pondered a moment on a potential wine pairing for the new confection. “Even though it’s a semisweet chocolate, I think that the spiciness of the curry – not the hot spiciness, but the variety of spices in the curry – would probably go well with maybe something on the dry side of a Riesling,” he said. “Even though the darker chocolate would generally go with a red wine, I think that that might be an interesting combination.”
Kakao sells the vegan truffles individually in the shop and in packs of four at the Tower Grove and Maplewood farmers’ markets.
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2010.