When I started writing my blog, Five Senses, in November 2007, I wanted to share what I had learned during my professional pastry days many years ago. I wanted to bring my readers into the mind of a pastry chef and cover topics that were typically on people’s minds about how pastry chefs performed some of their “magic”. Based on the comments that I have received from many of my articles, it looks like I had hit the right note with the topics that I’ve covered. I’ve also met some soon to be pastry chefs and aspiring home bakers as well. It has certainly been a fulfilling journey.

The volume of work in my present career has increased to the point where it has been difficult to put time towards updating my blog. In what I had thought would be a short lived experiment (I thought I wouldn’t last more than two months!) had turned into an 11 month engagement with my readers on the topic of professional pastry. It has definitely been fun but it is time to put away my pen and focus on other aspects of my life. As such, this will be my last blog entry.

To all my gracious readers who took the time to comment on my articles, I thank you tremendously. To the few who have stuck with me and have contributed to some of my content, I am eternally grateful. I wish everyone the best of luck in their pastry journey and to never give up their dreams of making it big.

Au revoir et à bientôt!

Have you ever wondered why some cakes or pastries that you buy from pastry shops have that “X-factor”, both in taste or texture, which can’t be reproduced at home no matter how hard you try? The reason is because professionals have access to an arsenal of specialized additives that enable them to push the envelope of taste and texture in their creations.

The subject of additives is a very technical one and covers a broad spectrum of products ranging from emulsifiers, gelling agents, sweeteners, cake and dough improvers, flavor enhancers, and others. I do not claim to be an expert in these areas nor is this blog posting intended to be an exhaustive discussion on all the additives used by professionals. My objective is, based on some of the additives that I have used in the past, to provide a brief insight into how pastry chefs achieve professional results using some of these additives.

Pastry chefs use many types of additives to enhance flavor, extend shelf life, and improve texture. Some of the more commonly known additives that are easily obtainable in the retail market are items like flavoring oils, liquid glucose, sheet gelatin, bread softeners and dough improvers. Very common within professional pastry kitchens but very difficult to find in the retail market are items such as trimoline, ice cream and sorbet stabilizers, atomized glucose, and pectin NH. A more obscure additive that I have used in the past that is not a common sight even within professional kitchens is an emulsifier called Peco 50.

As you can imagine, different additives are used in different situations to obtain specific results. Additives are generally used to obtain results that will typically fall within these three categories:

- Extend product shelf life
- Improve product texture and volume
- Enhance taste

Trimoline is a very common and extremely versatile sweetening additive that is used in confectionary, cake, and ice cream making to add sweetness and to help retain moisture which, in turn, extends the shelf life of the product.

Products like cake improvers will help to retard moisture loss and increase the volume of sponge cake batters. Emulsifiers such as Peco 50 will help to reduce mixing times, retard moisture loss, extend shelf life and homogenize cake batters for better stability and tolerance.

Very high quality flavoring products like those from Sevarome can elevate the taste of the finished product and provide that “X-factor” that could otherwise not be achieved with more mediocre flavoring agents.

Unless you are operating a pastry business, you will not need many of these additives if you are baking at home and will be consuming your goods within a very short timeframe. Many of the additives are designed to be used in very high volume production environments where goods produced will eventually be stored for sale over an extended period of time. Also, restaurant pastry kitchens will use additives to produce certain effects for their plated creations that are typically not feasible or practical to be reproduced at home. Molecular gastronomy is one such practice that comes to mind.

When used properly, I do believe that pastry and baking additives are essential ingredients that can lift a product from mediocrity to excellence. Ultimately, the end result is to use the right balance of ingredients to produce goods that are highly palatable and visually appealing at the same time.

I’ve provided a list of a few vendors who supply additives to the professional market:

Danisco
Danisco A/S
Langebrogade 1
1001 Copenhagen
Denmark
Tel: +45 3266 2000
Email: info@danisco.com
Web: Danisco
Presence in more than 40 countries

Sevarome
Z.A La Guide 1 43200
Yssingeaux Z.I. La Guide
France
Tél : +33 4 71 59 04 78
Fax : +33 4 71 65 54 24
Email: info@sevarome.com
Web: Sevarome

Patisfrance
Parc d’affaires SILIC
46 Rue de Montlhery- BP 80179
F 94563 Rungis Cedex
France
Tel: +33 (0)1 45 60 83 95
Fax: +33 (0)1 45 60 41 44
Email: info-export@puratos.com
Web: Patisfrance

Aromatic
Bryggvägen 12-14
SE-117 68 Stockholm
Sweden
Tel: +46-8-681 56 00
Fax: +46-8-18 29 79
Email: info@aromatic.se
Web:Aromatic

Are you a Nutella lover?   I must admit I have never been a big fan of it but I am aware that many people live and die by this ubiquitous spread.  The reason I have never really liked Nutella was because I always found the taste to be something akin to compound chocolate.  Although there was a sense of hazelnut flavor, the chocolate flavour always tasted sub-par.  Looking at the ingredients on the label of a Nutella jar only confirmed my suspicions.  The main components of Nutella were made up of sugar, hazelnuts (13%), vegetable oil, skim milk, cocoa powder, etc.

Recently, I had some praliné paste in stock and was looking to do something with it.  I also noticed I had some extra Valrhona Jivara milk chocolate sitting around and I had the idea to create my own praliné spread. Taking a cue from how praliné feuilleté was made ,  I decided to modify the recipe to make my own version of “Nutella”.  The result?  Absolute success!  The praliné spread I made had a more pronounced hazelnut flavour which was accentuated by the excellent quality of the milk chocolate combined with the smoothness of the butter.

The recipe is extremely easy to make with only 3 components.  Once you try this praliné spread, I am convinced that you will not want to go back to eating Nutella anymore!

Hazelnut Praliné Spread

100g Hazelnut praliné paste (Good quality praliné paste with preferably 50% or 60% hazelnuts)
50g Unsalted butter (softened)
35g Milk chocolate couverture (Preferably Valrhona Jivara Milk Chocolate)

- Put the praliné paste in a mixing bowl. If the praliné paste has been stored for awhile, the mixture may have settled and hardened and a layer of oil may have risen to the top. Simply mix the paste in a mixer with a paddle to recombine and you’ll return the paste back to its original form. The soft pliable recombined paste is what we are looking for in this recipe.
- Melt the milk chocolate and let cool before use.
- Add the softened unsalted butter to the praliné paste in the mixer.
- Add the milk chocolate to the praliné paste/butter mixture in the mixer.
- Once combined, pour the mixture into a small bowl and refrigerate.

When you are ready to serve the praliné spread, simply take it out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature. Use it on anything you normally would use with Nutella and see if you can taste the difference.

Get adventurous and add some crushed toasted hazelnuts to the spread to deepen the hazelnut flavour while adding textural contrast at the same time. Or you can even add some pailleté feuilletine to give it a tasty crispy texture.

Enjoy!

Now, onto the final part of my three part series of making the Intense. Today, we will make the masking ganache, chocolate glaçage and unmould, mask, and glaze the entremet.

Masking Ganache
The masking ganache is an important step to properly shape the entremet and to add some structure to the soft chocolate mousse. You’ll have excess ganache left over after masking the Intense and this can be frozen or refrigerated for future use with other chocolate entremets.

250g Couverture chocolate (55% or higher couverture chocolate)
250g Heavy cream
25g Liquid glucose

- Chop chocolate and place in a mixing bowl.
- Heat heavy cream together with glucose in a small saucepan until it starts to boil. Pull off heat and pour over chocolate. Let sit for 2-3 minutes.
- Mix to form a ganache.
- Set aside to cool

Chocolate Glaçage
This glaçage is a fondant glaze that is very versatile (can be used to glaze chocolate entremet and chocolate éclairs as well).   You‘ll make more than you need for one entremet and you can store the balance for future use.

250g Couverture chocolate (55% or higher couverture chocolate)
260g Pâte à Glacer (or any good quality compound chocolate)
90g Simple syrup (50% sugar + 50% water)
200g Evaporated milk
100g Liquid glucose

- Chop bittersweet chocolate and Pâte à Glacer and put into a mixing bowl.
- In a saucepan, heat the simple syrup, evaporated milk, and liquid glucose together. Bring to boil.
- Pour boiled liquid to chopped chocolate. Let sit for 2-3 minutes.
- Mix to form a ganache.
- Set aside to cool.

Unmoulding the Entremet
- Take the entremet out of the freezer. You should be able to push the entremet out from the ring mould. If you are having trouble pushing the cake out of the ring, take a small paring knife and slide it between the acetate sheet and caking ring and run the knife around the ring to release the entremet. Once released, either wrap the entremet in cling wrap for storage or if you plan on finishing the Intense immediately, just place the entremet back in the freezer while you prep the masking ganache and glaçage.
- Cut out a 16cm diameter round thin cardboard sheet and wrap it with aluminum foil. This sheet will act as the cardboard base for your entremet.

Masking the Entremet
- Heat the masking ganache to around 30-35 degrees Celsius. The ganache should flow loosely as you lift it up with your mixing spoon. Be careful not to mix too much or else you will incorporate air bubbles into the ganache. Incorporating air bubbles into your ganache will mar the final finish of your entremet.
- Place a baking sheet on the table and put a cup in the middle of the baking sheet.
- Take out the entremet from the freezer, remove the acetate strips, and place the cardboard base under the cake.
- Center the frozen entremet on top of the cup.
- Working quickly, pour the masking ganache over the frozen entremet until it is fully covered. Immediately take an offset spatula and push any excess ganache off the top of the entremet. The excess ganache that you push off the top will flow to the sides of the entremet and will fall to the baking sheet below. If you don’t perform this step, you will have a rounded thick top rather than a flat thin top and a flat thin top is what you want.
- Lift the entremet off of the cup with your hands. With a small spatula, clear off any excess ganache off the bottom of the entremet.
- Place masked entremet back to the freezer to set.

Glazing the Entremet
- Heat glaçage to around 30-35 degrees Celsius. The glaçage should flow loosely as you lift it up with your mixing spoon. Be careful not to mix too much or else you will incorporate air bubbles into the glaçage. Incorporating air bubbles into your glaçage will mar the final finish of your entremet.
- Place a baking sheet on the table and put a cup in the middle of the baking sheet.
- Take out the masked entremet from the freezer.
- Center the frozen entremet on top of the cup.
- Working quickly, pour the glaçage over the frozen entremet until it is fully covered. Immediately take an offset spatula and push any excess ganache off the top of the entremet. The excess glaçage that you push off the top will flow to the sides of the entremet and will fall to the baking sheet below. If you don’t perform this step, you will have a rounded thick top rather than a flat thin top and a flat thin top is what you want.
- Lift the entremet off of the cup with your hands. With a small spatula, clear off any excess glaçage off the bottom of the entremet.
- Place glazed entremet back the freezer to set.

When you are ready to serve the Intense, take it from the freezer and place in the refrigerator to thaw overnight. You can be creative in how you decorate this entremet. A piece of nougatine can be placed on top as a decorative piece (as shown in the photo in part one of this series) or you can serve it unadorned without any decorations.

If masking and glazing is too difficult to do, you can simply serve this entremet without these two steps and still enjoy it as is. Masking and glazing does require a certain level of skill that many home bakers may have trouble performing without proper supervision. Unfortunately, I do not have any photos describing these steps in detail (I am a very poor photographer if you haven’t noticed by now!) and I hope this will not deter you from making this fabulous cake.

As a side note, the glazing steps I’ve described above is not how the Intense was finished at Fauchon as shown in the photo in the first part of this series. The Intense in that photo was masked and sprayed with liquid chocolate rather than covered with glaçage. I’ve purposely changed the recipe to reflect the fact that spraying chocolate is very much outside the domain of a home baker and making a glaçage is more practical for the non-professional.

I hope you enjoy making this as much as I have enjoyed eating it!  Good luck!

Today’s blog post is the second of a three part series on how to complete one of my favorite entremet recipes from Fauchon, the “Intense”. My last post outlined how to make the three components that would comprise of the internal layers of the entremet. Today, I will discuss how to make the dark chocolate mousse and how to assemble the entremet in a cake ring.

You can refer to the diagram above on how the Intense should look like once it is assembled:

Intense (Part 2)

Dark Chocolate Mousse

190g Heavy cream
123g Dark Chocolate 70% cocoa (Preferably Valrhona 70% Guanaja dark chocolate)
63g Egg yolks
19g Egg whites
72g Simple syrup (50% granulated / 50% water)

- Whip the heavy cream until soft peaks. Cover and place in the fridge.
- In a large mixing bowl, melt the dark chocolate over a bain marie. Once melted, take the mixing bowl off the bain marie and put aside.
- In another mixing bowl, mix egg yolk, egg whites, and simple syrup together.
- Place the mixing bowl with the egg mixture over a bain marie and whisk until the egg mixture thickens to a point where you can coat the back of a spoon or until it reaches 80 degrees Celsius. Once the egg mixture thickens or reaches the right temperature, pull the mixing bowl off the bain marie. Using a stand mixer (or a handheld mixer) with the whisk attachment, mix the egg mixture on medium speed until cooled. You will notice that the egg mixture will thicken and grow in volume as you cool the mixture. The mixture will be considered cooled when you touch the bottom of the mixing bowl and it feels lukewarm to the touch. Place aside.
- Ensure the melted chocolate is still slightly warm. If it has cooled significantly, quickly place the chocolate over a bain marie to warm it up a little. Once warmed, pull off heat.
- Take the whipped cream from the fridge and put a quarter of it into the melted chocolate. Using a whisk, immediately whisk the whipped cream into the chocolate and don’t stop until it is fully incorporated.
- Next, pour the whipped egg mixture into the chocolate mixture and fold with a mixing spoon. After a few folds with the mixing spoon, pour in the rest of the whipped cream into the egg/chocolate mixture. Fold until the ingredients are incorporated but not too much as to deflate the mousse. Use immediately.

Assembling the Entremet

- Place a 16cm diameter x 4.5cm height cake ring on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Line the inside of the cake ring with acetate liner. If you don’t have acetate liner, simply cut a sheet of A4 (or 8.5” x11”) acetate (you can use those clear acetate sheets for binding your reports) into two 4.5cm height strips and line the inside of the cake ring with these strips.
- Place the brownie base at the bottom of the cake ring and make sure it is centered.
- Pour a bit of chocolate mousse over the brownie base and using a mixing spoon, spread the mousse so that it fills the sides of the cake ring around the brownie base.
- Place the praliné feuilletine layer over the brownie base and press down so that it sticks to the top of the brownie.
- Pour a bit of chocolate mousse over the praliné feuilletine layer and using a mixing spoon, spread the mousse so that it fills the sides of the cake ring.
- Place the chocolate cremeux layer over the praliné feuilleté layer and press down so that it sticks to the top of the praliné feuilleté layer.
- Pour the rest of the mousse over the chocolate cremeux layer and using an offset spatula, smoothen the top of the cake ring with the chocolate mousse. You’ll have excess chocolate mousse as result. Put this chocolate mousse aside for now.
- Immediately place the assembled entremet into the freezer and freeze for about 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, pull out the entremet from the freezer. You’ll notice that the chocolate mousse has deflated a little and you’ll see the top of the entremet a little depressed. Using your remaining mousse, spread and smoothen the mousse over the top of the entremet with your offset spatula. Once smoothened, immediately place entremet back into freezer and freeze overnight. You can eat the remainder of the chocolate mousse as a reward for a job well done!

That’s it for part two. My next and final posting in this three part series will discuss how to mask, glaze, and decorate the Intense. Stay tuned!

(Photo taken from Paris Breakfasts blog)

Within the pastry world, an entremet is typically a multi-layered mousse-based cake comprising of different complementary flavors with varying textural contrasts. A well executed entremet should adhere to the basic principles of visual appeal, textural contrast, and, of course, taste. The beauty of entremets comes from the myriad of shapes it can take on (round, pyramid, rectangular, hexagonal, teardrop, dome shapes) and the abundance of colours within the multi-layer attributes of this mousse cake. The taste receptor should be challenged as well with different combinations of taste sensations like salty, sour, sweet and bitter.

Conceiving a well constructed and well balanced tasting entremet lies in it the way each flavor component is assembled and complements each other.Within an entremet, it is typical to have three or four different complementary component flavors of varying textural contrasts.To the uninitiated, an entremet may seem like a lot of work that is very difficult to produce but in actual fact, making entremets are easy if you approach it in a step by step fashion.

In this post, I thought I would take you through the production of one of my favorite entremets from Fauchon, the “Intense”.Intense is a chocolate entremet for the chocolate purist.It is comprised of a chewy brownie base, a praliné feuilleté layer, a layer consisting of a piece of tempered chocolate sprinkled with cocoa nibs, and a chocolate cremeux layer.All these components are surrounded by a smooth and creamy dark chocolate mousse.To cater to those home bakers out there, I have modified the original professional recipe to a simpler version that I will be posting below.Since there are many components in this entremet, I have broken up this post into three separate postings to go through the steps to produce and assemble this fabulous cake.

Intense (Part 1)

Brownie (Base for cake)

200g Fine granulated sugar
70g All purpose flour
40g Cocoa powder
1/2 tsp Baking powder
1/8 tsp Salt
60g Unsalted butter
56g 55% Couverture chocolate
50g Whole egg
60g Egg whites
15g Vegetable oil

- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Celsius.
- Grease three 14 cm round cake pans or cake rings. Lay a 6 inch round piece of parchment paper on the inside bottom each pan or if you’re using cake rings, just lay a large piece of parchment between the cake rings and the baking sheets.
- Sift the all purpose flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt together in a mixing bowl.
- Melt the couverture chocolate together with the butter in a mixing bowl over a bain marie or in a microwave. Once melted, mix until well combined.
- In a large mixing bowl, add the fine granulated sugar, whole egg and egg whites. Using a mixing spoon, mix the sugar with the eggs until you have a combined wet mixture.
- Add the vegetable oil to the wet mixture and mix until well combined.
- Add the warm chocolate mixture to the wet mixture and mix until well combined.
- Fold in the dry mixture into the wet mixture. Fold carefully until combined.
- Divide the brownie batter into three equal portions and pour each portion into the cake moulds (pan or ring).
- Bake for roughly 12-15 minutes. You will know when the brownie is done when the centre is somewhat firm to the touch.
- Remove from oven, let cool, wrap the cakes and place it in the fridge or freezer for cake assembly later on.
- You’ll only use one of the brownies for the base of this cake so you can store the other two pieces for future use.
- The brownie base should be roughly 1.25 cm in height. If it is too high after baking, you can trim the top of the brownie to the required height.

Praliné Feuilleté

45g Praliné paste
24g Pailleté feuilletine
11g Milk chocolate, preferably Valrhona’s Jivara Milk Chocolate
5g Unsalted butter

- Melt milk chocolate together with unsalted butter
- Add melted chocolate mixture to praliné paste and combine
- Add pailleté feuilletine to chocolate/praliné paste mixture
- Using a 14 cm ring mould, spread the mixture into the mould
- Put into fridge or freezer to set
- Once set, wrap up and store in the fridge or freezer for cake assembly later on
- The praliné feuilleté layer should be roughly 1.25 cm in height.

Chocolate Cremeux

80g Fresh milk
80g Heavy cream
20g Egg yolks
8g Fine granulated sugar
56g Dark chocolate (70%) – Preferably Valrhona’s Guanaja Chocolate
1 tsp Powdered gelatin

- Prepare three 14 cm ring moulds by wrapping cling wrap around the bottom of each ring and place the rings on top of a baking sheet.  Alternatively, you can also use 14cm cake pans.  Simply lay some cling wrap in the inside of the cake pans
- Put chocolate into a mixing bowl
- Combine fresh milk with heavy cream in a small pot
- In a small bowl, mix powdered gelatin with a little water. Let sit for 5 minutes and then heat mixture in microwave until melted
- Put egg yolks and sugar into a mixing bowl and whisk together. Heat milk/heavy cream mixture until it starts to boil. As soon as it comes to a boil, pull from heat and slowly pour the hot liquid into the egg yolk mixture while mixing with a whisk at the same time
- Pour egg mixture back into pot and continue to heat over a small fire. Continuously whisk over the fire until the mixture thickens and can coat the back of a spoon
- Pour cooked egg mixture over the dark chocolate.  Wait for 5 minutes and then combine together
- Pour in dissolved gelatin into warm chocolate mixture.
- Divide mixture into three portions and pour into each ring mould or cake pan
- Place filled rings or cake pans into a freezer and freeze until set. Once frozen, remove from ring moulds or cake pans and then wrap each portion with cling wrap and store until cake is ready to be assembled
- You’ll only use one of the chocolate cremeux layers in the final assembly of this cake so you can store the other two pieces for future use
- The chocolate cremeux should be roughly 1.25 cm in height

That’s it for part 1.  In part 2 of my next posting, I will show you how to make the chocolate mousse and prepare for the final assembly of the cake.

Pâte à choux is a foundation recipe found in classical and contemporary French pastry making that is extremely versatile. Many French pastries and desserts have been created from pâte à choux like cream puffs, éclairs, St-Honoré, choquettes, profiteroles, and croquembouche and its versatility extends into savoury applications as well.

As with any recipe, there have been many interpretations on how to make pâte à choux. Extensive discussions and analyses about the topic can be found here with plenty of excellent tips and recipes shared among the forum participants.

As far as recipes goes, I’ve had much success with Pierre Hermé’s recipe from Chocolate Desserts and have used that as my base recipe for all my pâte à choux applications. Another highly acclaimed and very successful recipe I’ve used comes from Pichet Ong and can be found here.

Today’s discussion will not focus on how to make a pâte à choux dough since there is enough information that can be gleaned from the above links to come up with a successful dough.  Rather, this discussion will focus on a question that was inspired by a fellow reader to my blog (thanks Mightyroy) who asked me how to make éclair shells that looked like the picture perfect versions typically found in professional French pastry shops. He noted that the éclairs found in these shops tended to have very little cracks in the choux shells and were very uniform in shape.

What is the secret?

Assuming you have just successfully completed making your batch of pâte à choux dough , the secret lies in the use of a star piping tip (16 or 18 teeth with 1 to 1.5 cm tip diameter) to pipe the pâte à choux onto the baking sheet.

(Shown – Star polycarbonate Nozzle)

The use of a star piping tip (or nozzle) to pipe pâte à choux is essential to allowing the dough to expand evenly with minimal cracking during the baking process. The ridges created by piping the pâte à choux with a star tip creates gaps that allows the choux to expand evenly during baking. If you take a look at the picture below, you’ll see that the choux shell has dark lines along the length of the éclair.  These dark lines were the ridges that were filled in as the choux dough expanded during the baking process.

If you find that your shells are still cracking significantly, you may want to add a bit more salt to the pâte à choux base recipe to minimize the cracking but be warned that doing so may result in your choux shells being slightly saltier.  Finding the right balance in ingredients will be essential to fine tuning your recipe to a taste that’s right for you and your customers.

Sometimes, all it takes is a slight tweak in recipe and technique to bring your pastry creations to the next level and I hope I have been able to provide you with some tips on how to give your éclairs that polished and professional look.

I remember back in my early days of my culinary career when I used to marvel over the beauty and innovativeness of French cake and pastry making. I would always ask myself, “How did the pastry chefs make those cakes and pastries look so beautiful? What were the secrets?”.

Over the course of the next several postings, I shall provide you with a glimpse of what typically goes on in a professional French pastry kitchen. I’ll be revealing some tips on how some entremets are made and some best practices for producing cakes and pastries in volume.

Many people do not realise this but a key piece of equipment in a pastry shop is the freezer. The freezer is a critical storage facility for storing finished entremets and its associated components (French entremets are multi-layered mousse-based cakes that contain layers of contrasting and complementary flavours and textures). Without a freezer, it would not be possible to store the volume of entremets needed to service a thriving pastry business. It is typical for a pastry kitchen to produce entremets to last for at least 1-2 or even 3 weeks worth of business.

Contrary to what many people believe, freezing of entremets does not diminish the finished product in quality or shelf life. It is important to remember that once the volume production has been completed, the entremets and entremet components should be immediately frozen and maintained at temperatures between minus 15-25 degrees Celsius. Freezing at these temperatures ensures freshness is retained and longevity in shelf life is maintained.

Freezing also serves another purpose in entremet production. In order to build a multi-layered and multi-flavored entremet, the layered components must be frozen in order to properly assemble the cake. Many entremet components are very delicate to handle if not frozen and thus, needs to be frozen in order to properly seat the component into the entremets mould during production.

If you are running a home-based cake business, it is essential to have a chest freezer to store your production goods. If you are a large pastry shop or operate a central kitchen for a large pastry business, you will most probably invest in a walk-in freezer to accommodate the production volume needed to service your many retail shops.

As you grow your pastry business, you will find that freezer space will become more precious as you scale production to meet increased demand. But then again, that is a good problem to have, isn’t it?

I am an entrepreneur at heart and have had my share of entrepreneurial ventures in my lifetime. I always tend to root for and support new and promising restaurants when they open since it does take a tremendous effort and sweat to get a respectable food business off the ground. I am especially more excited when close friends of mine sets up a new restaurant venture. Such was the case yesterday when I attended the soft launch of SaltnChoc, a new and exciting Asian steamboat (also called fondue or ‘huo guo’) and chocolate fondue restaurant in Damansara Heights in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

SaltnChoc is the brainchild of my close friends, Pierre Chaillou and Agnes Chan, serial entrepreneurs in the food industry with a string of successful restaurant ventures under their belt, together with another Malaysian investor. Steamboats of the communal type are commonplace in KL and many parts of Asia but SaltnChoc is trying to tap into another less common but growing trend which is the individual steamboat business. Billed as a more hygienic way of eating, individual steamboat provides each diner with their own individualised broth together with its associated condiments. Diners also have the option of choosing chocolate fondue as an alternative to Asian steamboat. Although the chocolate fondue wasn’t available during the soft launch yesterday, I do believe this will be popular with diners that crave for something or anything chocolate.

Offering Asian steamboat together with chocolate fondue under one roof may seem like a strange combination at first but if you look at the nature of how the two are served, you can see that they are rather complementary in nature. Both use a direct heat source to heat the broth (steamboat) or chocolate ganache (chocolate fondue) while condiments are dipped into the heated liquid to either cook or coat the item. Providing the option for a combined savoury (salty) and sweet (chocolate) fondue experience in one seating was the main concept behind SaltnChoc.

To locate SaltnChoc, the restaurant is rather obscurely tucked away in a small row of shophouses just off Jalan Batai near the Pusat Bandar Damansara Immigration office and is on the other side of the more famous Hock Lee supermarket.

If you are looking for a unique experience with good food at very decent prices, please do check out SaltnChoc!

Update: SaltnChoc has shutdown operations at the end of 2008.

I like my brownies chewy. I like my brownies chewy and unadorned with nuts. There are so many variations of brownies and so many recipes out there and I’ve tried many of them but I’ve always come back to my own recipe that I have modified to suit my taste. It’s such a simple recipe that you don’t even need a mixer. You simply weigh the ingredients and mix everything by hand. Simple as that.

This recipe is extremely versatile in that I can use it to make a standalone brownie (as pictured above) or I can use it as a base component in some of my chocolate entremets. It freezes well for long term storage and is very transportable at room temperature.

My recipe below is baked in an 8 inch square pan. After baking, the brownie will be almost 1 inch (roughly 2.25 cm) in height and 8 x 8 inches on the sides. There is hardly any shrinkage. The chewiness in the brownie comes from the addition of extra egg whites. You can add a teaspoon of instant coffee if you’d like or just leave that out altogether and enjoy the brownie as is in its pure chocolate form. You can use any good quality chocolate in this recipe (no compound chocolate!) ranging from 55% – 72% but the small volume of couverture chocolate in this brownie recipe is such that you can get away with using a sweeter 55% couverture chocolate. My recipe below uses 55% couverture chocolate and I have adjusted the sugar content to reflect the added sweetness in the chocolate. Where I do not skimp on is the cocoa powder. I only use high quality dutch-processed cocoa powder from Cacao Barry or Valrhona. There is a high ratio of cocoa powder in the recipe so you want to be sure you use the best quality you can obtain.

I encourage you to tweak this recipe to your taste by adding walnuts, pecans or even peppermint oil to give it a minty chocolate taste. Many people add a layer of ganache to top off the brownie but I generally leave that step out. I like my plain brownie warmed with a quenelle of good quality vanilla bean ice-cream. Simple as that!

Brownie Recipe

200g Fine granulated sugar
70g All purpose flour
40g Cocoa powder
1/2 tsp Baking powder
1/8 tsp Salt
60g Unsalted butter
56g 55% Couverture chocolate
50g Whole egg
60g Egg Whites
15g Vegetable oil
1g Instant coffee powder (Optional)

- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Celsius.
- Grease an 8 x 8 inch square cake pan. Lay an 8 x 8 inch piece of parchment paper on the inside of the pan.
- Sift the all purpose flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl.
- Melt the couverture chocolate together with the butter in a bowl. Once melted, mix until well combined.
- In a large mixing bowl, add the fine granulated sugar, whole egg and egg whites. Using a mixing spoon, mix the sugar with the eggs until you have a wet mixture.
- Add the vegetable oil and the optional coffee powder (if desired) to the wet mixture and mix until well combined.
- Add the warm chocolate mixture to the wet mixture and mix until well combined.
- Fold in the dry mixture into the wet mixture. Fold carefully until combined.
- Pour brownie batter into the square cake pan.
- Bake for roughly 20-25 minutes. You will know when the brownie is done when the centre is somewhat firm to the touch.