Till my teen years, I never did figure out the exact meaning of ‘dessert’. The word, to my spelling-challenged mind, conjured up palm trees, a huge oasis and sand dunes. And the only dessert I got to eat when young were all Plain Jane ones — vanilla mostly, chocolate sometimes and as a rare treat, strawberry ice-cream (which invariably smelled of sickly sweet cough syrup).
Now, when I hear renowned pastry chef Mickael Besse reel off exotic desserts ranging from balsamic vinegar ice-cream to cherry champagne to olive oil icecream with strawberries to dark chocolate fantasies, my now-much-better-at-spellings mind conjures up visions of apple pie-laden English cottages, French vineyards overflowing with cheesy treats and handsome Italian men churning out 100 per cent fat free gelato!
All these desserts, by the way, will soon be available in Bangalore (some of them already are out there) at Ecstacy, the dessert hang-out that is all set to open at UB Mall by the end of this month. Mickael says he became a pastry chef to “escape the odours of cooking” and has trawled the world for nearly 12 years in search of ‘perfect ingredients’. “The mind churns out the dessert — coconuts and lychees make for a treat as do strawberries when marinated in mulled wine and served with olive oil.” Close your eyes and imagine.
Ecstacy has quite a fan following at its flagship outlet in Chennai where the fastest selling dessert is ‘Chocolatier’. Self-explanatory, the death by this particular chocolate will send you straight to heaven — it is made of the extra smooth and delicious Valrhona chocolate. This is a dark, creamy variety of chocolate from Valrhona, a small town near Lyon, France. Chocoholics consider it as one of the world’s finest varieties.
Incidentally, Valrhona chocolates are made from beans of a single year's harvest from a specific plantation. There are also many other flavours to try — cheesecakes made of imported cream cheese, mascarpone-dotted and coriander-infused ice-creams, Taal Madeleine biscuits with blueberries, apple cinnamon biscuits...yes, the mind (and the tongue) boggles. There’s also scope for your traditional fudge, apple pies, raspberry souffles and the ubiquitous tiramisu. “Desserts are 60 per cent presentation and 40 per cent ingredients,” says Chef Besse in all seriousness. And 100 per cent heaven, he forgot to add.
Somebody said life is uncertain, eat dessert first. Well, if you have to eat this particular one, put aside all uncertainties — you will first have to rob a bank. Priced at just 1.4 million dollars, the ‘Strawberry Arnaud’ at the Arnaud’s restaurant in New Orleans, are berries with bling, according to the Forbes magazine. The dessert features six port-marinated strawberries decorated with mint, cream and er..a five carat pink diamond ring. Available by special request, it is served by white-gloved waiters accompanied by a jazz band in one of the restaurant's private dining rooms.
I know, you would rather have that fresh strawberry cheesecake winking at you from behind the counter at your local bakery. So would I.
Only prudence and the presence of the chef is preventing me from attacking the round cheese board peppered with assorted crackers, apricots and sun-dried tomatoes that’s sitting between us. None of the little blocks of cheese on the board is anything like the processed cheese that I have grown up on or the emulsified cheesespreads that has been slopping about on my breakfast bread for years. “Eating processed cheese is like licking rubber,” says the chef and as I am still reeling from the salty, pungent aroma of goat’s cheese that’s doing a little jig behind my tongue, I have no cause to disagree.
Nor do Bangalore’s gourmets who have (finally) a wide variety of cheese to choose from. In fact, today, it is possible to find more than 150 varieties of cheese right here — everything from blue-veined Stiltons and Roqueforts to the sweet and delicate Swiss Emmental to the soft mozzarella and Camembert and the wonderfully nutty Italian Parmesan — you name it and you will find it in the city’s gourmet stores and fairs such as Olive Beach’s Gourmet Bazaar. Cheese appreciation has been gaining ground in India, says Chef Manu but we still have to get out of the mould of munching supermarket cheese slices.
“Cheese is a fascinating subject. The French themselves have nearly 1,000 different cheeses...there is creamy cheese, smoky cheese, hold-your-nose-and-eat-cheese..exploring the world of cheese is like exploring the world.” What the chef likes best is goat’s cheese because of its “earthy quality”. “Goat’s cheese gets its characteristics from what the goat eats and goats generally tend to eat everything!” The taste of cheese depends on a particular vegetation, soil, environment, milk and of course, what the milk-giving animal eats.
Which is why the French have the prestigious ‘AOC’ certification — ‘Appellation D’Origine Controlee’ which guarantees that the cheese originates from a specific region of France and has been produced in a traditional way.
Take the ‘king of cheese’ Roquefort, the celebrated and uber expensive blue cheese from France. (It costs Rs 450 per 100 gm at Olive Beach). Recipient of the first AOC certificate, Roquefort was originally ripened in the soil of natural caves of Mont Combalou in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. Traditionally, cheesemakers extracted it by leaving bread in the caves for six to eight weeks until it was overtaken by the mold. The inner part of the bread was then dried to produce a powder. Incidentally, the largest producer of Roquefort cheese is ‘Societe des Caves de Roquefort’, which owns several caves in the region and opens its facilities to tourists once in a while!
Nowadays, says Chef Manu, the mold is produced in the lab and is added to the curd or introduced into the cheese through long sticks that keep poking it. This mold is responsible for Roquefort’s distinctive blue and its smoke n salt tanginess — which hits you like a wrestler’s blow, the second you bite into its crumbly texture. Precisely why I reach out for the cracker. This time, without the chef’s prompting!
It was a close encounter of the dark kind. A highly excitable friend, in one of her spurts of enthusiasms, bought Lindt’s 99 per cent cacao bar. And despite our most sincere efforts (which rapidly turned bitter once the price came into view), not a morsel could go in. And we were proclaimed chocoholics! The accursed bar finally met its end in a rather exotic fashion — we melted it and used it as face packs.
Dark chocolate is not usually treated with such disdain today in our diet-obsessed world. It’s got the rare honour of being delicious as well as ‘healthy’ even though the health benefits are still being debated about. Dark chocolate is said to contain flavonoids, which act as anti-oxidants that are believed to protect our body.
That’s well, the necessary but boring part. What’s sizzlingly interesting about this kind of chocolate is how sexy it actually is — it is unfussily smooth and likes to be aloof (unlike your milk versions that happily turn crunchy, gooey and biscuity at the first opportunity); it never ever turns flaky; and its taste starts a good 30 seconds after you bite into it. Unless you are eating terribly bad quality dark chocolate (which is a rarity), when you first bite the chocolate, it appears hard and unyielding. A second later, it softens in your mouth. Do not expect sweetness; instead you get dark chocolate flavoured sometimes with bitter orange, sometimes with coffee and if you are very lucky, with wood. And look out for the overwhelming scent. It is intense and draws you in. And if you are not very careful, might even give you a headache.
There was a time when dark chocolate, for Indians, was a distant fantasy (or nightmare). No longer. According to Chef Mickael Besse of Ecstasy, a popular dessert hang-out, Indians are slowly getting addicted to the darker versions of chocolate.
“'The level of consumer interest in dark chocolate has taken us completely by surprise. Indians were never known to be great fans of dark chocolate but they now seem ready for it,” he says.
That might be because of the kind of chocolates we got to eat earlier. Until the last few years, anything beyond Cadbury’s and Nestle were hard to find in Indian supermarkets. Maximum you could do was have an uncle in the UK or the US who could come back with a few Hershey’s kisses, a Mars or a Snicker bar. But today, fine chocolate like Valrhona from France and Lindt from Switzerland are increasingly easy to find.
They are still highly priced but chocoholics have no second thoughts about why they are worth it. What they unanimously agree to is this — dark chocolate might be acquired taste but once you’ve acquired it, you have had it.
One thing’s for sure. To rework one of the most hackneyed food-related proverbs ever, one man’s comfort is another man’s puzzlement. At least that’s the conclusion I reached after a dipstick survey in the office about favourite comfort foods. (The question spawned a spirited discussion on weird foods. More about that another time.) If it was Maggi noodles with toast for one, it was KFC chicken for another (accompanied by some forceful ‘ewwws’ by others); for yet another, it was roast chicken while for a more homely soul, it was papad and pickles (we suspect the office canteen has had a great influence on her).
One girl said hers was chocolate any day with not a shade of guilt while another murmured “channa chur-type of mixtures” with a look that clearly said “Yes, I know they are fattening but I can’t help it’.
But that’s really the point about comfort foods. Those wonderful foods, those little nuggets of heaven that gush into our soul and make it all gooey and happy and wrap us (especially on cold wintry days) in a warm blanket of well, comfort. Hang those calories!
But this definition of comfort food is somewhat flawed.
Our minds are strange brewing towns full of twisted associations that have nothing to do with logic. Sometimes, the foods that comfort you might not necessarily be your favourites but might have come to you in the perfect atmosphere — a chill in the air, a romantic movie on the tube and mummy bustling about in the kitchen, for instance. In such times, give me anything that mummy has made (yes, even karela chips) and that will gladden my soul more than any favourite comfort food can.
Kitchen is where the comfort is a friend who shifted to London recently told me whenever she even hears a mention of the foods that she grew up on, she can “smell it and feel its texture” around her tongue. No caviar and no oyster can fill that void, she said wistfully. That about sums it up.
I guess when our minds are cold and hungry and aching for love, we head to the kitchen in the hope of creating some warmth. Happily enough, food does have this great ability to give us a warm pat on our backs (or stomachs) and say, ‘ok buddy, now move on’.
P.S: My comfort food is masala chai with ‘dippable’ cookies, preferably chocolate digestives.
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