Chocolate can be one of the sweetest gifts to give the person you love for Valentine's Day, and student Grace Poirier knows a thing or two about chocolate.
The second-year Vancouver Island University (VIU) Bakery and Pastry Arts student has recently returned from Europe after a school field trip with seven of her classmates. But on this trip, Poirier got a special opportunity to learn the secrets behind chocolate and create her very own.
This came after a contest that was held among the students in the program to blind taste test different items and guess what flavours they were
“It was a blindfolded taste test with around 20 different foods, beverages, and just different ingredients that can be incorporated into chocolate. So some of them are a little strange,” Poirier said. “You blind taste test them and whoever gets the most right wins the opportunity to go to the lab and make the chocolate when we're all on the trip.”
As the winner of the competition, during the trip, Poirier along with her instructor Ken Harper traveled to Meulan (an area outside of Paris) to visit the Cacao Barry's Or Noir Lab to design the university’s next signature chocolate.
“We tried around 20 different chocolates from regions all over the world just to get a flavour palette,” she said. “Then to narrow it down a little bit more, we taste the cocoa mass from that product.”
During this time she got to try combining different flavours and cocoa masses to find the right mixes.
“You make a few different recipes, you mix it up, we made little callets out of them to taste test the chocolate,” Poirier said. “We ended up doing this around six times, so we have six different versions of the chocolate that we made.”
Although she cannot spoil what the new flavour will be, she can say it will be a mix of dark chocolate and milk chocolate. Poirier said this mix of milk chocolate with a higher percentage of cacao can be a bit unusual but goes along with what her favourite type of chocolate is.
“I really like dark chocolate but I like a lighter dark chocolate, so this is very within my niche, my realm,” she said.
She said she learned a lot from her experience of making the chocolate, especially reminding herself that quality takes time.
“I don't know why in my head I suspected it to be like a pretty quick process just because we had a lab technician they're like doing all the scientific parts on the computer,” she said. Our [job] was just vocal opinions and discussing it, but it took around nine hours.”
Along with continuing to make chocolates at home for her friends and family, she hopes to find ways to incorporate chocolate-making into her future.
“Long term, I want to open a business that has to do with hospitality and pastry dessert type business,” she said. “So I would definitely see myself creating chocolates and producing them for sale.”
This is the second time through the Cacao Barry Or Noir Experience a VIU student has created a signature chocolate for the school.
According to VIU, Cacao Barry has been a sponsor of the VIU Bakery and Pastry Arts program for 11 years now and donates 500 kg of chocolate to the program every year.
So why does chocolate coincide with Valentine's Day?
Poirier said chocolate can be a great gift to give somebody especially if you know the person so well you know what their favourite type is.
“I really like these specific pistachio chocolates from Purdys,” she said. “So every year my boyfriend gets me these pistachio chocolates and it's just like something random I told him years and years and years ago and he remembers every year so I think it's really a lot about the thought of the person you're getting chocolate for.”
Poirier said as she just finished designing the new chocolate it would not be ready in time for Valentine’s Day. Still, it is expected to be ready for distribution and sales between October and December of this year.