Master Craftsman Francois Pralus, And A Whole Load Of Nathalie's Bullshit

To be honest, I don’t really have much recollection of my visit to Francois Pralus'. I was so overcome with appetite and awe and desire the whole time I was there that I took no notes and paid little attention to anything other than what I was looking at, listening to, or, mainly, tasting at any particular moment. When I call my time there to mind, fragments of sweet-smelling, over-bubbling machines swim blurrily into place, but mainly what drifts through my memory is my mind-state throughout the visit— breathless, transfixed, thoroughly mesmerized, and ravenously hungry..

The first thing that happened was Valérie from Hervé Mons (another tremendous visionary of a craftsman that I won’t even try to cubby into place by writing down) taking us to a dingy post-war cube of a building that exuded such a riveting smell that Katie and I clutched at each other desperately.

Inside, I remember a quiet whirring of old machines, the sound dough makes when one punches it, the noise of a knife mashing butter in a metal bowl and the gentle trickle of crushed cocoa beans falling through spread fingers. A tall man with curly white hair and architect’s glasses coming forward to shake our hands and take us through his chocolate factory: the rooms in which the canvas sacks of cocoa he selects from single estates all over the world are stored, roasted, ground, and conched for three days until they morph into chocolate.

Neither book nor movie Wonka, actually, accurately represents the work of today’s chocolatier. Oompa-Loompas and facetiousness aside, what I mean is that most famous artisans du chocolat do not make chocolate. They are called fondeurs and they buy raw product, usually from Valrhona, and melt it (fondre is the verb for melt) to use as their base for whipping up whatever confections we celebrate them for. Because it is difficult and time-consuming and one needs special equipment and know-how and it’s fucking hard enough just to confection chocolate, most people leave it to experts like Valrhona to roast the beans and conch the cocoa, then buy the raw product from them and go on from there.

Not Francois. Frustrated at the lack of options for fondeurs, fueled by a hunger for travel and a bit of an iconoclast to boot, he decided to give roasting a go. His father’s candy factory in Roanne made (and still makes) the town’s classic Praluline, a divine butter brioche studded and spangled with almonds and hazelnuts that’ve bubbled awhile in boiled pink sugar. He had a base from which to work, then, and wasted no time in sourcing the best beans from around the world and sending them to France. The chocolate world is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to professional secrets, but trial and error led him to his own methods. He only ever uses criollo and trinitario strains of cocoa (the best for chocolate-making, even if they are rare and much harder to grow), chosen from small plantations in places like Venezuela and the Ivory Coast and Madagascar, where he has now set up his own plot of cocoa-been trees.

The beans arrive in sacks that are split open with canifs and poured into roasting machines where they torrefy awhile. Then they are crushed and winnowed so the hull separates from the cocoa, which is then ground coarsely into powder. Crates mounded with cocoa, cardboard signs noting their provenance, await their turn in the conching machine, where they will be massaged with butter and sugar over rollers for three days until the result is liquefied, pure, divine high-cocoa chocolate. Because Pralus makes raw chocolate but also plays with it, he both a chocolatier and a fondeur.

What’s different about Pralus is that unlike fondeurs who buy Valrhona 70% and add to it powdered Lapsang Souchong or candied orange peel or gold flakes or cream for ganache (all to lovely effect), most of his chocolates are as plain as you can make ‘em. (Which is funny for a guy who’s as famous for his austere, severely bitter dark chocolates as he is for his Praluline, the Louis XIV of brioches—and equally proud of both products.) The variation between different Pralus chocolates, then, comes not from supplementing a raw product with exotic ingredients or exciting flavors or inventive techniques but simply by changing the provenance of the cocoa bean used to make the chocolate—sometimes simply choosing ones that come from a farm a short distance a way.

It was interesting to visit Pralus, who’s been making chocolate his way for years, right at the cusp of the food world’s single-estate fever (sourcing from small, specific producers to valorize the unique flavor that their particular combination of terroir, people, and technique lends their product). Randolph’s wife Anita, too, was way ahead of the trend.

I remember, when I sold olive oil and mango-lime vodka for Selfridges last Christmas, making the acquaintance of a woman who’d just flow in from Seattle, where she worked for Starbucks Headquarters, to check out ‘what was happening on the London coffee scene’ (industrial espionage couched in hobby-talk, basically). “Have you ever heard of Mon-Mowth Coffee?” she asked me. “I’m off there next.” Well, what do you know? On my way to Italy this week I’m reading the in-flight magazine and come across a full-page Starbucks advertisement offering tasting notes for its new line of—what else—single fucking estate coffees.

Not that I’m opposed to Starbucks publishing ‘cupping’ notes (what a conscientious coffee tasting of several blends is called) in places where lots of people can see them. I’m all for taste education of the masses (including myself) and if Starbucks chooses to put out fine coffee with idiosyncratic flavor, that’s a move I support even if trendiness may have been a motivating factor.

But even if Starbucks successfully co-opts the idea of the moment, their mammoth size means that regardless of the propaganda that sails out on their press releases and from their P.R. office doors, their single-estate coffees will never touch the brews from Anita’s coffeehouse. I cringe when I hear Simon say that the cheaper supermarkets become, the safer he feels about his product as the gap between them widens—I desperately hope he’s right. What I fear is the increasing skill of supermarkets and Starbucks at projecting notions like ‘single-estate,’ ‘farmhouse,’ and ‘artisan’ onto products and people that aren’t anything of the sort: ‘heirloom’ tomatoes that roll on conveyer belts out of Dutch greenhouses into refrigerated trucks where they’ll sleep in Styrofoam beds while they cross a couple of countries; humble cowboy-hatted farmers with soil-encrusted nails who shoot commercials for Sainsbury’s on their smallest field. It’s my concern about small organic supermarket Fresh & Wild, actually. Currently they’re small enough that they truly, truthfully and fairly support small-scale local farming. But in 2007 when they morph into Whole Foods and have ten times the buying clout and require ten times the volumes and may introduce even one percent of an inclination to turn the screw a little tighter (an effect that contains the potential to exterminate far more than one percent of their producers), they’ll inevitably want to maintain the small-scale, wholesome image people have come to trust—recognizing its immense value, after all, is what they’ve built their business upon. But will they still deserve our trust? We’ll see.

When Starbucks puts out cupping notes for a new line of single-estate coffees in magazines with a readership of millions, of if Godiva—the ultimate masters of artificial artisanal and bogus quality—were to print ads for single-estate chocolates, how, I wonder, are consumers meant to make the distinction between faux-special and actually special? Of course Simon’s product is safe as supermarket cheddar gets shittier and shittier. But if instead of vacuum-packing a block of processed cheese, Sainsbury’s wraps it simply in waxed paper, slaps a Union Jack on it, gets the factory foreman to stand beside a cow and before a camera and say, with feeling, that he made it, one of the thirty-six takes they shoot is bound to have a semblance of the genuine. Presto! Who the fuck is Simon Jones then?

Of course people aren’t complete twats. If something tastes good, they recognize it, and often they’ll drop the dough required for purchase. It’s why Neal’s Yard Dairy is still in business, thriving even: yeah, our cheese costs more, but it’ll fucking blow everything cheaper out of the water. But most shops no longer allow people to taste products before buying them, so consumers necessarily base their decisions on appearance and price. And the better supermarkets become at commandeering notions like ‘local’ and ‘artisanal,’ the harder it is for the quality products to stand up for themselves. All the more so because the ersatz artisanal products cost less to make, allowing the supermarket buying teams to haggle even more harshly with small producers of quality, eventually driving them out of business once they can no longer compete.

The key, I think, is in independent retailers eager to educate consumers. That’s where quality wins, or at least has a chance to, because the customer can make an honest decision, whether it’s by tasting the product or having it put into context for them. Of course, the buying power of an independent retailer is far less impressive than a supermarket’s, and employing an educated, passionate, long-term staff usually means paying them more than the minimum wage. Result: the same products might cost a tad more—and people won’t put up with that.

Wow. I’ve veered way off Pralus. Oh well, guess I really needed to get that off my chest. I’ve been talking to cheesemakers and farmers a lot recently about this stuff and am mulling it over quite seriously. Any thoughts?

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