Belgian Chocolate Varieties
by lexisclickBelgium, a country that tends to keep a low profile on the world stage. What do you associate with Belgium? The Great War and the dreadful battlefields of Flanders, poppies and the Menin gate at Ypres? Brussels and the EU would you say? There’s Hercule Poirot and Tintin from the world of fiction. Belgian beer is world famous but there’s one product that really is the nation’s pride. Belgian chocolate, that’s what Belgium means to most of us! Belgian chocolatiers have been world leaders in the manufacture of fine chocolate for over 150 years since one of them invented the filled chocolate and started creating a variety of fillings to go inside the little chocolate case. Men seeking romantic gifts for their special ladies have never looked back! The ladies themselves would probably go along with that too! The superb quality of Belgian chocolate has been maintained and indeed improved and refined over the years but that’s only part of the story. Eating the chocolate itself may give us a foretaste of Heaven but there’s more! Having invented filled chocolates successive generations of Belgian craftsmen and women have developed a range of sumptuous fillings to create the varieties of chocolates that we can enjoy today. Belgian chocolate, like lesser breeds, comes in three basic types, dark, milk, and white, all the finest of their kind but once you start looking at the fillings for chocolates you’re into another world. There’s so much to learn starting with the names and what they mean. For instance do you know what a ganache is? Well it’s a filling that you create by mixing milk or cream with chocolate and then adding such natural flavours as orange, coffee, rum, or caramel. Its strong flavour of cacao varies according to how much milk or cream is mixed in. Take praline, that’s a filling produced from ground, roasted, caramelised hazelnuts or almonds, sometimes both, with real chocolate added to give the right texture. You can go on and on. You must have eaten chocolates with fillings described as “fondant” but do you know what fondant actually is? Fondant sugar filling’s a blend of natural flavours with sugar beaten together to form a really creamy texture. It can be used as a filling or used as a coating or be moulded. Maybe you knew that already but if not you do now! Something you might not know is how the chocolatiers make truffles. That’s a rather confusing name really because they have absolutely nothing to do with the truffles that pigs grub out of the ground for their owners. They’re fungi and they’re quite different. The truffles you associate with Belgian chocolate are a smooth paste made by mixing chocolate, butter and sugar. The pieces are then drenched in dark chocolate and sprinkled with cocoa, flakes of chocolate or almond shavings. Those are just a few of the delicious fillings and coatings that the creators of Belgian chocolates use in the practice of their art. When you eat the end products it’s tempting to think that some sort of supernatural powers were involved in the making of it but that’s not so. The secret is simply knowledge acquired over several lifetimes and passed on from generation to generation with a bit more added each time. Add to that the skill and judgement with which that knowledge is applied and you can see how it’s done. So you see it’s not just the quality of the chocolate that makes Belgium famous the world over for its chocolate products. It’s the range of varieties their manufacturers offer us that puts Belgian chocolate at the top of the World Chocolate league.