Okanagan College chefs develop exclusive chocolate recipes

Two Okanagan College chefs say they have two sweet new recipes for chocolate, making the school the first post-secondary institution outside of Europe to develop exclusive new recipes of the dark treat.

Chef Danny Capadouca, head of the Pastry Arts Program, and Chef Bernard Casavant, the school's culinary manager, developed their recipes through Cacao Barry's Or Noir chocolate lab outside of Paris.

"Chefs and chocolatiers can go there and develop their own recipe of chocolate. They have an intricate system where if you go and develop a chocolate to close to another chef's recipe, it blocks you right out," Capadouca told Radio West host Audrey McKinnon.

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"So it really does protect one's recipe … this was going to be our exclusive recipe. That was enough for Chef Bernard and I to really get interested."

The two chefs developed two chocolate recipes: a 69.8 per cent cacao dark chocolate called Okanagan Noir and a 45.1 per cent cacao milk chocolate called Kalamalka Caramel.

"We wanted to put a local spin on it and name them after the lakes," Capadouca said.

'Intense … but not aggressive'

Capadouca says the differences in flavour come from the types of beans used, how they're picked and how they're fermented.

Casavant says the chocolates they developed are "intense … but not aggressive."

"It's not abusive of your palate like some 89 per cent chocolate," he said. "We are in wine country, we knew the dark chocolate, we wanted to be pairing with that.

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His hope is to begin retailing the chocolate, at least in bulk, at Okanagan College by the end of February.

"We have future dreams of macerating fruit and local winery wine and infusing that into the chocolate and partnering with retail, but that's down the line."

Capadouca says the chocolate is designed to be versatile enough for both snacking or cooking and Okanagan College students might soon be able to use it in their own creations.

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With files from CBC Radio One's Radio West

To hear the full story, click the audio labelled: Okanagan College chefs develop new chocolate recipes, a first for a non-European school