Choosing and Understanding Your Chocolate
Not quite white, not really milk,blond chocolate sparks curiosity.
Its golden hue and notes of caramel, biscuit, or cooked milk evoke memories of desserts and pastries… Yet it’s neither a new cocoa variety nor a white chocolate blended with caramel. So, what exactly are we talking about?
Blond chocolate is made through a slow caramelization process of white chocolate. This technique involves gently heating high-quality white chocolate (made with cocoa butter, milk powder, and sugar) at a low temperature for several hours.
The heat causes Maillard reactions between milk proteins and sugars,just like what happens when bread develops a golden crust or meat is roasted,creating new aromatic compounds.
The result?
A natural golden color, rich notes of toffee, shortbread, caramelized milk, and sometimes even a slight salty touch,all with the smooth, melt-in-the-mouth texture of white chocolate.
Who Invented Blond Chocolate?
French chocolate maker Valrhona is credited with the invention, having launched the first commercial version, “Dulcey,”in 2012. Since then, other brands have followed, but the production remains largely artisanal or semi-artisanal, given the time, precision, and quality ingredients required.
Is Blond Chocolate Truly Chocolate?
From a legal standpoint, blond chocolate is still classified as white chocolate, as it contains no cocoa solids (i.e., no cocoa paste). However, its sensory profile is much richer and more complex, which explains its growing popularity among pastry chefs and chocolate connoisseurs.
Orfève’s Approach
At Orfève, we do not see the different families of chocolate as a hierarchy, but as different possibilities for exploring ingredients and taste.
Our dark chocolates explore the expression of fine cacao and its origins. With our Noir de Lait collection, we work with a different balance, combining these fine cacaos with Swiss milk from Geneva in three intensities, 41%, 47%, and 53% cacao.
Blond chocolate opens up yet another territory. Its distinctive character does not come from a particular cacao origin, but from the gradual transformation of the sugars and milk proteins through heat. Its interest lies in mastering this transformation and the aromatic nuances it can develop.
We do not currently produce blond chocolate. But our work increasingly leads us to explore the different ingredients that make up chocolate. In particular, we press our own cocoa butter in our manufacture, naturally opening up new possibilities for research into white chocolate, and, perhaps one day, blond chocolate.