To: Pure Adventurers
From: Gift Muse
Date: Decadent Days
Subject: Black Pearls
Unassuming, tidy, contemporary counters. Dark, warm woodwork. Designer display cabinets and furnishings. Inside Jean-Paul Hévin’s stores, you’ll find a taste reflecting modernity and perfection, combined with an atmosphere of elegance and comfort.
In the words of the Guide des Croqueurs de Chocolat (Chocolate Lovers’ Guide), “the chocolates produced by that cocoa bean aficionado feature a bitterness so excellent that even the most finicky of purists will be won over. At the same time, adventurous types will be satisfied with the unexpected flavors.”
How does Jean-Paul Hévin manage to maintain the consistently high quality of his “black pearls”? He tells us that the secret is “the high-quality ingredients, which I am constantly tasting and sampling. I am just as uncompromising on the subject of where our fine cocoa beans come from (selected mostly in Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Madagascar) as I am about their flavor or color. My job, first and foremost, is that of a taster. I’m not entrusting the responsibility of testing to anyone else.” Jean-Paul Hévin has developed a number of methods that enable him to “taste” each chocolate to detect the different levels of flavors hidden deep within.
It is up to the master chocolatier’s know-how to do the rest. The extreme choiceness of his chocolates depends upon the harmony of its chords and upon this intimate blend of ingredients that are balanced so subtly: top-quality cocoa beans, sugar and butter, the quantities of which have been reduced so that J.P.H. chocolate, the very picture of sophistication, retains all of its authentic taste.
The artist chocolatier
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