A creamy-culinary soirée with Vale Fritz, Miss Marshal & Honold, Mühle Tiefenbrunnen, Zurich

Honold the family run confiserie with a century old tradition hosted a “creamy-culinary” dinner party with Vale Fritz & Miss Marshal taking care of the menu. Everything had something to do with either cocoa, chocolate or both. The event kicked off with a talk held by Mr. Inderbitzin from Felchlin, the renowned manufacturer of couverture. He showed us how the cocoa in Bolivia is harvested, fermented and dried.

After the presentation and a reception, things kicked off with a 9-course dinner opting to use chocolate in every dish. But first – and believe me I never thought I’d ever make a comment like this – the room was beautifully decorated with candles and colorful roses creating a contrast to the industrial concrete walls. Back to the menu ,any different ways of using chocolate were showcased, some very successful, some a bit less. Stracciatella-butter worked great, very pleasantly surprising was the chocolate and cheese fondue to dip the roasted vegetables into. A rather traditional dish was the mole and chicken, with a bit of spice and a few drops of lime to complement it. The Scampi didn’t work that well, the chocolate made it too sweet.

The winner of the night was the main course – the venison was out of this world. Tender, pink in the middle, tasty and a melt-in-your-mouth quality one doesn’t find often! Side dishes were nice, even though I first sneered at something called “Kernotto”, it was actually nicely flavoured and had a good bite to it. Personally the celeriac and celery mash was my favourite little tibit. The most controversial piece of this course was a blood ganache. Think of a creamy, sweet, very homogenous vesion of a black pudding (Blutwurst) – certainly very creative ue of chocolate and people who like black pudding enjoyed the blood ganache.

Unfortunately the desserts were less successful. The filo, cheese, brown butter and rose hip gelee course was dominated by texture (filo) and the gelee was lacking aromatic punch to tie the dessert together. The chocolate ice-cream had a perfect texture (classic technique using liquid nitrogen) and a nice cedar aroma, the rowan berry (Vogelbeere) was too acid. But the sweets served with coffee by the Honold team saved the day and made a nice end to an interesting, very well organized, tasty and creative dinner. Even more interesting was the conversation that ensued with a young pastry chef talent, we will be curious wether the bacon, onion jam, pistacchio truffe will ever materialize after we were asked what our dream chocolate would look like. Highlight of the evening was when Mrs Charlotte “Lotti” Honold – age unknown – was interviewed by Dominik Flammer and shared some memories such as skiing down Fortunagasse as a child. And apparently the best chocolate produced (manually) by Honold is called “Lotti’s Best” – I’ll need to try it.