Chocolate 1: Meadowsweet flower in plain chocolate

Day 1

Meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria, with Pump Street Chocolate Solomon Islands 72% plain chocolate 

I love meadowsweet for so many reasons - its beauty (those tufts of cream coloured fluff); its scent (so evocative of summer walks); its history (we have been using this plant for many, many purposes for 1000's of years); insects love it - it is always a busy place, what is there not to love!  

According to Tess Darwin's 'The Scots Herbal', the name meadowsweet is derived from its use to flavour mead rather than it's contribution to sweet smelling meadows; however, it is now more popularly recognised for the sweet heady scent that it contributes to meadows and hedgerows on warm summer afternoons. The fragrance is quite hard to pin down, and can veer on the side of unpleasant to some; however, when mixed with white chocolate it seems to have an aniseedy quality that is really delicious. 

It has been used as a flavouring since Bronze Age or before, but also has an important medicinal history; it contains salicylic acid, an ingredient of aspirin, and has been used to treat malaria, fevers and headaches. Its Gaelic name is Chuchulainn and is derived from the story that the legendary warrier of that name was treated with meadowsweet baths to cure uncontrollable fits of rage or fever.

We started using meadowsweet flowers in the early years - mainly as a flavour for cream-based ganaches.  We also found that we could capture the scent in cocoa butter really well, and so were able to use that cocoa butter to flavour choccolate bars and this has been one of most popular white bars for many years.  This year, I decided to dry some of the flowers, mainly to dry for tea, but was amazed at how the scent intensified on drying, and wondered if it might work ground into a dark chocolate rather than a white.

This is the result;  we chose the Pump Street Chocolate  Solomon Islands 72% plain chocolate, as we found that it supported both the deep almondy flavours as well as light floral notes of the meadowsweet.  A lovely way to carry meadowsweet through the seasons.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chocolate 8. Sitka spruce

Image
Day 8 Sitka spruce, Picea sitchensis Much maligned as 'dark, monoculture, plantations marching across our hill-sides', Sitka spruce is indeed a common sight in our landscapes across the country.  Whether you love it or hate it, there is no denying that it is delicious!  In the early summer, the dormant buds on the ends of each branch start to sprout and they look so enticing; small vivid green soft brushes, at the ends of the spiky blue green needled branches of the Sitka.    You can pick them and use them to flavour syrups, vodkas, teas, dry them and add to baking - they have a wonderful bright, citreousy flavour. We first used them fresh to make a milk chocolate ganache, which is now a regular in our spring selections.  The flavour keeps well on drying, and we can flavour creams for ganaches and caramels all through the year - as well as grind into chocolate.   Our chocolate choice for this flavour was Chocolate Tree 's wonderful Guatemala 50% milk c...
Read more

Chocolate 20. Water mint

Image
Day 20 Water mint, Mentha aquatica We find at least three mint species within a ten-minute walk of the house, and they appear at their own times and in their own places.  They have distinctly different flavours - this one, the water mint, has a Moroccan mint tea vibe to it - and is my favourite for making tea, as well as for making ganaches.  The other two mints - M rotundifolia and M avellana - that we find are distinct in their own ways - the first is much sweeter, and the second is hard to identify as a mint in flavour, being more delicate and a little bitter. I use the water mint a lot from early to late summer to make ganaches, and only recently tried it as a flavouring for a chocolate bar.  Mint chocolate is so available and usually very powerful spearmint flavours from oils, and I thought a more subtle mint flavour might just underwhelm people.  But of course, how wrong could I be!  The simplicity of a simple bright mint flavour with a really good milk ...
Read more