My mom visited Paris once for a business trip, and a group of her and her coworkers were out one night and they came across a tiny American-themed restaurant. The owners were so excited to see actual Americans, but they didn’t really speak a lot of English so the whole encounter was just both parties pantomiming their excitement at meeting the other.
Unpopular opinion but I suspect that most of chocolate guy’s sculptures–the ones he doesn’t explicitly eat on camera–are probably barely more edible than fondant sculptures.
There are a handful of things that make me guess that.
1) Good chocolate is pretty expensive. There’s a LOT of waste in these sculpture processes.
1a) If the waste gets melted down and reused (probable) that’s… um… I mean there are ways to do it sanitarily but it will pick up tastes.
1b) You need really well-controlled environmental conditions to make good chocolate even if you’re starting from good ingredients. Part of why Swiss chocolate tastes distinctly different from Belgian chocolate tastes distinctly different from (good) American chocolate is differences in environmental conditions in the factory–conditions that they go to a lot of trouble to regulate. The act of sculpting is going to ruin a lot of that.
2) Chocolate sculptures that a normal person can buy are made out of pretty bad chocolate.
2a) The reason for this is that chocolate is only barely a solid at room temperature and will melt in a warm room. It’s stable at a slightly higher temperature if you temper it, but only slightly. (And most of his chocolate is NOT tempered.) You need to add stabilizers and/or remove some of the parts that make chocolate taste good in order to get something robust.
3) Relatedly, he uses his hands for a lot of this stuff. Hands will melt halfway-decent chocolate really fast. Like, it’s maybe possible to use it anyway, if you’re fast and if you’re rarely touching it other than the camera shots, but it’s not likely. It probably means, as I said in 2a, that there are added stabilizers and/or components of the chocolate removed, all of which affect the taste.
4) There are definitely some scenes where his chocolate has a clay-like consistency. That’s modeling chocolate, and I’ve never taken a bite of it but I’m told it doesn’t taste great. (Most people say it tastes better than fondant, but maybe not by much.)
100%
The snake and the whale and the telescope and the sword in the stone and the robot baker are all technically impressive but probably taste like absolute shit. You do not want to eat those.
The weird-ass little mushroom cakes and and the peach swan thing and the skateboard cookie and things like that are actually made out of shit that would taste good.
The sugar-glass butterfly and roses will just taste like sugar and any extracts that are added to them, they are essentially just really really fancy hard candy.
I actually kind of hate his videos. The big sculptures seem like such an enormous, obnoxious waste because they are probably totally inedible (I mean you technically COULD eat them, and they would probably taste sweet, but also that airbrush food-grade paint doesn’t taste great, it’s kind of bitter, so it’s probably just an introductory note of bitterness followed by bland, chalky chocolate). It makes sense, given that he’s in Vegas and I’m sure that they’re being used as ridiculous displays at various casinos and stuff, but the big sculptures he does seem like such utter bullshit compared to the cute, creative, individual servings of very pretty cakes that he makes that look actually tasty.
I enjoy the large sculptures not because I think they look tasty, because they really don’t, but because it’s impressive mechanical and structural engineering in an unusual medium. Chocolate art doesn’t have to be eaten for it not to be wasteful when it’s being used as a sculpting medium.
That said, I do kind of want to try some of the little cakes with fruity goo inside.
I think that argument holds with, like, ice sculptures and similar stuff, but ice is pretty neutral, chocolate really isn’t.
I think I need to see a statement on his website or his youtube videos about where the chocolate is sourced from if I’m going to be more okay with that much waste chocolate.
Since he is a pastry chef who works with chocolate a lot, I would hope that it was from somewhere that didn’t use child labor, but it costs about $50 for a 3-lb bag of fair trade cocoa mass vs $100 for a 25-lb bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips and he’s making sculptures that use hundreds of pounds of chocolate. I kind of suspect that he is not using ethically sourced chocolate and that makes the waste in his videos seem much more upsetting to me than if is using ethically sourced chocolate.
heyyyyy a rare intersection with one of my areas of particular expertise, I GOT THIS ONE
Now, however, Guichon is using Cacao Barry chocolate, which I know for suresies because a.) I know what their couverture wafers looks like, plus he was playing around with “ruby chocolate” recently, which is one of their things, and b.) if you check his IG (both his regular account and the amauryguichon.pastryacademy account) he’s pretty consistent about tagging @cacaobarryofficial. I think there’s a sponsorship there.
The sourcing ethics with Cacao Barry (half of mega conglomerate Barry Callebaut) are a liiiiiiittle less clearcut than Valrhona’s. Barry Callebaut also makes a big deal about being open and transparent about their sourcing and ethics via their Forever Chocolate program, it’s an easy-to-find permalink on their main site, and they founded Cocoa Horizons in 2015, a legit, free-standing non-profit organization specifically for the purpose of improving the lives of cacao farmers and holding companies like Barry-Callebaut to higher standards.
Good deal, good times, buuuuuut on the other hand they were one of the companies named in the child slavery lawsuit this year. (note: I link to that site with some trepidation, because while they are the group that brought the lawsuit on behalf of the former child cocoa workers, their press releases are a little disconcerting and sensationalist.) Then, to complicate it further, you’ve got Tony’s Chocolonely, whose entire purpose as a company is about creating ethically sourced, slavery-free chocolate, making a statement about continuing to work with Barry-Callebaut here.
I don’t have a horse in this race, I’m a Guittard girl by personal choice, but that’s what’s up with Chocolate Guy’s sourcing.
aaaaaaaand not to make a long post even longer, here’s a statement from the official IG on what they’re doing with his bigger sculptures, for what it’s worth:
I personally am okay with large amounts of expensive, mostly ethically-sourced chocolate being used as an artistic medium, then put on permanent display for educational purposes, but I know not everybody will, I just wanted to answer the question posed. 😀
Hey, thank you so much! That genuinely helps me feel a lot better about it. That takes it from “if I have to feel guilty about buying a snickers bar there is no fucking way I can watch this without feeling a whole lot of seething resentment” to “okay, this is annoying and Perhaps A Bit Extra, but generally no worse than any other fondant or otherwise gross-tasting food sculpture.”
Seriously, just knowing that there is SOME effort being put into the sourcing is a huge deal, because that’s a lot farther than a lot of chefs will (or can!) go.
i knew chocolate guy was gonna get Called Out in some form as soon as he got popular enough–it’s good to see a coherent discussion with actual facts going on, instead of just “I don’t like him so he probably traffics child slaves himself!”
by the way, if y’all like being thrifty with food, I wholeheartedly suggest going and buying a turkey right around now. Grocery stores are at the peak of their desperation to get rid of leftover Thanksgiving stock, and turkeys are a relatively undesirable product for 99% of the year. They don’t want to throw these things away and they’re settling for a BARE minimum profit. My local grocery store was offering up a couple different brands for anywhere from sixty cents to two dollars a pound.
A turkey can go straight into your freezer and stay there for up to a year as long as you get it in before its expiration date, and it’s a lot of food that’s not as difficult to prepare as your complaining father has made you believe on literally every Thanksgiving of your childhood.
Signed, a woman living paycheck to paycheck who just bought ten pounds of meat for eight dollars.
mc1303 