Chocolate Showpieces, Jacques Torres, and the Best Class Ever

Me and my class with Chef Jacques Torres

Today I had the best class ever--Jacques Torres taught it. In college, I had many professors who were leaders in their fields and I would sit in the lecture hall or at the seminar table listening intently to what they had to teach the class. This was different than that because, in addition to him teaching us and showing us amazing techniques and tricks that could only come from Mr. Chocolate himself, I got to cook in the same kitchen as Jacques Torres, not just listen to him teach (like I get to do at the demos).

Chef Jacques with the main structure of
the showpiece. The blue thing in front
of the showpiece is one of the silicon
molds that I discuss below.

We have a chocolate showpiece project coming up, so Jacques Torres--or Chef Jacques as we are told to call him--demoed how to make a chocolate showpiece. He talked about finding the focal point, designing a shape that is pleasing to the eye, and the proper proportions of width to hight. He showed us how to mold odd shapes out of chocolate using rubber or cardboard bands (which enables you to make the piece thicker than you could if you were trying to cut it out) and how to use metal rings to mold the circles for the base (again, this makes things thicker than if you just cut out the shape.) That's how he made the main structure of the showpiece.

Chef Jacques making flower petals and the tuile mold used for
curving them. Also you can see the notching in the edges of
curved pieces of chocolate that form the showpiece's structure.

He also showed us how to make abstract flowers (by forming petals with a pairing knife dipped in chocolate and curving them in a tuile mold) and paint chocolate onto textured molds--in this case to make wings for a butterfly and leaf-like decorations for the base. He taught us how to cut fluted edges out of chunks of chocolate and glue everything together. 

The flower.

Finally he showed us a really cool technique to make a kind-of dough out of chocolate that will harden properly (in contrast to modeling chocolate that doesn't harden completely). Basically you put chocolate (regular old pistoles/chunks from a bar of chocolate) into a food processor and blitz until the chocolate becomes a dough--this may require adding a bit of external heat, but don't use too much or it will met as Chef Jacques so helpfully demonstrated. Once it is a stiff dough you can mold it like clay into complex shapes--in this case, the stamen of the flower, antenna for the butterfly and decorative curvy bits to add movement to the top of the showpiece. These decorations, plus a little bit of petal dust on the butterfly, made for a beautiful showpiece. The most amazing thing about it is that Chef Jacques made it from scratch in about 2.5 hours, including gathering equipment! (To give some perspective, we have more than 8 hours to make our showpieces.) I have to say, I this makes me feel somewhat more confident about being able to make my showpiece...not to mention, I have some really great ideas for techniques I want to use. I almost can't wait until I make my showpiece...almost.

The finished showpiece.