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Wen Chocolates

CAPSULE REPORT: Every time we think we have settled down with a “favorite chocolatier,” we discover a new favorite. Chef Will Poole of Wen Chocolates makes chocolates just as we like them: exciting concepts, perfectly articulated flavors and, as you can see in the photo, exquisitely crafted pieces. While the most demanding connoisseur would covet a box, anyone who loves fine chocolate will treasure one.

Poole understands that chocolate-lovers have their preferences. He sells his chocolates online by the piece, ensuring that every piece you get is a flavor you want—no Forrest Gump dilemma. (If you don’t like to make choices, there are pre-set assortments.) At $1.50 per piece, these chocolates are beautifully priced as well as beautiful to taste—and before you do that, beautiful enough to simply admire as art. Read the full review below. (If your email client does not support anchor links, scroll down.)

• For more of our favorite chocolates, click here.
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INDEX

• Overview
• Truffle Flavors
• Our Favorites

• What Is Couverture
• Buy Wen Chocolates Online
• More Chocolate Gifts

Each handmade confection is crafted with the finest, all-natural ingredients. The couverture is mostly E. Guittard, the premium line from Guittard Chocolate Company, one of America’s finest chocolate producers. More specifically, Chef Poole prefers the 61% cacao Lever du Soleil couverture, a blend of South American cacaos, for his dark chocolates (both for the enrobing chocolate and the ganache). The milk chocolate is the Orinoco 41% cacao from Venezuelan beans (caramel tones with a hint of cinnamon).

For three of the pieces, Chef Poole uses a mix of E. Guittard and Plantations, a couverture made exclusively from the Arriba bean,* in 75% and 100% cacao. The Kochac truffle is made completely from Plantations couverture. The Violette and Mocja truffles are made with a mix of the two couvertures.

*Plantations is a producer that specializes exclusively in Arriba cacao, also called Nacional. The Arriba bean is naturally sweeter than other cacao beans: you can eat a higher-percentage cacao bar that will have less bitterness compared to other brands (the higher the percentage of cacao, the less sugar in the chocolate). We have eaten their 100% cacao bar—it has absolutely no sugar—and love it.

From top left, clockwise: Savannah, Bananas Foster, Pain d’Epices, White Cloud, Prazen Sladkor and Mint Julep.

What Is Couverture

Couverture (meaning coating) chocolate is professional-quality chocolate made with better beans, ground to a finer particle size and with a higher cocoa butter content than most chocolate bars for eating†. It is used to enrobe candies and other confections (chocolate-covered pretzels, e.g.). Couverture comes in kilo (2.2 pound) to 10 pound bars or blocks. Some companies make smaller bars and “wafers,” discs smaller than a quarter, for the home baker and chocolatier.

†Fine chocolatiers, of course, make their chocolate bars from the same quality couverture.

Couverture is tempered to form a thin, smooth, shiny coating on hand-dipped candies. The extra cocoa butter, generally 36% to 39%, makes it easier to work with, allows for a thinner shell coating and gives it a different texture and consistency than non-couverture chocolate, i.e. chocolate bars. (Bars for eating can be 25% to 33% cocoa butter, depending on the quality of the bar.)

Each chocolatier decides which brand of couverture to use, depending on his or her personal tastes. Some use more than one brand and/or different blends of beans, origin couvertures or percentages of cacao within a brand, based on their feeling that specific couvertures pair better with particular items. For example, even within semisweet chocolate, one couverture might taste better with nuts; another with fruits, fruit cremes and peel; another with caramels and toffee; and yet another with plain bars and ganaches.

• Brands popular among U.S. chocolatiers include Callebaut, El Rey, Guittard and Valrhona. Callebaut’s chocolate is certified kosher, so chocolatiers who want to make the finest kosher chocolate generally use it.
• Some chocolatiers use the manufacturer’s straight product, others might blend different blocks to get their desired result. Still others might have the chocolate manufacturer blend a special “recipe” according to the chocolatier’s own specifications (e.g., more cocoa butter for a smoother mouthfeel, more Venezuelan beans in the mix for a fruitier chocolate).

To understand your flavor preferences, ask chocolatiers which couverture they use: it gives the chocolates their defining taste, regardless of fillings. By understanding, e.g., that you like Couverture A but don’t like Couverture B as much, you will understand your preferred flavor profile. (It’s like knowing that you like the fruitier style of many California Pinot Noirs better than the more balanced style of many Oregon Pinot Noirs.) Most chocolatiers don’t make a secret of the brand of couverture they use—they’re proud of their choice(s) and want you to be an educated consumer. And, knowing your preferences lets you make more informed choices the next time you purchase chocolate. If you know you enjoy chocolate made with Guittard couverture, e.g., the next time you see a Guittard chocolate bar, you might stop to buy it. Or, the next time you encounter a new chocolatier and find that he or she uses Guittard couverture, you know you have a good chance of really enjoying those chocolates. 

NOTE: Even if you don’t like a particular couverture in chocolates, it will probably taste splendid in baked goods and ice cream, where the flavor is nowhere as intense as biting into a chunk of it. One brand that has flavor notes that we don’t enjoy in eating chocolate is one of our top choices for baking and for making ice cream.

For an overview of some of the great chocolate producers in the world, read our article, “House Tour: The World’s Great Chocolate Houses.”

Truffle

The word truffle has several meanings in the world of candy—like praline, you have to clarify what is being discussed. That’s because in different countries, words mean different things, and America, the great melting pot, has polyglot references to many things.

• A French invention, the original chocolate truffle was a ball of ganache, often flavored and rolled in cocoa. It was named after the precious black truffle fungus because of its physical resemblance. Sometimes the ganache is rolled in white confectioners sugar or finely chopped nuts; modern truffles can be coated in peppercorns, sweet curry and paprika and can be enrobed in couverture.
• In 1912, the Belgian chocolatier Jean Neuhaus invented the first hard chocolate shell (also called couverture), enabling fillings of any kind and consistency—creme, whipped cream, soft caramel, light ganache, liqueurs et al. Previously, only solid centers like caramels and nut pastes could be enrobed in chocolate—anything else would have leaked out.

Now come the layers of confusion:

• The hard chocolate shell that gets filled is called couverture; so are the large blocks of chocolate that get melted down to make it.
• Jean Neuhaus called these new filled chocolates pralines, the same word used to describe the caramelized almonds that had been made by the French (and known to the Belgians) since 1636. The French call filled chocolates chocolats fourrés; they call chocolates in general bonbons de chocolat or chocolats assortis.
• Back to chocolate truffles (i.e., balls of ganache): the word truffle is often used in America to describe any filled chocolate. If it is applied to a filled, hard-shell chocolate, the term should be limited to shells filled with ganache. In the case of Wen Chocolates, the term is appropriate because almost all of the chocolates are filled with ganache.

Alas, there is nothing we at THE NIBBLE can do to enforce a common chocolate language: we can only explain the Tower of Culinary Babel.

WEN CHOCOLATES

Assorted Truffles

• Individual Truffles
  Single Truffle: $1.50
  Two-Piece Box: $3.00
  Four-Piece Box: $5.99
  Six-Piece Box: $8.99
  Twelve-Piece Box: $17.99
• Pre-Set Assortments
  Milk or Dark Chocolate
  6 Pieces $8.99
  12 Pieces $17.99

Purchase online at WenChocolates.com.

Or telephone 1.720.891.4622, Monday
through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Mountain Time.

Clockwise from top left: Triglav, Mocja, Cairo,
Violette, Savannah.

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