On the occasion of the Easter weekend, Julie Andrieu will present “Les carnets de Julie spéciale chocolat” on Saturday 13 April at 16h10 on France 3.
To discover a region, a city or a product, and to explore its history through a typical recipe to better understand its specificities and its riches, this is the adventure that proposes to us Julie Andrieu who, aboard his red convertible, travels the roads of France. A small reporter of taste and good living, Julie finds unusual places, meets warm and truculent characters, able to make us understand what makes the creative, gastronomic, cultural, heritage or economic cement of a region.
The kitchen plays more than ever its link role. It solates families, connects generations, establishes the identity of a region and ensures the transmission of know-how. Encounters, recipes, anecdotes and valuable information are transcribed in small notebooks. Moments of pleasure and escape to savour without moderation.
Today, Julie makes us discover chocolate in all its States, from bean to Tablet, raw or cooked, for dessert or in salted dish! And it is during an egg hunt that she will plant the scenery. Accompanied by children, she discovers in the garden the chocolates of the master chocolatiers Stéphane Bonnat, Christophe Roussel, Jérémy Fages or Amelle wick.
The custom of offering Easter eggs already existed in ancient times, in Pagan traditions. The Persians, Romans and Egyptians celebrated the return of spring, the season of the hatching of nature, by offering painted and decorated eggs. The eggs symbolize, in fact, fertility, renewal and creation. The tradition was then taken over by the Church to celebrate the rebirth of Jesus Christ, resurrected on Easter Sunday.
But it was only in the 18th century that the idea of emptying the eggs to fill them with chocolate was imposed. The whole chocolate egg appears in the next century. As cocoa becomes more democratized, chocolate makers invent a mixture of sugar, cocoa butter and powdered chocolate to create a malleable dough that can easily be poured into moulds. The egg in chocolate is then born, and other chocolate sculptures will later be created by the confectioners, like the hen, the rabbit or even the bells!
-Product: chocolate, bean to Tablet
Management of the CIRAD (Centre for agronomic research for development) in Montpellier in order to discover more in detail the cocoa trees. Christian CILAS makes us discover the plant and the pod that allow the manufacture of chocolate. Stéphane Bonnat us then opens the doors of his chocolaterie. It shows us how to turn the precious beans into shelves. They undergo several crucial steps: roasting, grinding, conchage…
-Artisan topic: Jérémy Fages, Chocolatier sculptor
Passionate about the professions of mouth and amateur of everything that comes close or far to the field of art, Jérémy wants to merge his passions by combining the most original flavors to the artistic. He then specializes in the Chocolaterie; the chocolate being “infinitely modular”. In 2012, he received the Rabelais trophy of young chocolatiers talents. In March 2016, he organized an exhibition “Cacaophage ENA”, with sculptures 100% chocolate, in Toulouse.
-Artisan topic: Amelle Wick’s raw chocolate
At Châtillon-en-Diois, at the gates of the Vercors Park, Amelle realizes her raw chocolate with pure raw cocoa butter, sweetened with honey from local producers and infused with pink.
Chocolate is a fair trade because Amelle uses only cocoa beans from a native South American variety, one of the oldest and rarest.
And the recipes:
-Christophe Roussel’s raw chocolate tart
-Chocolate bar with honey and rose and whipped cream with two chocolates (raw and cooked) by Amelle Wick
-The inratable mousse, the always perfect fondant and the best truffles with Victoire Finaz
-Emmanuèle Vasseur chocolate crust beef
-And the sculpture freshly made by Jérémy Fages