PastryScoop.com is an outreach program founded by The French Culinary Institute that is charged with “supporting the increasing importance of pastry arts and pastry chefs in American and International cuisine” and to act as a resource to both professionals and non-professionals. PastryScoop.com has a wide range of interesting resources online and hosts a number of offline events including two conferences annually and a regular Supper Club at The French Culinary Institute’s restaurant, l’Ecole.

I was invited to attend the December 2004 Supper Club dinner featuring chocolates from E. Guittard. Overall take: quite delicious and inviting in its relative informality. Good food, good wine, good chocolate, good company.

When RSVPing for the event I was asked to choose my appetizer and entrée and my place setting also indicated my dinner selections so there was no need to order dinner.

Options for the appetizer were a butternut squash soup and a warm sausage and herbed potato salad (I opted for the sausage). The appetizers were paired with a Sentall Cellars Chardonnay (all wines were provided by Baron Francois Wines) which by itself was quite remarkable in that I tend not to like Chardonnays, preferring more acidic fumé or sauvignon blancs. This particular Chardonnay had a buttery texture that went quite well with the soup, but with a slight acidity and pear and tropical fruit notes instead of the grassy or heavy oak notes of many California Chardonnays. However, the sausage had whole peppercorns in it and the wine just could not stand up to the heat and spice - which is not surprising.

Entrée choices included pan-roasted cod with smoked salmon and chocolate-spiked sauce Américaine or braised and sautéed chicken with chocolate mole sauce. I chose the chicken with mole as the pairing of chocolate with fish is not a novelty for me (I often pair fish with a white or bittersweet chocolate beurre blanc). The entrée selections were paired with a L’opera de Villerambert Julien, Minervois which was remarkable because of the (to me) distinctive taste of cocoa nibs. The chicken was cooked perfectly and the mole had the perfect bitter bite with a strong overtone of roasted corn (probably from tortillas used to thicken the sauce); however the mole had a too refined and velvety texture - in my opinion it needed to be more “rustic” to be true to its heritage. Because of the nib taste in the wine, is was very complementary to the sauce.

Dessert consisted of three selections, a chocolate pecan tart made with E. Guittard 55%, crème brûlée made with E. Guittard 61%, and a semi-sweet chocolate ganache with bittersweet chocolate ice cream made with E. Guittard 72%. After dinner and so much wine, this much dessert was quite a lot to tackle, but the plate presentation was quite elegant. The desserts themselves were all very well made, quite satisfying, and highlighted one of the main features of E. Guittard chocolates, which is that they are good vehicles for other flavors without calling attention to themselves. They are easy to use and don’t have flavor profiles that a chef or home baker needs to fight against.

The desserts were paired with a vintage 1984 Armagnac (Chateau de Laubade), which, with notes of coffee, nut butter, caramel, molasses, honey, old sweet oak, and chocolate, was a perfect match for the desserts. This was finished off with a chocolate tea from Serendipitea, a nice warm way to end a delightful meal in the company of very interesting people.

You can get on the PastryScoop Supper Club e-mail list by signing up at www.pastryscoop.com. Attendance at each dinner - the theme changes each time - is limited to 36 people and the dinners are quite reasonably priced. Click here to visit the E. Guittard web site. Click here to visit the Baron Francois web site.