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My friend Claire has two passions: chocolate, and lavender. She recently opened Rue Claire Artisan Chocolates & Lavender Farm. In addition to a handful of other odds and ends jobs, I spent a few weeks working for her in the lavender gardens (by far, my best smelling gig) and painting her lovely, newly constructed eco-friendly shop. The interior of the quaint little “green” building is appropriately colored lavender from head to toe, and most of the time Claire is, too… right down to her lavender-hue gardening gloves and rubber boots.
While attending an international chocolate convention in NYC, she won a piece of the world’s most expensive chocolate. I was invited to the tasting, along with a few local foodies, including Chef Dano Hutnik of Dano’s Heuriger, and the owner of Shalestone Vineyards, who make the best red wines on Seneca Lake. Normally, I do not go for sweets. I get more excited about a good piece of cheese than chocolate, but was honored to be a part of the tasting. The chocolate, La Madeline au Truffe, was given to Claire at Fritz Knipschildt’s Chocolate Magic presentation. It was made with the rare and expensive French Périgord truffle, Valrhona dark chocolate and truffle oil, and sells for a whopping $2,600.00 per pound. The wild truffle imparted that distinctively pungent fungus aroma to the chocolate, and the fungus itself added a woody, nutty texture in the middle of what I experienced as the smoothest, silkiest chocolate imaginable, which was not too sweet, either. The essence of truffle seldom has a middle ground when it comes to people’s palettes, most either extremely love or extremely dislike it. I thought it was totally a winning combination. I should also mention that Claire’s own combination of Lavender and Chocolate, in the form of a fudge “lolli”, is to die for.
www.rueclaire.com
