Home
Dominique and Cindy Duby
By Malcolm Jolley
Vancouver's Dominique and Cindy Duby are on the vanguard of the molecular gastronomy movement. The chocolatiers and pastry chefs are know for bringing the techniques of "the new cooking" to the mixing bowl. Now, they've taken aim at savoury chefs with a groundbreaking cookbook that mixes the common sweet food with ingredients like shrimp and duck, as well as far out chocolates and drinks. Wild Sweets Chocolate challenges the way we approach basic recipes. I caught up to the husband and wife team recently for this interview.
Gremolata: This book is a little different...
Dominique Duby: When we took the idea of the book to our publisher, they thought we were going to add a chocolate sundae sauce to a piece of salmon or something.
Cindy Duby: And that turned them right off! [Laughs.]
Gremolata: I have to admit when I read the press release, I thought "what the...?"
Dominique Duby: It's all about context.
Cindy Duby: People always think of chocolate as a sweet thing, never as a savoury.
Dominique Duby: So when you put into a savoury context, you almost have to trick the mind that it's not really chocolate. You do different sauces, emulsions like a Hollandaise. You do treatments that are salty or acidic. Then, chocolate adds a different dimension and chocolate, in a bar form, in those kinds of sauces adds body. So the sauces hold themselves and instead of having a liquid that falls down to the bottom of the plate, you can do things that have volume.
Gremolata: Like the "orange chilli chocolate mayonnaise" to go with your halibut?
Dominique Duby: Right, but it's not like a mayonnaise you buy in a jar. The inspiration for the savoury dishes really came from pastry chefs. We wanted to create things that we could pipe or dress with a spoon, or whatever. Chefs, in general, are more asymmetrical in their presentation, more about how things fall on the plate. We wanted to add that pastry chef touch. Maybe a tuille or a choux pastry, something different but savoury.
Gremolata: So, are you writing the book principally for professional chefs?
Cindy Duby: Home chefs too. The everyday person. The professional might get inspiration from it, but it's also for the home chef - that's why there are two versions of each dish. There's a home version where we cut out some of the steps, but it still has the essence of the dish.
Dominique Duby: It's a bi-audience! It's for both.
Gremolata: Maybe not the first cookbook someone would own, though?
Dominique Duby: Oh sure. It's for the culinary enthusiast. Anyone who is willing to use chocolate in savoury cuisine is already a little more adventurous and has a keen interest in cooking. And we wanted to write a book that would contribute and add to the existing body of knowledge out there. It's not another book about how to make chocolate brownies. We wanted to produce something fresh and new.
Gremolata: How do you come up with the concepts?
Cindy Duby: We experiment. Coming up with the drinks was fun.
Dominique Duby: Yes, and I think we did it a little different form a savoury chef. Usually a chef would say, I have some prawns what should I cook with them? In our case we experimented with different chocolate sauces and ingredients, like saffron or ginger, than try and think of what main thing would go with them. The protein was more or less the last element.
Gremolata: That's completely the opposite of how most of us think about dinner. I mean you go to the market and see a nice piece of meat or whatever and build a meal around it.
Dominique Duby: Yes. And we not saying there's a right or a wrong way, just that this is different. And what this does, if nothing else, is make the creative process more interesting. If you do things the same way - in a linear way - all the time you will hit a wall. When you change how think you might discover all sorts of things. And then the whole creative process can start again.
Gremolata: Speaking of which, did anything, any new combination, just not work?
Cindy Duby: There was something that combined Merlot and lemon that was not good. When we ate the dish it almost tasted like bad meat or something. But when we went back and took the lemon juice out it was perfect.
Gremolata: Wine and chocalate? Conventionally that's a no-no.
Dominique Duby: Actually, we have a whole section in the book on wine and chocolate pairing. We take a scientific approach and see why it wouldn't, and the what we found was that it's the tannins. There's tannins in wine and tannins in chocolate, especially dark. When you're working with chocolate and wine, you want to minimise the tannins in the chocolate, with sweetness for example.
Gremolata: When you work with chocolate and combine it with all these other ingredients, did you find there were sort of hidden flavours that came out?
Dominique Duby: It was more about deconstructing chocolate to see if we could use it in different applications. So, for the tuna we used coca powder as a rub. With other things we would use cocoa butter, which can take a little lemon. It's really more about fine tuning.
Cindy Duby: Like finding out red grapefruit works better than yellow.
Gremolata: A lot of work!
Cindy Duby: We eat a lot! [Laughs.] We do a lot of testing and tasting. All the time.
Comments