The Lyon King of Chocolate
Mike Gerrard visits the Bernachon chocolate shop in Lyon, France, said by many to produce the best chocolate in the world.
The best chocolate in the world? A bold claim, but one my Parisian friend Paule had no hesitation in making. And as a chef and a leader of gourmet walking tours in the French capital, she certainly knows her onions… and her chocolates. When I came across another impressive recommendation for Bernachon chocolates, which referred to the founder as ‘the king of chocolate’, I knew I had to make a pilgrimage to Lyon in southern France, where the chocolate is made behind the sole Bernachon shop.
The shop was opened in 1945 by a young 26-year-old chocolatier, Maurice Bernachon. Bernachon may have been young but by the time he opened his own shop he had been making chocolate for twelve years, first encouraged by his mother and later studying under the great chocolate makers of Europe. In those days most major cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna and Berlin, had renowned chocolatiers, but today Bernachon remains one of only a handful of shops in the world which still maintains the old traditions. They import their own cacao beans – 21,000 kilos every year – and roast and blend them on the premises to get the exact flavours they require.
The ingredients are everything, as Bernachon’s chef chocolatier Raymond Meguot tells us. The most important ingredient of all is, of course, the cacao bean. ‘The best are from Venezuela,’ Raymond Meguot tells us, ‘in particular a town called Chuao. Others come from Caracas, San Antonio, also from Brazil and Ecuador, Trinidad, Jamaica, Madagascar and the Ivory Coast.’ Raymond plunges his hands into one of several sacks of dusky brown beans on the floor, and offers them to us to smell. The aroma is deep and rich, if not yet quite the end product, the smell that is to food lovers what the song of the sirens was to Odysseus – irresistible.
Behind us a young man is sifting through the raw beans with a riddle, discarding any that are not 100% perfect. The original pod that these come from looks rather like a coconut, and the beans are inside in what resembles cotton wool. They break the pod open, then wash the beans and remove the impurities.
‘Different beans have different tastes and characters,’ says Raymond. ‘It is just like wine, a question of terroir. Making chocolate is very similar to making wine: good ingredients, the local land, the skill of the maker. The chocolate is blended with 30 percent refined sugar. Our blend of chocolate is all natural, and it has its own personality. You have therefore about 65% cacao.’
The finest vanilla pods from Madagascar are first blended with the sugar at 50 degrees (not one degree more or less), and then the cacao is added and slowly mixed in. The resulting thick paste begins to look recognisable as chocolate at last. However, it must first spend 36 hours churning in a machine called a concheur, and then a further 10 hours breathing, which releases the acidity. Raymond explains that the amount of breathing time is one of the many things that varies according to the tastes of the chocolatier, and is what gives each person’s chocolate a distinctive taste.
The taste of the chocolate is only the beginning, though. Raymond shows us some of the other ingredients which are then used to flavour and fill some of the 62 different kinds of chocolates that Bernachon produces. Each of these can take the blending of up to 16 different kinds of cacao bean to produce the basic chocolate from which they are made. Then come the almonds from Provence, walnuts from Grenoble and the pistachios from Sicily. ‘This is a particular type of almond,’ Raymond says, showing us one, ‘which is very tasty and is used to make our Almond Princess.’ We watch a young man taking the two halves of the almond and sealing them together by inserting the filling.
In the main room of the ‘factory’ (which is really just a handful of small rooms behind the shop), a woman has the kind of job many children must dream of. She is plunging her hands into a bath of chocolate, filling heart-shaped moulds with the pure dark luxury.
‘My friends all say to me: why aren’t you fat?’ Raymond tells us, followed by a typical Gallic shrug. ‘I say it’s because chocolate is made of good, natural products.’
Raymond Blanc visits Bernachon in Lyon
Certainly the chocolate at Bernachon is, including the alcoholic fillings such as rum and Armagnac. Later we bite into a Grand Marnier ‘bonbon’, and the booze bursts out and runs down our chins, a waste that won’t happen a second time! We’re practically dribbling, though when, after our behind-the-scenes tour, Raymond leads us into the shop where the finished chocolates sit in their thousands on trays, we feel like the kids given the key to the candy store. And having sampled Bernachon chocolates, we can only agree with Paule that they are the best in the world… but we’ll carry on tasting all the others as well, just to be sure.
Bernachon
42 cours Franklin Roosevelt
69006 Lyon
Tel: 04 78 24 37 98
