At Tour de France, tasting Belgium’s chocolate is a must
BRUSSELS (AP) >> On meeting someone who makes bars of chocolate for a living, the question that immediately springs to mind is: “After a while, do you get sick of eating the stuff?”
The reassuring response, firmly delivered by chocoholic chocolate-store manager Patricia Lafargue is that it’s simply not possible to have too much of a good thing.
“Every day, I have to eat chocolate,” she said, as she ladled molten sweet, dark scoops into a mold where the chocolate hardens into bars. “I cannot cope without any chocolate. That’s not possible for me.”
With the Tour de France getting off to a riotous start Saturday in cycling-mad Belgium, it would have been almost criminal while here to not check out the country’s world-famous chocolate industry. Tough job, but some
one has to do it. After all, one cannot live on cycling alone.
Brussels, where Stage 1 started and where, after a 194.5 kilometer (121 mile) loop south of the capital city, it also ended with a sprint finish won by Dutch rider Mike Teunissen , is choc-a-bloc with chocolate stores. That’s nightmarish for dieters but paradise for the sweet-toothed.
Given that Belgium is also big on fries , sold at some 5,000 “frietkot” frykiosks and served with mayo in paper cones, perhaps it’s only natural that chocolate is big here, too, to pile on pressure on waistlines.
Confectionary is a 4 billion-euro ($4.5 billion) industry in Belgium, producing 700,000 tons of chocolate and pralines per year, according to the industry’s trade group, Choprabisco. It says most of the chocolate and pralines are exported but that Belgians also munch through six kilograms (13 pounds) each per year. Yum.
To make bars, Lafargue first melts dark chocolate to 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) and then hand-cools it to a more manageable 32 Celsius (90 Fahrenheit) on a cold marble table, vigorously massaging the mixture with spatulas, a process that improves the quality and texture of the chocolate once hardened.