How it started
What is a dessert, anyway?
Once we’d perfected our first dessert, the Gâteau de Voyage Citron, it was time to decide on a second option. For this new sweet, our approach was to explore the very essence of the dessert. Why is it always the last dish of a French full-course meal? It may be largely due to differences in our culinary cultures.
A lot of Japanese dishes incorporate both sugar and salt, giving them a natural sweetness, whereas French cuisine tends to be more savory, without as many sugary ingredients. Maybe the role of dessert is to ensure that we get enough sugar.
Art de vivre
Even more interestingly, desserts are served in the same way in ordinary households as in restaurants. Most families eat something sweet after dinner, although the dish varies widely from sweetened yogurt to fruit.
We often hear people say that a meal does not feel complete without a sweet dessert. So, does that mean that the dessert, in essence, acts as the grand finale to an intimate meal shared around a table with family and friends?
The French often speak of the art de vivre, a phrase used in a similar way to the English word “lifestyle.” We find it very French to describe the act of living as an art. To find beauty in one’s ordinary, everyday life and to have your life enriched by that beauty—that is the “art of living” that the French have perfected over generations. Concluding an enjoyable meal with a delightful dessert certainly exemplifies the art de vivre.
After all that contemplation, it came time to decide: What kind of dessert would work well as the grand finale to a home-cooked meal?
Brigade de cuisine
At Project KOTO, we dream of realizing a world of true gastronomy as has never before existed in Japan. We know our teamwork in the kitchen is key to achieving this dream.
Many Japanese restaurants still maintain a strong vertical hierarchy in which the head chef reigns supreme. However, this often means that those who work under the chef are unable to demonstrate their creativity to the fullest.
In French kitchens, we observed a more inclusive type of teamwork. Whenever the situation calls for a particular chef’s unique personality and strengths, they take a turn demonstrating their technical skills, intuition, and typically French eye for stylish presentation.
When it comes to desserts, it is telling that every restaurant has a chocolatier. In Japan, this role usually falls under the domain of the pastry chef, but in France, creating works of art out of chocolate is a sacred task entrusted to a specialist. This also speaks to how delicate and intricate the process of making delicious chocolates really is.
We don’t yet have a chocolatier on our team, but we thought that the challenge of creating a chocolate confection would be a good way to demonstrate the well-roundedness of our team, instead of leaving it to one person—as would be the case in France.
And so, it was decided: we’d make a chocolate cake rich enough to captivate anyone who tried it.
Philosophy
Thus began our quest to create a recipe for a chocolate gâteau de voyage. Taking the lead was our pastry chef, who has the biggest sweet tooth on our team.
Our goal was to create something that we’d never eaten before—a chocolate cake that was light yet full of mouth-watering richness.
Along the way, we adjusted the ingredients in increments—as little as one gram at a time—and spent entire days testing different batter mixtures. The result is a recipe with less flour and more chocolate than a typical chocolate cake, with cognac and vanilla added to provide a deep flavor.
Whenever we test one hypothesis after another and ultimately arrive at our answer (in our case, a winning flavor), we are reminded that cooking is a philosophy.
It must be said that not all of us are fond of rich, heavy chocolate confections. Even so, upon trying our recipe, even the most skeptical among us found it to be incredible—and ended up begging for another slice.
Mythology
The history of chocolate is a long one. Cacao cultivation began in South America thousands of years ago. By the time of the Aztecs, who flourished in present-day Mexico from the 13th century, it was popularly consumed as a beverage.
Aztec mythology tells the story of how Quetzalcoatl, the patron god of agriculture, brought cacao from a sacred mountain to share with humanity. That is why the Aztecs believed that cacao was imbued with a mystical power and often presented it as an offering to the gods.
Cacao arrived in Europe in the early 16th century, around the time that the Aztec Empire met its downfall at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors. Since then, cacao has been enticing people around the world with sweet temptations in the form of cocoa, chocolate, and other beloved desserts.
We hope you’ll remember the sacred origins of chocolate while serving this cake as the grand finale to an intimate moment of your own. It even pairs well with wine.
