22 Oct 2017 | 05:12am IST
Sunday chocolate schooling with Goa’s Swiss Miss
Alvinia Joanita Desouza from Calangute is a chocolatier at the pinnacle of the world’s
chocolate industry: Switzerland. In Goa for a few days, Café catches up with her as she spills
the beans on a couple of recipes that she believes everyone who enjoys ‘kitchen time’
can work with, this weekend
At times,
callings come easy, and you know
exactly what you want to do, and where you want to be. But for
Alvinia Joanita Desouza, from Calangute, a chocolatier par excellence with
Baeckerforum Aeshlimann in Switzerland, the road paved with chocolate was not a
straightforward one. Having been brought up in a family of pharmacists, with
both, her father and sister being in the trade, the choice to follow the same
path seemed but natural in her earlier years. However, a love for spending
time, working in the kitchen with her mother was just as strong, especially
when it came to baking. “That magic of seeing the smile on faces when I’d make
complex pastry or even something simple gave me so much joy, that I always knew
I wanted to get into a baking-related creative pursuit at some point, and that
pharmaceutical chemistry wasn’t going to be my future,” she shares.
“In addition to
baking, I developed an early love for travel and I’ve been travelling since the
age of 16, across Australia, all of South East Asia, Europe, and so on. I’d
travel every year and on my travels, I’d buy nothing else but chocolate. I
think that every traveller does, but for me, I’d just spend every bit of
allowance on chocolate (all for myself, no less). On one of my travels to
Europe, I was with a friend at the side of a lake in Lucerne, enjoying a bar of
‘Läderach’ (dark chocolate sold loose as broken bars of fresh made
chocolate) with hazelnuts, which is heavenly, and that’s when the idea actually
came to me. I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t I learn how to make chocolate that
is as perfect as this piece?’ I suppose that boys get inspired at noisy places
like bars, while girls receive inspiration in pristine surroundings like
lakes!”
Once Alvinia returned
to Goa, she started researching schools and colleges teaching pastry and
chocolate, and thus began her Swiss journey. Once she was done with the one
year of intensive Swiss pastry and chocolate art at the Culinary Arts Academy
in Lucerne, she spurned the choice of a number of hotels to continue to do her
internship, in order to spend more time learning from the little bakeries in
Switzerland that are famous for their unique craftsmanship and traditions. She
chanced upon a beautiful little café/ bakery in the province of Emmenthal to do
her internship and they had their very own house speciality – moulded pralines
named
‘Hógerli’, which translates to little hill. As the months
progressed at her internship, she was offered a full time job and was thrilled
at not having to think where to go next.
“When I started
working full time, I expanded my repertoire to working with the bakery and
confectionary team. This in turn has helped me develop new flavours for the
chocolate department while working with a variety of flavours on a daily basis.
I have developed a new production line of truffles, pralines and chocolate bars
that I am very proud of. Some of my creations are Black Olive in a White
Ganache, Pistachio Gianduja, Pinacolada in Milk Chocolate with a Pineapple
Jelly and a Malibu Ganache, and Blood Orange Crisps mixed in Almond Gianduja.”
The
future seems bright indeed, with Alvinia’s plan being to develop a bean to bar
production house in Goa, which will be very artisanal, with single origin cocoa
from India itself, including the states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. She
also hopes to display a variety of her own signature flavoured chocolate
drinks, handmade chocolate bars and even the slabs of Läderach chocolate that
started her journey on that day by the lake.
