Do chocolate cereals shock you and seem improper?  A generation of children who grew up eating Count Chocula are now adults and they have spawned new sensibilities, evidenced by Boucan, a restaurant based on chocolate.  I, Gail, love chocolate so was eager to try the innovate menu but Jason was cautious and suspicious. The setting, above the town of Soufrieres in St. Lucia, should be enough to lure you there.

To give you a flavor of Boucan, here is the intro page of the menu:(click here to see the full menu)

A generation brought up with the mindset that sugar is an acceptable breakfast cereal ingredient and that Count Chocula is a worthy addition to the table, is well set up for a dinner based on chocolate ingredients. But, chocoholics beware, this is not a Cadbury’s marinade sauce. The owner of Boucan began with Hotel Chocolat, a high-end London-based chocolatier. He was intrigued by the history of chocolate in the West Indies and purchased an old estate a few years ago. The restaurant uses different parts of the cacao bean for flavoring in all of their dishes, from the pulp to the roasted bean, and it proved to be very tough to choose our meals.

We were brought some warm bread with a selection of condiments: butter infused with cacao nibs, rich chocolate sauce and cocoa bean olive oil. My favorite was the chocolate sauce as I am a sucker for chocolate, but I appreciated the subtleties of the other choices.

Our favorite dish of the night was the amuse-bouche, an onion soup infused with cacao bean flavoring. As the liquid hits your tongue it goes through a few different stages from sweet to savory. Throughout the meal, we were impressed with the inventiveness of the food and the lack of gimmicky flourishes. Because the dishes are seasoned using cacao or ground bean, the flavor is not traditional chocolate, nor does it possess the weight of a Mexican mole. It has a pungent spiciness that one can’t quite identify.

My first choice, the Endive and Green Papaya salad with chocolate dressing, was not available; I chose the Citrus Organic Leaf salad, with white chocolate and coconut dressing. Jason chose the Cacao Tortellini,  cacao pasta filled with goat’s cheese and spinach with toasted almonds. The combination of the two dishes provided a nice balance of refreshing greens and multi-textured pasta.

If we had been staying at the hotel and dining there every night, I would have appreciated the main courses more. Both Jason’s Seared Tuna with Salad (Boucanier Salad) and my Provisions One Pot

Curry were excellent, but not special. (Provisions are root vegetables). I should have selected an appetizer as my main, although I could have eaten a pound of the cacao nib naan.

By the time dessert was offered, we were both quite full so we shared “The Story Of Chocolate, In Ice,” which progresses from pod to chocolate: 1) cacao pulp sorbet 2) cacao nib-infused ice cream 3) chocolate ice cream. The sorbet was fragrant and tasted best after a spoon of the excellent chocolate ice cream. My favorite was the cacao nib-infused scoop, which tasted like a malted. Chocolate truffles accompanied the dessert, but we carried those home with us so as to be able to appreciate them independently the next morning. After all, despite the fine food and wonderful surroundings, my heart still belongs to traditional chocolate.

For lunch on our first day, I tried an Empanada Pino. Pino is not pine nuts, nor is it pineapple. It is a mixture of spicy ground beef with stuff thrown in there such as hard-boiled eggs, olives (pits included), raisins and corn.

The dough was very floury, in a good way,  and it was baked; for those of you with Eastern European and South African provenance, it was sort of like bobotie in a baked pierogi.

I tasted two others while in Chile,  empanaditos and a fried empanada, and neither was as good as the bobotie pierogi. Jason had a salad – sometimes, I don’t understand him at all. I recently learned the empanadas don’t have a tilde on the n. The verb empanar is to bread something while the verb empañar is to fog up.

But Chile is more than empanadas. First, the fruit is wonderful-you probably have some Chilean raspberries in your fridge. A nationally loved fruit that you may not know is the cherimoya. If you google it, you will be sure to find people quoting Mark Twain, who supposedly thought it was the best thing ever. Since I never found a direct quote or source, I suspect that someone put the quote on Wikipedia once and everyone copied it. For any US readers, Melissa’s in California  will ship some to you. Or, come to Chile and try Cherimoya juice or Cherimoya Alegre, half cherimoya juice, half Orange Juice. The juice was like nectar and tasted like a combination of the best of pineapple and mango to me. We visited the …. market in Santiago and the fruits and vegetables looked amazing. Piles of strawberries, baby spotted potatoes (looked better than it sounds) and giant stalks of celery were everywhere. Speaking of potatoes, I read that scientists believe that the potato originated in Chile 13,000 years ago.

Another popular vegetable is corn, known as choclo. I am sorry to say that I never tried the supposed national dish, pastel de choclo, a minced-meat mixture with mashed corn on top. I wonder if guidebooks to the USA mention Tuna Casserole as a must try dish as well. I did have cazuelo, a hearty beef soup, with vegetables as well as some scrambled egg. It was excellent but could have benefited from some hot sauce. We have discovered that Chileans and Argentineans aren’t the biggest fans of spicy food. What is called spicy food here is pretty mild, most likely because Chile, unlike Peru, is lacking in any Asian or African influence . We didn’t try is the Chilean hot dog. Looks like a regular hot dog but is seved with avocado and mayonnaise.

We also never tried Chorrillana-a plate of French Fries, topped with beef, eggs and fried onions.

Clearly we need to return to Chile.  I did try the national drink, the pisco sour. Both Peru and Chile claim the pisco sour as their national drink but only Peru has a holiday for it.

Chile, being a long country with lots of ocean exposure, is famous for its seafood. A traditional dish is Congrio (Conger eel soup), which is a white fish cooked with… Very tasty. It is so loved that Pablo Neruda, Chile’s nobel-prize poet, wrote an ode to it. (Click here to read it). Actually, it is not really an eel but is a fish, known as kingclip in some parts of the world. Since we were in Chile during National Week, there were lots of parties going on throughout the night. What is the Chilean hangover recovery food? Ceviche. If you don’t quite see that, you might agree with Jason that when it comes to hangover food, you need to stick with your own country’s traditions.

In the grain category, I enjoyed the circular morning biscuit which I can’t remember the name of, bread dipped in chancho en piedra (Chilean salsa),  Sopapilla (pumpkin fritter) dipped in theoretically hot sauce, and, of course, quinoa. But what was my favorite meal? If you know me, you shouldn’t have to ask – the raspberry-mint ice cream at Emporio La Rosa in Valparaiso. Full of raspberry flavor with a hint of real mint, I could have one right now.

 

Having expended a lot of energy on boat system discussions, we briefly changed tack to think about refreshments. We are not oenophiles but do like a glass with dinner a few nights a week.   Our current strategy is we buy the half bottles.  I will hold off on referring to them by the French name of demi-bouteille in fear of revealing my natural snooty nature since we already drink too little for the cruising lifestyle.

So what shall we drink on board Two Fish?   50 half bottles of wine sounds like a lot of space, breakable glass and weight.   Technology to the rescue.   In 1975 an Australian created the first boxed wine, he died in 2010 at the wine preserved age of 95.   Boxed wine had a humble start – the drinker used scissors to cut a plastic bag enclosed in a box.

Now the Swedes, French and Ausies have improved the technology to where an opened box wine will last longer than an opened bottle of wine.   Boxed wine is lighter and easier to pack.   A warning for wine collectors – box wine will not cellar well versus the traditional bottle.  I am pretty sure no one was thinking of keeping a box of wine for 2o years.

A quick search on the web will reveal that boxed wine is coming of age.  Epicurious, Esquire and others are writing reviews of these wines.  Here are a few of the better reviewed wines.  I think we can also pick up some Yellow and Blue in Buenos Aires.  We will try a few and report back.  Do you have a favorite? If you don’t want to confess to drinking box wine on the blog just drop me an email.   But there is no shame in boxed wine.  Just a shame not to have wine.