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Paul A Young began his career by training as a chef in 1989 then doing agency work in Leeds, which led to a year working with Marco Pierre White’s chefs as they travelled round the country at outside catering events. He spent six years with Marco, becoming head pastry chef, before moving south to London and a job at the Criterion. A stint in product development for M&S then led to Paul deciding to set up on his own.

After developing chocolates for the likes of Charbonnel et Walker and Rococo, Paul went it alone, opening first shop in Islington, followed by another 18 months later, in the Royal Exchange. Timing was crucial: “London needed fresh hand-made chocolates back in 2006, and someone who was daring and creative.”

“I’ve been a chef for 7 years, then I was a developer, then a patissier so I’ve done all that: I never get bored with it because we’re making 110 products at any one time. It’s good to specialise – there are only about five or so chocolatiers in London. I have never trained as a chocolatier: if I’d learnt in Belgium or France I’d have been learning other people’s things. In London people want innovative, fresh chocolate and my ideas.

So is it true that chocolate is a difficult food to work with? Paul says: “It’s chemistry based – lots of structure, molecular stuff, crystals to understand. Lots of things can go wrong if you don’t treat it correctly. Our chocolates are supposed to be as perfect as possible, but of course they are hand made – we’re seeing homemade and handmade back in all areas of food.”
 
Paul also debunks the importance of cocoa solid percentage. “It’s a complete myth and gives no indication of quality, flavour, taste or texture: all it tells you is that the chocolate is 70%, 60%, 50% cocoa – the brown, solid bit. But that could be the worst quality cocoa beans ever...

“The quality of chocolate depends on the quality of the cocoa beans, the quality of the sugar, how long the beans have been roasted and fermented, where the beans have come from, is it natural vanilla... So if you go to the supermarket don’t always go for the chocolate that is 70%. People should go by price – the more expensive it is, the better. And turn it over to check that it doesn’t have vegetable fats in it. If the percentage is higher it will be stronger in taste but not more bitter – bitterness only happens if they’ve used inferior quality beans which need to be over-roasted to compensate for this. Over-roasting = burnt = bitter.

“If you use beans that are fantastic quality they don’t need so much roasting so you end up with a more balanced choc. None of our chocolate has that burnt, bitter taste. You could have good beans but if they’re over roasted they’ll be bitter – just like coffee beans. If you cook anything too much it will taste burnt and bitter. It’s like tea with tannin – can make it dry and bitter. 

“For recipes, if you have tried a 70% percentage from a brand but you didn’t like it, change to a 66% or 64% from the same brand. If you swop the chocolate in the same proportions you might find that you like that recipe even more. That’s the key. Brand is important. Try to spend at least £2.50 on a bar of chocolate.
Chocolate should just be cocoa beans, cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla and sometimes soya lecithin, which is a natural emulsifier. If, in my humble opinion, a chocolate bar lists cocoa powder as well, it’s to be avoided. We all know what happens if we eat a teaspoon of cocoa powder – it’s dry, bitter. So if you use it to make, say, a chocolate mousse, the end result will be heavy and the chocolate isn’t smooth. That’s because the chocolate is heavy. All the supermarkets have their Finest, Excellent or whatever chocolate. This better-quality own-brand chocolate is worth buying.

“If you use the same recipe with two different brands of chocolate it will be completely different. It’s like any ingredients – cheap inferior chilli powder tastes way different from chilli from a specialist. In this country we spend less on food than we did in the 1950s. Yet if you spend an extra 50p or £1 on your chocolate – not very much if you’re making a dessert for six people – it will be quite different.

“Chocolate isn’t fattening either – people should eat a bit less of it, but eat better chocolate. It shouldn’t be a treat. If you’re buying cheap chocolate bars such as Snickers, Mars etc they’re a totally different thing. I’m not allowed to be associated with it as it’s got vegetable fat in – as a master chocolatier I have to only use chocolate with cocoa butter in it. If you eat cheap confectionery every day it’s bad for you; but if you eat up to 40g of real chocolate per day it will make you feel better, you won’t get sugar rushes or pile on the pounds or get spotty. You don’t need as much of it as you do cheap chocolate – but if I need some comfort food a Kit-Kat is fine!

Paul gave me a piece of 70% blended chocolate then a Madagascan 64% - the latter was much more complex and fruity, acidic and mouthwatering. He explains: “The 64% has better flavour and layers than the 70% yet 90% of the population would plump for the 70% automatically. So you can say ‘I don’t like Venezuelan, but I love the fruitiness of Madagascan, so when I make my dessert or cake I’m going to go out and find some Madagascan.’ Supermarkets now have origin chocolate in their finest, Taste the Difference or other premium-quality ranges.

“We use 30 types of chocolate – some blended, some single origin. We don’t use the same thing for all our chocolates. It’s very like wine varietals and regions and people should think about chocolate in that way.
“My favourite flavourings vary. In winter, I like all the warming things such as cinnamon and nutmeg, and in the summer it’s really fruity, light acidic things such as lemongrass and lime. Thai and Japanese things are great, as are fruits like raspberries and strawberries. Those berries go really well with the Madagascan chocolate as it’s so fruity, so cherries and red fruit are the perfect match.”

Paul sells a wonderful hot chocolate with chilli – which, he says, is easy to do that at home and add just a dash of chilli powder. This works with other spices too such as nutmeg or ginger. 

Melting chocolate is another potential minefield. Paul says: “I would never ever melt chocolate in a microwave. The heat is too intense – there are hot spots and cold spots. Before you know it, it’s burnt. Life is never that short. If you can put a pan of water with a bowl over, have a cup of tea, make sure the water doesn’t boil, you can do it. White chocolate can be harder to melt – in fact, it contains no cocoa solids, but is made simply from cocoa butter and sugar. It’s good for decorating or you’re making a lime ganache use a white chocolate. It does also go well with peppercorns or blackcurrants. Melt it slowly, cool it slowly, treat it with care – that’s the key thing with white chocolate in particular.”

Tempering chocolate needs lots of practice. “At home, there’s a method called seeding, which means adding solid chocolate to melted chocolate in a mixing bowl. If you have granite or marble worktops at home you can temper on the slab, but it does take a lot of practice. Use cheap chocolate to practise – you can always remelt it. In my book there’s just one page on easy tempering – I took out all the scientific chemistry elements. It’s to do with confidence – like making meringues or soufflés – once they’ve done it a few times they’re fine. If you muck it up, it’s chocolate – it may not be as shiny as you’d like but it will taste fine. Just as when you get on a bike as a child you don’t expect to be able to ride it immediately.

Paul also recommends being adventurous with your own flavouring for chocolate. “It takes time and practice to find the best combinations of flavours. Everyone has spices in their cupboard – even if it’s just black pepper and cinnamon or salt. Sea salt in chocolate is fantastic. It’s more about people having the confidence to try things. Little tiny steps are needed. People worry that things might go wrong but you can’t think like that when you’re cooking. If you put too much chilli in, then when you serve it say ‘It’s a fiery chocolate tart!’ Or if you put too much cinnamon in, you won’t notice.”

In Paul’s shop sea salt and caramel is the most popular chocolate – “we were more or less the first to sell it. It captures people’s imagination. It’s like an explosion of flavour in your mouth – real caramel rather than glucose-based caramel. We don’t need a long shelf life so all our chocs are fresh. This also means you need just one chocolate. We only use Billington’s sugar – this makes the chocolate more caramelly and less cloyingly sweet. We never use white sugar, only Demerara, muscovado sugar. For us it’s every ingredient that counts. We don’t use Swiss or Belgian chocolate, just French. It’s intense, but not sugary or fatty – it’s all about complexity.”

I asked him about his own favourite chocolate. “It changes from day to day. I love our fresh raspberry chocolate – it’s just filled with fresh raspberries and raspberry liqueur. We don’t use any flavourings at all, or essences. Other days it’s rum and raisin, or champagne, or sea salt and caramel depending on my mood. I just take chocolate and use complementary fruit, herbs, spices etc. We never use double cream – chocolate has enough fat anyway so we add a little water. It’s about looking at what’s in season, what you have at home – in my book I have Storecupboard Tea Truffles. Whether it’s Yorkshire Tea, Typhoo tea or the most fragrant jasmine pearl tea, you can make a ganache. Use whatever tea you like! There’s still a part of me that’s a guy from a mining village up north who makes do. If you want to make truffles and you have four bars of chocolate, just use whatever you’ve got: chilli, cinnamon, wasabi, nutmeg, cloves, home-made marmalade.

It’s common in restaurants to be served chocolates with the end-of-meal coffee, but for Paul this is a no-no. “I love drinking chocolate with either Lustau sherry – raisiny, pruny – or a peaty malt whisky such as Talisker. Red wine is too challenging – not the best combination especially as reds vary so much. Noval port is amazing – the only company that still treads the grapes with their feet. The flavour is deep and mellow. Don’t eat chocolate with coffee – so many restaurants get it wrong. If you drink coffee then eat a chocolate you will not taste the chocolate – coffee always has a bitterness so it swamps the chocolate. Chocolate also goes well with a delicate jasmine or green tea, or herbal such as camomile, lemon balm, white tea, oolong. The warmth melts the chocolate and it all marries together.

“Cheese and chocolate is another surprising success: Stilton, mature Cheddar, washed-rind cheeses. Goat’s cheese too – we make a goat’s cheese, lemon and rosemary choc in the summer and it’s delicate and gorgeous. It’s about thinking about different ingredients yet we’re conditioned from an early age to associate certain ingredients with each other. When we opened, people questioned the fact that we used Marmite, wasabi, stilton...but they work.”

Paul A Young is at 33 Camden Passage, Islington, London N1 8EA, (0) 20 7424 5750; visit his website at www.paulayoung.co.uk


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