Most of us know chocolate mousse in its simple, velvety melt-in-your-mouth form.
But we also know the best chefs take a traditional dish and weave a little magic (adding a dash of personality) to make something surprising and new.
That’s the idea behind the current Mousse Masters competition. Dreamt up by Weave Cacao, the culinary challenge invites New Zealand’s chefs and bakers to show off their artistry via innovative takes on chocolate mousse.
This year’s competition invited chefs with more than two year’s professional experience to enter and to consider this year’s themes in their creations. They included making mousse the hero, highlighting the flavour of Weave Cacao and celebrating Pasifika culture with inspiration from NZ’s Pacific neighbours and cacao-growing communities.
Weave Cacao is a couverture chocolate, made using cacao grown and processed in Papua New Guinea. Couverture chocolate is a high-quality, professional-grade chocolate with a higher percentage of cocoa butter that makes it ideal for chocolatiers and pastry chefs to use when cooking, coating, dipping, molding, or enrobing their creations.
This year’s grand finalists have been selected and hail from all over Aotearoa New Zealand, including chefs such as Ben Chapman (Embra), Robert Cullen (NZICC), Maxine Scheckter (Sugar Flour) and Cocoa Wild’s Head Chocolatier Shalvi Mohindra.
On October 21, the nine pro chef finalists and three promising young chefs will each present their mousse-based dishes to the judges at Elemental Cooking School.
Legendary Kiwi chef Peter Gordon is on board as the competition’s ambassador and Head Judge and says he’s excited by the standard of the finalists.
“It’s an incredible line-up for the final, and I’m sure it’s going to be very hard to pick a winner. The key may lie in how well the recipes represent Pasifika culture – that’s the part I’m really looking forward to.”
Also on the judging panel are food writer and cookbook author Amber Rose, chocolate expert and journalist Luke Owen Smith, Weave Cacao co-founder Oonagh Browne and Sperian Kapaia.
The winner of the pro chef competition will be taken on a life-changing trip to Papua New Guinea with Peter Gordon and Oonagh Browne, where they will meet with Weave Cacao’s farming communities, learn about the challenges and adversities that cacao farming communities face, and experience the entire process from tree, to bean, to couverture chocolate.
This year’s most promising young chef will win a year’s supply of Weave Cacao couverture (40kg) and a two day Cacao Intensive Training Course with Oonagh Browne in Christchurch.
