It is not often that we have a free day in our classes. This term we had an extra 3 hours to spare, so after a short class on making parchment bags and piping skills, John Montanile and myself took the Intro to Baking Culinary Class to Midwest Imports. We met up with Todd Ostrowski, who not only gave a demo/lecture on the history, source, harvesting, processing of cacao but also showed us around the backroom where the students were introduced to their product lines from Haco(pronounced Hah-ko), Hero and Felchlin (pronounced Felk-lin) plus additional lines from other companies around the world. The school gets a lot of our chocolates from Midwest and Todd conducted a tasting of all the couvetures in their line. Couveture is fine quality chocolate containing at least 30% cocoa butter. Felchlin has a line of cacao blends, but also has a range of Grand Crus, from single bean or single country origin.
Some of my culinary students were more interested in the savory products, though, from the white truffle oil to Asian spesialties. I was surprised to see rtu gumpaste flowers from Sugar Petals and marzipan flowers from Holland, I think. They were pretty good quality workmanship.
All in all it was a great educational experience for our students to be introduced to suppliers.
Midwest also told them that they are indeed open to the public, and if you show your CHIC ID they will give you a student discount, but please call first.
