Inspiration for this chocolate

As I was born in Hong Kong and spent part of my childhood there, I always wanted to create a chocolate that would capture my childhood memories. One of my favourite dishes was (and still is) chicken wings in sweet soya sauce – I’d be in dinnertime heaven with a dozen chicken wings and a bowl of plain steamed rice (very handy to soak up all that delicious, almost molasses-like, sauce). So this year we’ve been working on a sweet soya sauce-based filling for our chocolate, as a tribute to the city where I first lived.

This chicken wing dish is actually called “Swiss-style chicken wings“, though it has no connection with Switzerland at all. The dish is one of the specialities at Tai Ping Koon, a classic “Western” restaurant in Hong Kong. I put the quotation mark round the word “Western” because it’s more a colonial-style of cooking rather than a true European style. Another classic dish from the restaurant is “Portugese-style baked chicken” – something you would definitely not find in Portugal!

There’s an unusual charm about the restaurant – time seems to have just stood still for many decades inside the restaurant, with the decor very much from the 1950s/1960s. You won’t find many restaurants like this in Hong Kong any more, and many of its peers have closed down in the last 10-20 years due to the high rent or redevelopment of the properties.

Hong Kong is a gourmet heaven, and the cuisine in that part of southern China is so varied that we would have a hard time to narrow down to one flavour for our chocolate named “Hong Kong”. We knew for a while that we want to have our own interpretation of this “Swiss-style” sauce in our filled chocolate collection. It worked straight away with the first batch we made as an experiment at the start of the year – the combination of the sweetness of the caramel and the saltiness of the soya sauce was no surprise to us, but the extra flavour dimension in the form of umami from the soy just made us really excited about this new creation. Since then we have spent time fine-tuning the caramel filling and selecting the most appropriate chocolate couverture to use for the shell.

The choice of the shape of the chocolate is a no-brainer for us – the groove along the chocolate shell looks like the famous Victoria Harbour between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula, and the rectangular shape looks like a piece of Mahjong, one of Hong Kong’s most popular pastimes!