Christopher Elbow Chocolates, San Francisco
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This shop and café in the fashionable Hayes Valley area of San Francisco should be a Mecca for all chocolate lovers that make their way to the city. In fact, even if you're not a ‘chocoholic' you should investigate Christopher Elbow chocolatier.
The shop sells chocolates that not only taste amazing but also are also beautifully designed. They are so beautifully designed they could almost serve as works of art in their own right.
Christopher Elbow specialises in using exquisite ingredients to make them, gathering the best chocolate for his needs from all over the world. This ethos is abundantly clear from the range of chocolates available. Among the ganache chocolates he makes are ones whose cacao comes from Ghana, the Caribbean and Venezuela.
The shop's chocolates come in three main categories, ganaches (a rich combination of cream and chocolate), marzipans and those made with flavoured caramels. The caramels include flavours such as strawberry and balsamic vinegar or rosemary caramel.
Although these sound unusual they aren't designed as novelties or for mere shock value, they're combinations that the developer has worked with and has decided work as flavours in their own right. If I was forced to pick one to recommend, it would be hard, but it would be the passion fruit caramel in white chocolate.
It not only serves the chocolates, but also has a small café attached where they serve their own hot chocolate. Again, it is nothing ordinary, it is simply the milky variety seen around the world. Instead the recipe draws inspiration from Aztec civilisation, the home of chocolate.
The chocolate comes in small cups and is intensely flavoured with ingredients like chili. It is very much the espresso of the hot chocolate world and unlike anything I had had before. Drinking it you will understand why the Aztecs ascribed almost mystic qualities to chocolate.
Elbows career began working in kitchens in his native Kansas and in Las Vegas before starting to produce chocolates and setting up his own company. The San Francisco store is only his second, the first is in his native Kansas City.
Visit the shop, stop in for a hot chocolate and then investigate the rest of Hayes Valley, a nest of design-orientated shops, high-class bakeries and boutiques. The area is usually defined as the streets either side of Hayes Street between Alamo and Franklin Streets.
Hayes St 401, San Francisco, USA
Contact tel: +1 415 355 1105
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Christopher Elbow Chocolates
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