“Winter Ember” wins in Coruña

Cociña con Castaña de Galicia reached its sixteenth edition this year. It is a competition devoted to a single ingredient — the Galician chestnut — and that is precisely what makes it demanding: when everyone works the same raw material, there is nowhere to hide a weak idea.

Delicious Diamonds entered a bonbon, “Winter Ember”. It won.

What was at stake

Recipes came from Portugal and from Spain. The final round is not decided on paper: finalists present live, in A Coruña, before the jury — tasted there and then, and explained on the spot.

It is an unforgiving format. A piece of chocolate can be photogenic in an application and fall apart in a warm room at the end of a day’s travel. Chestnut is particularly ungrateful in this respect: it carries little fat of its own, dries easily, and loses its aroma if warmed without care.

Winning with chestnut, in Galicia

It is worth stating the obvious: the chestnut is theirs. Galicia has centuries-old chestnut groves and a kitchen that has worked the nut for generations — in desserts, in stews, as flour. To present a chestnut bonbon to a Galician jury is to accept being judged by the people who know the ingredient better than you do.

That is exactly why it was worth doing. A prize on home ground confirms what a house already does; this one required leaving it.

The maison, in competition

Joana Marinho trained as a civil engineer and is a self-taught chocolatier — and it is that combination a competition like this exposes. A bonbon is a problem of structure before it is a problem of flavour: shell thickness, crystallisation point, the water content of the filling, how long a piece holds outside its temperature. None of that can be improvised in front of a jury.

The method is the one we bring to any one-of-a-kind piece a client commissions: start from an idea of flavour, build it layer by layer, test, remake. The difference here was a deadline, a room, and a public tasting.

What happens now

“Winter Ember” is not in the boutique yet — a competition piece and a carte piece are not the same thing, and we want to present it properly. In the meantime, anyone curious about how we think about ingredients can start with the Gardens of Origin, or with The Chef.

Our thanks to the organisers of Cociña con Castaña de Galicia — and to the Galician chestnut, which gave us a great deal of trouble.