Two flavours that we have wanted to include in a filled chocolate for a long time are pineapple and tomato, but we have not thought about putting these two ingredients together until recently. It's an obvious combination really - after all, many popular dishes all over the world include both tomatoes and pineapples: whether it's sweet and sour pork from Chinese takeaways, or Brazilian Moqueca (fish stew), or even Hawaiian Pizza (fact: Hawaiian pizza actually originates from Canada!).
Despite naming this chocolate Honolulu, this chocolate is not based on any particular dish - but we have found that this combination is popular in many places in the Pacific. And when we did our usual "guess the flavour" quiz on social media, most people suggested pineapple as one of the flavours straight away when we revealed that the name of this bonbon is Honolulu.
In our minds, this chocolate has to be a layered chocolate, with a layer of soft jelly vs a layer of ganache. The original concept was actually a tomato jelly and a pineapple ganache, but the overall flavour profile did not live up to our expectation, even though we knew the combination would work. Then we made some pineapple jam one day, and we also made a few versions of tomato ganache using various dark, milk and white chocolates, and we found that the pineapple jam and a tomato with white chocolate ganache was the exact match we were looking for.
Interestingly, both pineapples and tomatoes have a mixture of sweet and slight acidic flavour. When you combine these two ingredients, the different levels of acidity and sweetness balance each other out. We have also found that the umami flavour in tomatoes also works best with sweet caramel taste of white chocolate - the flavour clashes with dark chocolate in a ganache. The final balance to round off the flavour combination comes in the form of a milk chocolate shell.
Honolulu is now available in our Personal Selection Boxes.