Chocolate With Candied Seeds

By Corey Lee

For years, we served traditional molded chocolates, filled and deco­rated individually by hand. They were skillfully made, and many of our guests raved about them. Nonetheless, they always felt incon­gruous with the rest of our menu, appearing somewhat common and possibly interpreted as a platitudinal gesture that comes at the end of so many tasting menus. And for something I wasn’t fully able to embrace, they were a painstakingly time-consuming preparation that required a big investment from us. This recipe is a very different kind of chocolate service. The flavor of it is based on gang jung, a Korean candy made of nuts and seeds bound together with syrup. We make a nougatine of various seeds and fold it into tempered chocolate. We then set it into large blocks that get chiseled into irregular shapes. The rough shards of chocolate are much more intriguing to me than their perfectly formed, satin finish predecessors, and reflect an evolved aesthetic that I find quite beautiful.