Patrice Chapon, the master of chocolate

Soon Easter! This is the opportunity to meet one of the rare craftsmen to ensure the entire manufacturing process, from the cocoa bean to the gourmet egg.

This Peugeot 203 of the 1950s was converted into a mobile foam bar.

It's a tiled shop that looks like it came out of a Tim Burton film, where, in the middle of the cocoa scent, the raw wood furniture rubs shoulders with an old machine that roasts the precious beans. A wall covered with shelves surmounts glass bells housing each of the cocoa fragments, whose bewitching scent we are invited to smell. Patrice Chapon is an explorer of taste.



Since 1986, he has been travelling the world in search of the small producers that he has found in the heart of the Brazilian forests or at the bottom of the Sambirano valley in Madagascar, populated by mygales and royal pythons: "These are hacienda cocoa, which I buy very expensive, to convince producers not to sell them to the cocoa industry.



I look at the beans after they dry and check that they are perfect, of a beautiful color. Then, I roast them in Chelles, near Paris, before proceeding to the conching (which lasts twenty-four hours and whose goal is to remove acidity)".

In his moss bar, in Paris, Patrice Chapon serving a chocolate mousse.

Chapon is the only chocolate maker who does not use soya lecithin or cocoa butter. His passion is pure, concentrated, intense cocoa, a blessing of nature, rich in vitamins and minerals and free of any chemicals during its agriculture. Its cocoa trees grow in an almost virgin environment, between mango, eucalyptus, banana, hibiscus and vanilla trees, which communicate their perfumes to cocoa.

Milk chocolate and dark chocolate egg garnished with caramelized cashew nuts, filled with fries and mini-Easter eggs, 35 €.© Philippe Petit / Paris Match

In his shop, he has created a chocolate mousse bar that reconciles us with this dessert often too sweet. Each was made from a unique terroir cocoa: Ecuador (rose petal notes), Madagascar (cherry aromas), Venezuela (100% sugar-free cocoa: an explosion of dried fruits!), Peru (blackberry, ginger) and Ghana (spicy and intense nutmeg taste). Thus it is possible to appreciate the taste and the quintessence of each of these particular vintages. Enthusiastic, the Queen of England made Patrice Chapon her ice cream maker for chocolate ice cream...

Mosses are served here in cones or 100 gram (6.20 €) jars. Besides cocoa, Chapon uses only organic eggs and good cane sugar, no vanilla, no preservatives, no orange peel, he is also the first craftsman to use the cocoa pulp that covers the bean and is necessary for its fermentation. From this pulp he makes sorbets and drinks with the incredible taste of lychee.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

Has Your Office Life Made You Fat?

It has been a long-drawn discussion whether all of these advances in technology has made us fat, particularly office junkies who spend a good part of our lives hacking away at keyboards and staring at monitor screens.

Perhaps the only movement you’d do is towalk towards the coffee dispenser todrown vats of sugar-laden coffee. Combine that chilly air-conditioning and that’s pretty much your life. No sweat!

No more need to walk up to a colleague’s cubicle, just a click your IM and send that important file. No more huddling to an office space for a meeting, an IM conference will do. We tend to walk less and less.

This observation can be made worldwide, as BBC’s report on E-mail makes office workers lazy says:

Dr Dorian Dugmore, an international heart expert, said: “We are losing millions of hours of exercise through the explosion of e-mail…

“The average energy expenditure of deskbound workers falls well below the recommended amount of 40 minutes per day.

 Fat

“People e-mail colleagues who sit next to them, never mind those who work over the other side of the office.

“It might seem like a small change to make, but we need to start somewhere in a bid to change people’s increasingly lazy attitudes.”

It’s very evident that office life is quite sedentary. Not so much action in the physical sense. I was also a victim of such a sedentary lifestyle. Back in my college days, I used to run three miles a day to keep myself fit. A year after graduation, spending most of my time writing and doing reports and analyses comfortably in my workstation, I found that I was 20 lbs grossly overweight.

Now, ever since I’ve retired from my corporate career and started focusing on the more flexible work of writing, blogging, and taking graduate studies, I’ve found myself more in control of my schedule - something that I didn’t have when I had a boss who was hounding me every minute of the day. I now get to squeeze in an exercise routine every morning. And I don’t need coffee anymore to keep me active since I have my good eight hours of sleep for that.

However, even writers like me can fall into the deathtrap of laziness. The Blog Herald marketing manager, J. Angelo Racoma writes on his personal blog about sedentary lifestyles and blogging:

…I’ve always thought that if I ceased to follow the demands of the bundy clock, I would have more time to attend to life’s niceties.

But working independent and having no time to follow might sometimes mean working all the time, actually. And this can sometimes be stifling to one’s creativity (and on one’s personal life), particularly if you set no boundaries between work and personal life.

So it’s a call for physical activity. Again, Dr. Drugmore’s states in the BBC article:

“Increasing activity levels by just 10% could save 6,000 lives and £500million per year, and one million fewer obese people in England could mean 15,000 fewer people with coronary heart diseases, 34,000 people developing type 2 diabetes and 99,000 fewer people with high blood pressure.”

So as a piece of advice to workers, try to stay active. When there’s an opportunity to walk around, do so. Log in more mileage on those legs!

As for business owners, try to encourage physical activity in the workplace. I know some of the more capable companies have their own spaces where employees could jog on a treadmill or lift weights to relieve stress. But if you can afford such benefits, then you may want to organize 15-minute stretch routines for your employees. These would help them be active through out the day.

Focusing on Metabolism to Burn Fat

Some of us don’t know what to do even after trying out all the diets searchable in the internet. You’ve tried them all — even starved yourself and still it’s the same weight problem. Is there no other way to do it? Ever had that friend who could down two family-sized pizzas in one sitting, have an ice cream and still stay slim? That’s metabolism at work for you. Fast metabolism will help you lose weight. And that it’s probably one of the best ways to shed the extra pounds. A few things you have to know about metabolism.

Different people have different metabolism rates. It’s unfair, I know but what can you do? That’s really how it is.

Analyze why your metabolism is like that. There are factors which determine why you have your particular metabolic rate. One is age. Older people tend to have slower metabolism. Another is gender. Men are believed to burn more calories than women just by being men. How inconvenient for women, right? Sometimes you have to ask if nature is gender sensitive. If you want to determine your basal metabolic rate , check with a dietitian or a fitness expert.

Also, experts also say that your metabolic rate is genetic, probably dates back to your great great grandparents. This can probably be linked to the reason why one family seems to have one body type, fat or slim. Also, metabolism increases when you increase your muscle mass. There’s also the link when problems in the thyroid gland slows down or increases metabolism.