I swear to god one of these days were going to see a video of Amaury Guichon and he's going to be making some wings and they are going to look dope as hell, the detail of each feather will be breathtaking, he'll spray paint them to perfection, but as the video goes on, he's not building any sort of winged creature, just the wings. And then there's a human-sized harness (also made of chocolate, somehow, he can do it). And he's attaching the wings to the harness. And he's putting the harness on and he demonstrates how he can flap the wings. And then he'll be off. Out the window and up and up and up. And we'll be looking at the livestream (it's a livestream now) and we'll scream "No, Amaury, the sun! It's going to melt the wings!". But he knows this already. And he is free.

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FUCK YEAH !!! OH FUCK YEAH !!!!!!

ITS FUCKING LOAD BEARING?!

ATTENTION TUMBLR

CHOCOLATE GUY'S BIRTHDAY IS IDES OF MARCH

Chocolate guy has learned how to make corrugated cardboard. he is a powerful eldritch being who cannot be contained. The only reason we seem to be alive is because his interests are exclusively in the making of delicious lifelike desserts.

The Bubble Bath!🛁The perfect romantic dessert! Who would you share this bath with?

x

okay so i often watch these chocolate guy videos and think to myself “what is the point of making this out of chocolate? modeling chocolate is reportedly disgusting, this is not really intended for consumption, why doesn’t he just make it out of clay or something”

but watching this video i FINALLY realized.

chocolate is the only sculpture medium that you can melt and then freeze for effect without some serious equipment.

like. the process of letting the chocolate drip down over the water balloon? yeah that chocolate only needs to be, like, a little over 100F/38C. that’s a touchable temperature, that’s something that you can put your fingers in without burning them off. and then it freezes again at about room temperature! and granted you want the ambient environment a little colder than room temperature, because otherwise the heat from your hands will start to melt it, but again, being able to melt this medium with your hands is a bonus.

clay doesn’t melt. you can make it liquid-y by adding water, but that doesn’t harden up again afterwards, or when it does, it’s EXTREMELY fragile. plastic melts, but at pretty high temperatures that can be dangerous to handle, and it’s also really easy to burn and will release toxic gases when it does burn. metal melts, but that’s obviously even HOTTER and MORE dangerous. wood doesn’t melt. stone technically melts but like. good luck with that one.

chocolate melts at a reasonable, human-touchable temperature and freezes again at room temperature, which means you can make solid shapes from dripping or pouring melted chocolate and letting it harden.

the only other sculpting medium i know that does that is wax, and i think wax is generally too soft/malleable overall for the kind of large structures that this guy makes.

so i finally, FINALLY fucking get why he does this shit in chocolate oh my god.

@hexadecimal00

I mean, I’m pretty sure he does them in chocolate because he’s a pastry chef and chocolatier by training (really early training, too! Like 14 years old!)

Like all of the above about the features of chocolate and how it allows itself to be used to make this kind of detailed sculpture are true but um, pretty sure he makes sculptures out of chocolate because he’s a pastry chef and these are his media. One of the most remarkable things about his work is actually that he’s absolutely dead insistent that every one of these is made to be eaten: a lot of chocolate sculpture is (or especially was before he started throwing down this way) kinda … .second class food. It really is JUST about the sculpture. 

Guichon is adamant that it’s supposed to also taste amazing and is meant to be eaten. 

He’s not a non-food sculptor who stumbled across chocolate as the perfect material and medium; he’s a pastry chef who internalized that his awesome food could also be awesome sculpture AND still be food. He works in chocolate because that’s the point. 

For the smaller things he makes, you’ll often see him actually eating it at the end, and I think that’s a great indication that he’s actually trying to make Good Food, not just PRETTY food.

This post is doing the rounds again and every time I stumble upon re-reading “modeling chocolate is reportedly disgusting”, I’m consumed by rage. I had already commented but whatever ahfjf!1!

As a pro pastry chef who would give half a lifespan for a fraction of this fucker’s skill, let me reiterate: Chef Guichon works only with the best materials, and I have yet to see him adding glucose or corn syrup to his chocolate (which is how you make standard modeling choco). This shit is FINE ok, it’s high-percentage cocoa unless it’s white, the lacquer he airbrushes on is ALSO cocoa butter + dye, and the quality IS the reason it’s so stupidly versatile. Chocolate triglycerides crystalize and arrange themselves differently depending on melting and cooling points. If it’s flexibler than clay, it’s only because Chef Guichon’s otherworldly sense of temperature is only rivalled by his whittling technique, his intimate knowledge of how much tension and weight the material supports, and his eldritch understanding of shape. I hate him for it!

I’m damn positive he’s a delightful person! I would never ever wish him ill! He seems so adorable and chill, but oh my god! There’s a pic of his baby-faced teen self with a Kraken vs Ship work - from 2007!! I spent ages denying my loathing was 1000% CRIPPLING RADIOACTIVE GREEN ENVY!1! “Modeling chocolate”, “reportedly disgusting”? He’s the fucking Mozart of his craft, I shall never be on his level, and I won’t stand by this slander. The taste has to be out of this world, plus the sculptures DO get eaten by the end of the events they’re made for. They’re food, through and through.

So yeah, nice analysis of the properties of chocolate as a sculpting/modeling medium but seriously - OP has it all backwards. Gastronomy as a whole is an art, AND it’s not meant to last, AND flavor is a major part of the aesthetic experience (which is why fondant should be banned).

Chef Guichon changed the game. He’d never nerf his own work with subpar taste.

This collab was not on my 2023 bingo card

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Unpopular opinion but I suspect that most of chocolate guy’s sculptures–the ones he doesn’t explicitly eat on camera–are probably barely more edible than fondant sculptures.

There are a handful of things that make me guess that.

1) Good chocolate is pretty expensive. There’s a LOT of waste in these sculpture processes.

1a) If the waste gets melted down and reused (probable) that’s… um… I mean there are ways to do it sanitarily but it will pick up tastes.

1b) You need really well-controlled environmental conditions to make good chocolate even if you’re starting from good ingredients. Part of why Swiss chocolate tastes distinctly different from Belgian chocolate tastes distinctly different from (good) American chocolate is differences in environmental conditions in the factory–conditions that they go to a lot of trouble to regulate. The act of sculpting is going to ruin a lot of that.

2) Chocolate sculptures that a normal person can buy are made out of pretty bad chocolate.

2a) The reason for this is that chocolate is only barely a solid at room temperature and will melt in a warm room. It’s stable at a slightly higher temperature if you temper it, but only slightly. (And most of his chocolate is NOT tempered.) You need to add stabilizers and/or remove some of the parts that make chocolate taste good in order to get something robust.

3) Relatedly, he uses his hands for a lot of this stuff. Hands will melt halfway-decent chocolate really fast. Like, it’s maybe possible to use it anyway, if you’re fast and if you’re rarely touching it other than the camera shots, but it’s not likely. It probably means, as I said in 2a, that there are added stabilizers and/or components of the chocolate removed, all of which affect the taste.

4) There are definitely some scenes where his chocolate has a clay-like consistency. That’s modeling chocolate, and I’ve never taken a bite of it but I’m told it doesn’t taste great. (Most people say it tastes better than fondant, but maybe not by much.)

100%

The snake and the whale and the telescope and the sword in the stone and the robot baker are all technically impressive but probably taste like absolute shit. You do not want to eat those.

The weird-ass little mushroom cakes and and the peach swan thing and the skateboard cookie and things like that are actually made out of shit that would taste good.

The sugar-glass butterfly and roses will just taste like sugar and any extracts that are added to them, they are essentially just really really fancy hard candy.

I actually kind of hate his videos. The big sculptures seem like such an enormous, obnoxious waste because they are probably totally inedible (I mean you technically COULD eat them, and they would probably taste sweet, but also that airbrush food-grade paint doesn’t taste great, it’s kind of bitter, so it’s probably just an introductory note of bitterness followed by bland, chalky chocolate). It makes sense, given that he’s in Vegas and I’m sure that they’re being used as ridiculous displays at various casinos and stuff, but the big sculptures he does seem like such utter bullshit compared to the cute, creative, individual servings of very pretty cakes that he makes that look actually tasty.

I enjoy the large sculptures not because I think they look tasty, because they really don’t, but because it’s impressive mechanical and structural engineering in an unusual medium. Chocolate art doesn’t have to be eaten for it not to be wasteful when it’s being used as a sculpting medium.

That said, I do kind of want to try some of the little cakes with fruity goo inside.

I think that argument holds with, like, ice sculptures and similar stuff, but ice is pretty neutral, chocolate really isn’t.

I think I need to see a statement on his website or his youtube videos about where the chocolate is sourced from if I’m going to be more okay with that much waste chocolate.

Since he is a pastry chef who works with chocolate a lot, I would hope that it was from somewhere that didn’t use child labor, but it costs about $50 for a 3-lb bag of fair trade cocoa mass vs $100 for a 25-lb bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips and he’s making sculptures that use hundreds of pounds of chocolate. I kind of suspect that he is not using ethically sourced chocolate and that makes the waste in his videos seem much more upsetting to me than if is using ethically sourced chocolate.

heyyyyy a rare intersection with one of my areas of particular expertise, I GOT THIS ONE

One of his earlier videos that I can’t find now included the couverture he was melting down to make stuff, and those were very clearly Valrhona feves, which are particularly distinctive looking so far as professional-grade chocolate goes. The good news there: Valrhona is partnered with Slave Free Chocolate, and they make a pretty big deal about being open and transparent about the ethics of their sourcing, both in human and environmental terms.

Now, however, Guichon is using Cacao Barry chocolate, which I know for suresies because a.) I know what their couverture wafers looks like, plus he was playing around with “ruby chocolate” recently, which is one of their things, and b.) if you check his IG (both his regular account and the amauryguichon.pastryacademy account) he’s pretty consistent about tagging @cacaobarryofficial. I think there’s a sponsorship there.

The sourcing ethics with Cacao Barry (half of mega conglomerate Barry Callebaut) are a liiiiiiittle less clearcut than Valrhona’s. Barry Callebaut also makes a big deal about being open and transparent about their sourcing and ethics via their Forever Chocolate program, it’s an easy-to-find permalink on their main site, and they founded Cocoa Horizons in 2015, a legit, free-standing non-profit organization specifically for the purpose of improving the lives of cacao farmers and holding companies like Barry-Callebaut to higher standards.

Good deal, good times, buuuuuut on the other hand they were one of the companies named in the child slavery lawsuit this year. (note: I link to that site with some trepidation, because while they are the group that brought the lawsuit on behalf of the former child cocoa workers, their press releases are a little disconcerting and sensationalist.) Then, to complicate it further, you’ve got Tony’s Chocolonely, whose entire purpose as a company is about creating ethically sourced, slavery-free chocolate, making a statement about continuing to work with Barry-Callebaut here.

I don’t have a horse in this race, I’m a Guittard girl by personal choice, but that’s what’s up with Chocolate Guy’s sourcing.

aaaaaaaand not to make a long post even longer, here’s a statement from the official IG on what they’re doing with his bigger sculptures, for what it’s worth:

I personally am okay with large amounts of expensive, mostly ethically-sourced chocolate being used as an artistic medium, then put on permanent display for educational purposes, but I know not everybody will, I just wanted to answer the question posed. :D