Indulge in the truffles at Dean's Sweets
By BRIAN DUFF | March 18, 2009
DEEP CHOCOLATE Just part of the selection. |
Dean's Sweets, with its Americana name and its modest storefront, does not prepare you for the sophisticated chocolates you find there. A truly great chocolate truffle, like a great life partner, is so rarely discovered that the smart thing to do is to stop looking for it. | DEAN'S SWEETS | 88 Middle St, Portland | Sun-Mon, Wed-Thurs 11 am-6 pm; Fri-Sat 11 am-7 pm | $17.50 for 8 truffles, $27.50 for 16 | 207.774.7779 |
Social economists suggest that to find a life partner one should have seven relationships, and then marry (if it's legal) the next companion who tops the first seven. With truffles you should give up more quickly. Grab one of those Lindt balls you they have near the register at Target, register your disappointment, and then stick to chocolate bars.So I was surprised to find that the truffles at Dean's Sweets are genuinely remarkable. The key is that, despite the shop's name, chocolatier Dean Bingham only makes one thing — dark chocolate truffles — and they are not particularly sweet. While the truffles come in many flavors, these amount to minor variations on a specific theme. Such specialization is wise because working with fine chocolate is no simple matter. It requires an alchemist's setup — with flame, steam, cool stone, pots and vats, and multiple thermometers — and a sensitive touch. Due to the fragile and fickle nature of cocoa butter, getting the right look, flavor, and texture out of chocolate requires the sort of delicacy and obsession shown by the men who transport nitroglycerin in Clouzot's The Wages of Fear.
You can tell that Bingham is deeply attached to his process because he won't leave the home kitchen where he developed it over the years. The shop he and his partner opened four months ago has the facilities to make chocolate, but it remains empty back there. The front looks just great however, with plate after plate and elegant boxes of dark truffles, bulbous and misshapen like little brown smurf-houses.
Each truffle's dark shell is made with a 70-percent cocoa Belgian chocolate that remains nameless — one that Bingham used to buy at the Rosemont Market when he first started experimenting. Perhaps he fell in love with the same Dolfin bars that I used to snatch up from the Greengrocer? The shells are thin but not delicate, and bear the chaotic markings that result from hand-dipping.
The bitter-richness of the dark chocolate shell is terrific, but it would not matter much if the ganache filling were not just as good. This is where most truffles go wrong, with a filling that is both too firm and too sweet, giving you flashbacks to the nougat in a 3 Musketeers bar. The Dean's ganache is soft, velvety, and deeply rich. It appears to be a simple heavy cream and chocolate recipe with hardly any extra sugar. The result is a truffle that is decadent, but appeals to the adult palate.
Related:
Photos: Gross Thanksgiving food to avoid, Vinh Sun BBQ and Restaurant, City Table, More 
- Photos: Gross Thanksgiving food to avoid
Thanksgiving is a time for gorging on food and hanging out with family, but really it's mostly about the food. There are some dishes that take it too far, however, and we are here to help you steer clear of those.
- Vinh Sun BBQ and Restaurant
Constrained by a small word count, I often choose restaurants with relatively short menus. I correctly took Vinh-Sun to be a Cantonese "BBQ" specialist, a retailer of roast pork, whole suckling pigs, ducks, and chickens. But it's also a spanking-clean Chinatown restaurant serving a broad Cantonese and Hong Kong menu.
- City Table
I'm enjoying this restaurant recession more than the last one.
- Sofia Italian Steakhouse
I have to admit I giggled when I got a press release describing this restaurant as being located in the “white-hot West Roxbury-Dedham dining scene.” After all, the space had already killed a reasonably good steak house, Vintage, after a long closure in which it tried to upscale, then ended up downscaling by adding red-sauce Italian dishes.
- The Beehive Café
When Three Rivers Café closed last year, fans of chef Eli Dunn eagerly awaited his reappearance.
- Los Andes
It makes sense that the people who run Los Andes are the ones who had a popular place further up Chalkstone for nine years. It was named simply the Bolivian Restaurant and was, in fact, pretty definitive. At a recent visit to the new restaurant, a fellow diner enthused that the baked saltinas (potato, yucca, and cheese), an indulgence-encouraging two-buck impulse purchase "at the Bolivian," were "worth driving across town for." Indeed.
- Review: Off the Boat Seafood
To find Off the Boat Seafood, a South Italian take-out joint that just this winter added a 10-table dining room and a wine list, mainlanders will pass through the Callahan Tunnel and embark on an exercise so challenging it's not unlike finding the Northwest Passage.
- Korean Garden Restaurant
Despite being open only six months, Korean Garden already has 22 Internet reviews.
- Keep your skin on
Skinless, boneless cuts of fish are convenient — you don't have to clean them yourself — but getting rid of those "extras" takes away a lot of flavor, and a lot of the nutrition, too. Good news! It's easy to grill whole fish, and they make a great centerpiece for summer cookouts.
- Maria's Seaside Café
The recent mini-heat-wave that made us all optimistic that summer really would roll around again set us to thinking about seasonal restaurants along Rhode Island's shore.
- Tory Row
Matthew Curtis and Christopher A. Lutes, perfect-pitch masters of minimalism at Miracle of Science, Cambridge 1, Middlesex Lounge, and Audubon Circle, have finally opened a restaurant with a few flaws.
- Less
Topics:
Restaurant Reviews
, Culture and Lifestyle, Food and Cooking, Foods, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Food and Cooking, Foods, Desserts, Chocolate, Chocolate, Dean's Sweets, Dean's Sweets, Less
