Mindy Segal is living the dream. She’s one of Chicago’s best and most renowned pastry chefs, owns an incredible bakery, and has her own cannabis brand. Just when I thought I couldn’t want her life anymore, she now has her own custom chocolate, which she and her team hand crafted in France. If you have a sweet tooth, you might want to get a snack before proceeding.
During a recent trip to Paris, Segal and her team (including pastry chefs Bo Durham and Karen Gizowski) spent a week together doing “research,” meaning sampling as many pastries as they could get their hands on. During this time, they made a special visit to chocolate maker Cacao Barry, which sounds pretty much like the Wonka factory.
“It was probably 45 minutes outside of Paris, in this old brick home next to the factory where they produce all kinds of chocolate for everywhere in the world,” Segal says. There, she and her team got to make their own chocolate entirely from scratch, starting with beans and working through the entire process.
Segal explains that as a pastry chef, she always mixes her chocolate to create her decadent concoctions. “You might have this dark chocolate, but it’s a little too fruity, so you add a little milk chocolate to it, and it becomes that perfect dark chocolate.” Here, rather than blending chocolate in her restaurant, she and her team created the perfect signature chocolate, tasting various beans and selecting the type of sugar used. Once the prototype chocolate was made, chefs at Cacao Barry made it into various products to see how it performed, like chocolate mousse and hot chocolate.
The result is “Lait Extraordinaire.” A blend of beans from Mexico and Ghana, the final product is a mix of dark and milk chocolate, which fits Segal’s preferences. “I’m a milk chocolate, caramel, butterscotch, banana, brown butter girl,” Segal laughs. The name comes from Segal’s constant mantra at her bakery. “The signature of everything that we do here is that we take the ordinary and make it extraordinary,” says Segal. “So extraordinary is one of the words that we use a lot.”
Going forward, you’ll see Lait Extraordinaire used in products like cookies, brownies, pastries, and more. You’ll also be able to buy it by itself. “It’s going to add a different level of nuance to our pastry, a little more elevated,” says Durham. Hopefully it goes over well, because in order to get this kind of custom treatment, you have to buy a lot of chocolate. Like two tons (for real) of chocolate. Looks like it’s time to start eating.