Last Friday, me and my friend Anna-Karin visited the Chocolate Festival that is held annually here in Stockholm. The exhibitors are a mixed lot, there are bakeries and patisserie shops, chocolate importers, manufacturers, magazine companies and a big stage with live pastry making going on. A great place to be if you love your chocolate, that is :)The far biggest trend this year was using salt, licorice and salmiak with chocolate. About every vendor had some truffles sprinkled with flaky sea salt or chocolate bars with salt ground in with chocolate. "Salty licorice" was another big thing, it's a traditional Swedish licorice preparation where the licorice is spiced up with salmiak. I'm not sure if salmiak is used at all outside Scandinavia, I've never seen it abroad. It's a very intense tasting salt that takes the skin off your tongue if eaten to much.
The main coming thing, I think, is preparations with raw cocoa. There have been bars with cocoa nibs around for a while, but now there were bars made from just pressed raw cocoa of different granularities and brown sugar. I suppose it's an extension of the global "going natural, no additives" trend.
Chilli was the biggest thing last year, there were still lots of chilli preparations, but I felt that one has peaked by now.
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