Sweet Inspiration

Combining the science of molecular gastronomy with their training as chefs and chocolatiers, Richmond's Dominique and Cindy Duby are turning out tastebud-popping confections.

By Jesse Spencer; photograph by David Jackson

IN THE 1980S, Cindy and Dominique Duby ran a pastry business in North Vancouver. For a time they had a retail outlet, Patisserie de Paris, and at its peak their wholesale business turned out as many as 3,000 desserts a day for hotels and restaurant chains like the Boathouse. After 14 years of profitably sweet servitude, they got bored and packed it in.

Dominique is the Brussels-born son of a metallurgical engineer father and a mother whose love of food and cooking suffused family life: science meets art. Cindy is a Richmond-born woman whose Japanese ancestors bequeathed her an appreciation of sushi-like textures, artful presentation and oriental ingredients: east meets west. They’d met while working as hotel chefs in 1981 and gone off to study under master pastrymakers and chocolatiers in Belgium and Paris. Now, newly liberated, they followed their passion for food science in new directions: mushroom cultivation (“We were interested in the medicinal benefits,” says Dominique), nutrition (they studied at the Canadian Nurtition Institute), the physiological subtleties of savoury and sweet. They turned their attention to chocolate, and while studying adult education, with its emphasis on brain-based learning, they conceived the idea of brain-based eating, an approach that insists on appealing to all senses.

“After all,” says Dominique, a lanky, voluble fellow of 45, “eating isn’t just about the way food tastes. It’s about the way it looks, smells, feels, the circumstances at the time. Eat in darkness, and food becomes very different than when you see what you’re eating. If I serve you something in a plastic pail, you’ll find it very different than if it’s served on fine china. We create our products to be a multi-sensory experience.”

The products in question include scientifically derived, exquisitely produced, seductively packaged, seriously expensive chocolates. Using the principles of a food movement called molecular gastronomy, the Dubys combine flavours and textures in arresting, even startling, ways: apple-red cabbage gelee with chestnut praline, for example.

This is the sort of avant-garde epicureanism that has made el Bulli near Barcelona one of the world’s singular restaurants, and wd-50 in Manhattan a room in which rarefied cuisine is raised to the level of performance art. If you want to take that idea to the extreme, have dinner at Moto in Chicago. The menu-—printed in edible soy ink on Parmesan-flavoured rice paper, framed in puffed rice and freeze-dried shallots and served on a bed of creme fraiche—is also the appetizer.

The Dubys launched their first chocolate series in 2004. Was the world ready for wild squash truffles? At first, most of the interest came from Toronto and New York. Since getting coverage on CNN, NBC, and Dailycandy.com, their online sales (dcduby.com) have taken off. (They sell locally at Edible B.C. on Granville Island, Barbara-Jo’s Books for Cooks and, seasonally, at Whole Foods.)They’ve done a book, Wild Sweets, about wine and dessert pairings. Their presentations at industry events such as the Masters of Food & Wine in Carmel, and the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Florida, add to their renown. How many hours a day do they work?

Cindy, as reserved as Dominique is garrulous: “Right now, about 14.”

Dominique: “We’re busy, but it’s fun.”

Cindy: “Mostly fun.”

“Do you have children?”

Dominique: “No.”

“Do you have pets?”

Cindy: “No.”

“Why do you do this?”

Dominique: “Because we’re crazy.”

“Do you eat your own chocolates?”

Dominique: “Only taste. In the morning. Before toothpaste, before coffee, before fat clogs the tastebuds. Sometimes I eat a Purdy’s peanut butter bar. It’s very nice—when you add salt to a bitter component like chocolate, it gives the perception of sweetness. They do it really well.”

Besides launching their new Origins collection this month—this group includes a separate textural element to go along with the chocolates—they’re hunting money for a PBS series (Kitchen Myth and Magic). They’re at UBC two days a week, working with Food Science students on two projects: creating a drink that’s both hot and cold (“Grip the bottom of the glass and it feels cold; take a sip and it’s hot”), and a highly unusual ice cream (“with the look and consistency of ice cream, but hot. It melts as it cools”). And, as always, they’re investigating new combinations of flavours, scents and textures.

You might say the Dubys, like Willy Wonka, are confectionary geniuses obsessed with chocolate. You might say they’re mad scientists whose experiments in molecular gastronomy have taken cocoa beans to new heights. You might say that they’re artists whose studio is a laboratory and whose medium is chocolate. You might also say they’re canny marketers who’ve neatly carved out their own niche in a crowded market.

Or you might simply bite into one of their sublime creations, close your eyes, and let it speak for itself.