One of the delights of each new season in the Swiss cities of Zurich and Geneva is stopping by the Teuscher shop, when they change what really amounts to the scenery since it’s not just a matter of what’s in the window.
Lavish crêpe paper cut-out decorations hang from the ceiling and transform the display surfaces with the year’s seasonal theme, always different but generally using pastels in the spring, bright summer colors followed by an autumn leaf palette, and snowy whites highlighted with gold, silver, perhaps red, in winter. Even the packaging – tall, square boxes topped by a lush riot of paper decoration – matches.
Well, not quite all the packaging. Notable exceptions are the simple green and yellow-gold, beribboned boxes filled with champagne truffles.
Teuscher Created A World First
Teuscher deputy CEO Rafael Rubio begins the tale of the truffles’ inception this way: ‘’It was the summer of 1947, there was a heat wave in Zurich, and business was slow. Adolf Teuscher, Sr. was thinking about what he could do to improve sales.’’ The sight of a champagne bucket suddenly made his mental light bulb go on very bright, and ‘’Teuscher decided to create champagne chocolates with a fresh, cooling taste’’ that would draw the crowds.
Rubio states categorically that ‘’the recipe was Teuscher’s invention, and it was a world first.’’ Over 60 years later, the truffles are still pulling them in, all year round, at what are now the firm’s 25 branches – most of them not in Switzerland, or even Europe, but in the States and Canada as well as the Middle East and Asia.
Hand-Crafted Chocolate
The official description of the truffles on the Teuscher website states that they are made from ‘’a delicate blend of fresh cream, butter and chocolate with a champagne cream center surrounded by a dark chocolate ganache, enrobed in milk chocolate and dusted with confectioner’s sugar.’’ The champagne used is Dom Perignon. The truffles are also available in an all-dark version.
‘’We never use preservatives, hydrogenated oils, gums or waxes in our products, but rather ship the chocolates every week from Zurich,’’ says Rubio. As a result of this freshness-first policy, the truffles do not have a long shelf life, indeed should be eaten within ten days. Not that once a box of the truffles comes into your possession it is likely to last anywhere near that long. Nor should it prove difficult to grasp why the 2006 edition of the National Geographic’s 10 Best of Everything listed Teuscher as best chocolatier in the world.
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