Chef Kunal Kapur decodes myriad flavours of ice cream

New Delhi: Celebrity Chef Kunal Kapur, an Indian cuisine whiz, will don the hat of an ice cream maven as he is now associated with world-famous icecream brand, 'Magnum'.

Chef Kapur, a judge of the family favourite ‘Masterchef India’, decided that ice-cream should be considered as an entire dessert experience. "I came on board with ‘Magnum’ last year when Dutch Unilever was launching one of their most selling ice-cream on a stick in India,” he told PTI.

He claims that the company required a chef who could talk about chocolates and ice-cream, especially Magnum, since it rose above ordinary ‘ice-cream on sticks’ and could provide a completely different dessert experience. He believes that he fits the role of this chef perfectly.

The chef, who was in town to host one of Masterchef’s famous MasterClasses, took ice-cream aficionados through a journey of chocolate tasting, helping the dilettante audience identify the basic difference between the cocoa content of white, milk and dark chocolate, and determining the quality of each.

While the ice cream produced by Magnum is solely made from Belgian chocolate imported from the world’s largest producer of premium chocolate, ‘Barry Callebaut’, Chef Kapur claims that the taste bud of the average Indian is not aware of the difference between myriad flavours of chocolate yet.

"The Indian palette isn’t aware of what is a pure Belgian chocolate flavour,” says chef Kapur, “For most of us, which is about 99 per cent of the people, a piece of chocolate is a piece of chocolate. How many would really know beyond ‘milk, white, and dark’ chocolate, or how their chocolate is made?”

The chef, however, believes that people are becoming increasingly curious about the sort of ice cream or chocolate they are eating. "We want people to take their ice cream seriously. I think we have risen to a level where people really want to know what chocolate and ice-cream they are eating.”