From to bean bar
Waterloo pastry biz takes chocolate to new heights by roasting its own beans
THE MAYANS touted it as the “food of the Gods” and many people have been known to surreptitiously self-medicate with it come the mid-afternoon blahs.
That’s because every time a piece of luscious chocolate goes into your mouth, the world comes to a screeching halt as you are held hostage to its seductive, silky ways.
Luckily, a raft of research gives you permission to only half joke when you say chocolate is your favourite vegetable. Chocolate, particularly the dark variety, is laced with antioxidants, which are credited with everything from trimming blood pressure and cholesterol numbers, to improving brain functioning, to quelling heart-hampering inflammation.
And now a local pastry business is making it even tastier to embrace your inner Willy Wonka. The story of Waterloo’s Ambrosia Pastry Co. begins in 1999 when Tim Simpson and Aura Hertzog met in Toronto while enrolled in the culinary program at George Brown College. Hertzog was from Toronto, and Simpson had moved to the big city from Waterloo Region. Following culinary school, they worked in the food industry in Toronto and Vancouver before settling in Kitchener, where they opened the Golden Hearth bakery at King and Cedar streets, across from the Kitchener Market. They ran Golden Hearth for three years before selling the business to take their lives in a different direction, including raising a family. With a new focus on pastries and chocolate, Hertzog and Simpson moved to a small 350-square-foot commercial kitchen on Waterloo Street in Waterloo
>> last December and started selling their products through the Ambrosia Pastry Co. in February.
Tim has always had a passion for chocolate, partly forged from a friendship with the owner of the lauded Soma Chocolatemaker in Toronto’s fashionable Distillery District. With a penchant for making items from scratch, Simpson and Hertzog decided to invest in the equipment needed to make their own chocolate directly from the bean.
This makes Ambrosia Pastry Co. one of only a few artisan chocolate makers in all of Canada crafting chocolate in a multi-stage process directly from the cocoa bean.
“We just started by ordering some beans, playing around a little and things have progressed from there,” says Simpson.
“We consider ourselves chocolate makers not chocolatiers who simply melt pre-made chocolate to make their products,” Hertzog adds.
Their commercial kitchen has a good collection of whole cocoa beans from far-flung locations like Belize, Madagascar, Peru and Papua New Guinea. Similar to coffee, cocoa beans have terroir: a food where you can taste the nature that produced it.
“You can get fruitiness from one bean and more nutty nuances from another,” says Simpson.
Papua New Guinea beans are traditionally dried and fermented under a fire, which vivifies them with their signature smoky personality. “This is a good chocolate for Scotch lovers,” notes Simpson.
They plan to use Mexican cocoa beans to make chocolate delights like hot chocolate and mole sauces for Uptown Waterloo’s Taco Farm. “It’s like any food — if you get good ingredients and treat them gently, you’ll get good results,” says Simpson.
At present, all of the cocoa beans used to make their chocolate bars are certified organic and fair trade.
“One day we would like to be big enough where we can buy the beans directly from the source,” says Hertzog, who adds that she believes the market for single origin chocolate will take off over the next few years as it did for coffee.
To go from bean to bar, the cocoa beans are roasted in a top-end convection oven, which destroys any lingering bacteria or yeast that grows on the beans during fermentation under the sun at the source. Like coffee, once roasted, the beans should be processed soon afterwards.
The beans are then coarsely ground in a human-powered grinder and the husks are removed.
From here, the bean bits are transferred to a high-powered juicer, which breaks the mixture down to a grainy paste before being transferred to a melanger, a machine in which two granite stones spin to use heat and friction to produce velvety smooth chocolate liqueur. The melanger runs for anywhere between 24 and 48 hours.
More cocoa butter and sugar are added during this process based on the percentage of total cocoa desired in the finished bar.
Ambrosia bars range from 55 to 70 per cent total cocoa, the range for what is considered “dark” chocolate. The chocolate liquor is then transferred to a marble surface for tempering, which is the traditional method for producing chocolate. Simpson explains that tempering on marble cools the chocolate at a predictable rate to form stable cocoa butter crystals, which will stay dispersed within the chocolate as opposed to rising to the surface. Tempering the chocolate to 88 to 90 degrees before making the bars also raises the melting point of chocolate so that the bars melt beautifully in your mouth and not your hands.
It’s quite apparent that Simpson takes a lot of pride in the artistry and precision of proper chocolate tempering. Once tempered, the liquid chocolate is poured into polycarbonate bar moulds and chilled until they harden into hand-crafted single-origin bars. Simpson has also started to experiment with chocolate-covered nuts and fruits as well as white chocolate using organic cocoa butter.
The recent purchase of a small distiller will be used to make in-house flavourings such as mint extract.
“Often, I feel like I am getting paid to play,” says Simpson.
Currently, Ambrosia Pastry Co. is mostly selling products to restaurants, cafés, catering companies and bakeries. However, they also have pop-up pastry sales where they sell directly to customers who can use an online form at http://ambrosiapastry.com to request ambrosial goodies, including chocolate bars, goat cheese tarts, macarons and homemade marshmallows.
“Our business model gives us the opportunity to grow at a reasonable pace without overwhelming us with orders we can’t complete,” says Hertzog.
People are now inquiring about weddings and as things progress perhaps the couple may even look into having a small retail space as well as shipping to chocoholics across the country.