Western Morning News (Saturday)
THE ART OF MAKING THE PERFECT CHOCOLATE
Martin Hesp recalls a fantastic trip to St Lucia where he was lucky enough to make his own chocolate bars... and eat them. Happy Easter!
We have learned in recent times that there are very few certainties in life, but here’s a prediction that is a safe bet... It’s the fact that, as this newspaper hits the doorsteps this weekend, millions of people will have the word “chocolate” on their minds.
Various industry sources have calculated that more than 80 million boxed Easter eggs are sold in the UK each year, which is getting on for three per household. Pandemic or no pandemic, there will be an awful lot of chocolate being consumed over the next 48 hours.
If you take Easter out of the equation, research shows that chocolate is the “most widely sought after and frequently craved food” on the planet. No surprises there, then. But what is amazing is how few consumers know exactly what it is, or how it is made.
Just over a year ago I was in the South Hams learning all about the chocolate-making process at Salcombe Dairy. I was working on a feature which, because of Covid, never happened – but basically the story was about how the company has expanded into chocolate making alongside its 40-year-old ice-cream operation.
The two edible items do seem to complement one another – and, like the ice cream, Salcombe Dairy’s chocolate is very much a root-and-branch affair. They call it bean-to-bar chocolate, meaning that it is made completely in-house using fairly traded and organic Peruvian cacao beans.
The company’s Lucia Bly told me: “Our ‘bean-to-bar’ chocolate making process allows us to control every step of manufacturing, from sourcing the cocoa beans to hand-wrapping each and every bar.
“Rather than focusing on mass manufacturing, the emphasis on bean-to-bar chocolate is about producing very high quality products through extensive ingredient selection. Each cocoa bean has thousands of different flavours which can only be discovered if great care is taken during the manufacturing process. The end result is a chocolate bar packed full of unique flavours.
“We source organic, fair trade cacao beans from the Peruvian rainforest. We ‘melange’ these cacao nibs in Salcombe with raw cane sugar before ‘conching’, tempering and moulding into our famous chocolate. We use natural ingredients, local when possible, to make our award-winning chocolate in a variety of flavours,” she added.
“It’s the manufacturing process that makes this type of chocolate really special. Our cacao nibs are ground for 48 hours, which is what helps to achieve the smooth and creamy texture. We also ‘conche’ the product for three hours, which means we remove any volatiles including some of the acetic acid and tannic acids, while still leaving the essence of the bean in the flavour. Last but not least, our chocolatiers use their expertise to create a well-tempered bar of chocolate. This ensures we achieve the final shine and that crisp, satisfying snap you get with every bite.”
Salcombe Dairy does indeed make a top-end luxury chocolate. But some of the trade terminology may need explaining. Because chocolate making really is a kind of alchemy – an unlikely kind of magic which seems to go against expectation.
If your mind boggles (as mine does) at the thought of an ear of wheat being transformed into a loaf of bread, it will really struggle with the concept of a cocoa bean turning into a chocolate Easter egg.
Because the weird looking growth
hanging from a tree in a tropical rainforest doesn’t look, smell or taste anything like the finished product. At least a good loaf of artisan-made bread will smell like the wheat it’s made from but, when it comes to chocolate, you cannot imagine how anyone ever managed to pick a cocoa-bean and say: “Mmmm! I can make what will become the world’s favourite confection out of this!”
It’s a mystery which I found myself pondering in a beautiful tropical garden 18 months ago. I was fortunate to learn all about the origins of the story during a stay in St Lucia’s amazing Jade Mountain resort in the Caribbean, where guests can enjoy the bean-to-bar experience by making their very own chocolate from scratch.
The resort is part of the beautiful Emerald Estate, upon which grow more than 2,000 cocoa trees. Staff at the twin Jade Mountain and Anse Chastanet resorts have been hand-crafting Emerald Estate chocolate for a decade, but more recently they opened a special air-conditioned laboratory where guests are able to not only learn all about how chocolate is harvested and made, but also have a go at creating their own bars.
Saint Lucia has a connection with the cocoa industry which dates back to the early 1700s. There are many plantations on the island which have been harvesting and producing cocoa for eons, mainly supplying the local market.
I took a tour of the estate’s remarkable gardens in the hills just behind the seaside town of Soufriere and saw how the cocoa was harvested in season, after which it is held in fermentation bins before being eventually laid out in special drying racks.
It’s an interesting process. Break open a cocoa pod, pull out one of the white beans and pop it into your mouth and your taste buds will be treated to a rather pleasant sweet-sour experience that tastes nothing like chocolate. And I mean nothing like. You get no hint of this plant’s eventual culinary destination at all. You are advised not to bite into the bean itself, as you’ll have a nasty bitter surprise.
Seasons vary from region to region, but the process of turning the plant material into chocolate begins when the pods are cut open and the white pulp containing the cocoa beans is scooped out. The pods and pulp are placed into large wooden bins where the pulp is fermented for five to seven days. Next comes the drying process when the beans are laid out on those moveable racks. Then comes the roasting process, which is followed by another process which removes the papery skins. The eventual ‘cocoa nibs’ are then ground with stone rollers until they are reduced to a paste. This cocoa mass or cocoa liquor is a pure, unrefined chocolate which contains both cocoa solids and cocoa butter – the natural fats present in the bean.
In chocolate factories the raw material then goes through another process sometimes called ‘conching,’ in which things like sugar, milk powder and other flavourings are added. The old fashioned, non-industrial form of conching happens on a cold marble slab.
At Jade Mountain’s lab we were able to make our own chocolate bars by smearing the cocoa and sugar mix on to the marble topped table again and again, until the whole thing reached a smooth silky consistency. We were then given moulds and a choice of other ingredients like chopped nuts with which we could embellish our own individual bars. A day later staff delivered my cooled and refrigerated bar to my ‘sanctuary’ at Jade Mountain – and very wonderful it was too, though I say it myself.