Chocolate is THIS girls best friend

I was one of the volunteers on this year’s 'Join the Chocolution', Choctober Chocolate Festival in our fine city of Norwich. Created by Lynn Lockwood whom I helped out on the last Choc festival a decade ago, she is a chocolate sommelier & educator (imagine that job).

She flew David in from Columbia a 3rd generation cocoa-farmer so he could educate us on the highs and lows of running a cocoa plantation in South America. The continent of origin along with Turkeys and potatoes, a trio that would quite possibly work in tacos by way of a mole but let’s get back to CHOC.

Did you know cocoa trees grow perfectly up to 20% above or below the equator, but 80% of the worlds cocoa beans come from Africa – namely Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Ghana. 

But this all comes at a cost and that’s what Join the Chocolution was all about. Find out more on www.jointhechocolution.org soon to be a local CIC raising the voice of cocoa farmers. Like, did you know the average cocoa farmer earns less than a dollar a day and certain farming is linked with child slavery (1.48 million and counting)?

But I’m a humble chef, cookery tutor and food writer so will tell you all about the process of chocolate.

Cocoa trees can develop fruit within 2 years, sooner with the right conditions. Pods the size and shape of a small child’s rugby ball grow on the trunk of the tree. When they ripen the farmers will twist them off the trunk and crack them open with a machete revealing the white pulp that surrounds the 20-60 brown beans inside.

Columbian Dave cracked one open at the Chocolate Festival and I fell in love with the almost lychee like pulp that is sweet and juicy with citrus flavours. This pulp is used to ferment the beans which are fermented for around a week depending on the bean variety usually covered in banana leaves and left in those warm tropical conditions. 

The beans are then dried in the sun and then bagged for sale. 

The chocolate process is another thing altogether – beans are roasted to develop flavour and then cracked open and separated from their shell (winnowing). This leaves the broken shells which can be used to flavour all sorts. And the beans are then ground for a day or so – this breaks them down to a pulp called Chocolate Liquor– in this process the fat will break its way out to the top and be poured off as cocoa butter – that delicious fat is used to make real white chocolate, but also used in dark & milk chocolate to make chocolate bars. The cocoa liquor (which is more like a pulp) is then ground to a smooth liquid we all love as 100% chocolate.

Chocolate bars are made by mixing the chocolate liquid with sugar and vanilla and in commercial chocolate all sorts of poop including oils and nasties including flavourings. 

Real great bean-to-bar chocolate is made simply with good quality beans, produced in a great way and mixed simply with a small amount of sweet, vanilla and milks to make a quality bar which would cost you around £5-£15 a bar but it will probably render you ecstatically orgasmic & happy, with a natural hit of energy and health-boosting goodness. 

Unlike a commercial well-known bar of chocolate that will cost you £1-3 and only contain 18-25% of actual chocolate and mild pleasure which will leave you unsatisfied like a very bad lover.

Trust me - you want the good stuff, and when you taste the good stuff you will know it’s good stuff and you won’t want to go back. Wink Wink !!!!

I was introduced to Madagascan chocolate www.chocolatmadagascar.com, a fabulous story about the king of Madagascar wanting to increase money into the county so they build a chocolate factory so they could turn the cocoa beans they grow into amazing tasting award-winning chocolate they now sell all over the world including Harrods and Waitrose. They now employ over 550 locals in the process. And I can confirm their white chocolate is the best I have ever tasted. 

But we also have local Norfolk/Suffolk bean-to-bar producers my absolute favourite is:

Tosier  who have a chocolate tasting room. Their coffee chocolate bar has won 3* at the Guild of Fine Food and I agree its sensational. We went on a chocolate and cheese tasting session in their shop / café, I think we paid around £20-25 pp and it was a taste sensation. They also offer a beer and chocolate tasting, so look out for events or if near Southwold / Beccles – travel to Middleton, Saxmundham for a hot chocolate like no other and buy some chocolate, you won’t regret it. 

The smell when they are grinding the bean to chocolate is pure bliss. 

But with chocolate that good you only need a square a day - - don’t bite, let it sit on your tongue and melt slowly to appreciate the taste. 

Now let’s just think about that for a minute.

Other Norfolk producers include :- 

Harris and James - Based in Beccles – where you can do a chocolate experience for around £20 but they also have a café there and in 5 other locations. They make a wicked hot chocolate and their chocolate gelato is made from only local milk and their melted chocolate. 

Booja Booja - Who make vegan / dairy free truffles and chocolate treats including drinking chocolate. Employing over 50 people and based in Little Melton, Norfolk. I especially love their new product Chocolate Wonders, mini truffles in a share bag for £2.99. But they also make vegan ice-cream with a base of cashew nuts and of course their chocolate flavours are deliciously creamy and also gluten-free. 

Gnaw - Make fun-flavoured bars with about 60 flavours. Its hard to remember my favourite but they recently won an award for their popcorn and peanut. They also make hot chocolate stirrer sticks, snacks and melts. And they post their chocolate all over the world – they certainly are a local success story with their factory and HQ North of Norwich. Find Gnaw locally in Jarrolds. 

It’s also worth mentioning St Giles Hotel have been working with Join the Chocolution to only sell chocolate that is 100% responsible and delicious. They have a mocktail on their menu using the cocoa pulp – that cool white lychee juicy stuff you find in cocoa pods. Mixing it with coconut milk for that tropical twist, lime juice for the zing, cranberry juice for the balance and shaken with egg white making it creamy – and quite possibly the best mocktail I have ever drunk, no word of a lie – trust me I’m a X-chef and food writer.

Cocoa trees were around possibly a billion years ago, making them one of the oldest foods on Earth. Back then it was naughty monkeys who spread the seeds by pooping! It was the Olmec then the Mayan’s 2kBC that made a chocolate drink, flavoured with local ingredients like chilli and vanilla but unsweetened – it was the west that added sugar. 

Montezuma was the Emperor of the Aztecs who drank chocolate (Xocolatl) to give him strength in the bedroom maybe up to 50 cups a day, he had many wives and chocolate was considered an aphrodisiac. But cocoa beans were so important these civilisations used them as currency. 

1 bean = 1 tamale

3 beans = rabbit

100 beans = slave

But it was an British pharmacist at Frys and Co that invented the format to make the first chocolate bar. 

And the rest it history.

I am now off for a hot chocolate!