Captain Chocolate, set sail for a cleaner bite

Chocolate, a word, a name, that covers this sweet bittersweet temptation appealing to many, especially women, right? Today unfortunately it has lost a part of its true value as it has become a main flavouring ingredient in various biscuits and other sweets. Unfortunately? Not entirely of course. The downside of this evolution is the upscaling of the production, at the cost of quality, but more important is it detrimental to the labour conditions of the farmers, especially in Western Africa. Have a look at the documentary The Dark Side Of Chocolate by Miki Mistrati to get a closer look into it. Our daily choices as consumers impact the lives of farmers all around the globe, and will sooner or later get back to us, for sure. That’s why at Kitchenroots we believe in an internasocial society, an idea that comprises the responsibility that comes with the choice of our goods. Read it between the lines on the page of My Roots and on the insightful page dedicated to this renewing idea: Internasocial Society.

We gave you a short insight on chocolate making in the first episode about chocolate: Chocolate, A Bittersweet Temptation Unwrapped. But our current method is simplified in many ways and very much intuitive, as is our cooking style. Slowly but surely the equipment is being upgraded and when the time is ripe a physical culinary atelier will follow to sell our bars to you personally. The Tres Hombres could also bring sugar and salt by boat, which would lower our impact on the environment even more thanks to the zero emission transport method. A bit precarious maybe, but the chocolate making as such was a dream since a long time as well and is getting more tangible by the day.

Next is the grinding of the sugar and cacao nibs and the conching of the chocolate, two steps we somehow apply together in our wet stone grinder machine for about 48 to 72 hours. The duration partly depends on the texture you intend, personally we like our chocolate very smooth in the mouth, soft and creamy. And creamy doesn’t necessarily mean we had to add milk powder to the liquor, an impression that can occur as a result of the specific identity of the beans. The very last stage of chocolate making is quite tricky; tempering is crucial to homogenize the cacao butter in order to assure a crispy bite and beautifully shiny chocolate, but more importantly to make sure the bars can easily be released from the moulds.

To getter a fuller and deeper understanding of bean-to-bar chocolate I would strongly recommend the book Chocolate: Indulge Your Inner Chocoholic by Dom Ramsey. Dom has a shop and atelier in London where he experiments with chocolate and develops very interesting flavours.