Tonight saw the return of Willie Harcourt-Cooze to UK TV screens and a welcome message on British TV that most Brits are eating ‘confectionery’ and not, actually, chocolate. Not all of us though, Willie’s starting his new project in the middle of a worldwide fine chocolate revolution, where the UK and London in particular is now actually leading the way in the appreciation of real chocolate (though I would say that, wouldn’t I.)
Willie started off last year with his crusade to bring us ‘cacao’ – rough ground 100% bars made with beans from his own plantation in Choroni, Venezuela, and a couple of other sources. Let’s face it though, the 100% ‘bar’ was really a cooking ingredient, not exactly an eating bar. I’m sure a lot of people bought the tube like bars out of curiosity because of the TV coverage, made a couple of recipes then left the remains at the back of the cupboard, though no doubt there were some hard-core addicts as well. Cooking with chocolate is fab, but it’s eating chocolate that really gets us going.
Chocolate history in the making
So Willie’s now come around and is finishing off the refining of his chocolate and producing 72% eating bars. This, actually, is a pivotal moment in British chocolate history. We have our very first artisanal bean-to-bar chocolate maker, and probably the first new chocolate maker in the UK for 70 years.
Many of you will have seen all the ‘origin’ bars popping up in every supermarket these days and many a high street chain. It’s important to realise though, and I can’t repeat this often enough, nobody makes fine chocolate in Britain directly from beans – until now that is. Cadburys, Mars, Nestlé. etc. make a lot of chocolate products of course, but increasingly the actual chocolate is made by huge companies like Callebaut, very little of it in the UK. Cadburys’ Green & Black’s chocolate, for example, is now made in Poland by Callebaut.
So alongside the some of the best chocolate makers in the world – Amedei, Domori, Michel Cluizel, Valrhona, Pralus, we now have our very own British version. That’s got to be good news.
Is the best chocolate in Barcelona, or London?
Willie starts us off by telling us that most of the newsagent bars we are eating are not in fact chocolate – I point with which I’d have to thoroughly agree. Interesting to hold up Spain as a centre of chocolate excellence though. The chain he visited was Sampaka (owned by Spanish chocolate maker Chocovic, whose chocolate is used in their products.)
Sampaka have great looking shops and some interestingly flavoured bonbons, but are about on a par with the UK’s Hotel Chocolat quality wise, meanwhile the Daily Telegraph today asked "Is London now the world capital of chocolate?” (Though ‘egged’ on in that respect by Rococo’s Chantal Coady.) They also point out the good work our other William’s have been doing of late, Mr Curley and Mr McCarrick.
The fact is, that everywhere you go in the world the market is overwhelmed by candy type confectionary. It’s a bit like McDonalds, it’s everywhere. It’s a fair point that the UK (and US) are a little worse because of the lower percentage standards, but this doesn’t really make much difference when you’re eating a Snickers – there’s hardly any chocolate involved anyway. A trip to France might have been more appropriate – that’s where the fine chocolate movement started.
Calling a spade a spade
Good to see candy favourites like Galaxy and Dairy Milk taken apart as the testing group was introduced. These kind of bars are really based on mouth feel and sweetness and not chocolate flavour. Interesting to see how this develops. Seventypercent did something similar a few years ago, for a social development project in Halifax. We were asked to present a fine chocolate tasting to a group of die-hard candy ‘chocoholics’ – first thing in the morning, in their social centre, right after a round of bacon butties.
Dark chocolate was such a rarity in those parts that we couldn’t even buy a bar of Bournville to supplement the event. The chocoholics in the group were totally converted though and ended up having their own blend made by Domori after creating test batches of chocolate from beans in their own kitchen. (And so actually beating Willie by several years!)
In the tasting pack Willie was giving out to his test group of Cadbury type chocoholics, I spotted bars from Pralus – maybe Indonésie – Malagasy’s Mora Mora, and a couple of Valrhona bars, one of which was Guanaja (the old packaging though). Hopefully the other Valrhona was Manjari, which is always a good introduction to fine chocolate. I guess we will find out tomorrow.
Healthy chocolate tests:
The chocolate fitness test was interesting, though not completely new ground. I wonder what the placebo was? Good tasting chocolate affects my brain and general feeling, aside from any chemical affects, so I’m not sure that it’s a completely fair test.
Does cacao improve performance? Ask Aztec warriors, they went into battle on it. There’s actually plenty of research around about the health benefits of chocolate, plus a few thousand years of pre-Colombian human consumption. Chocolate only has a bad name because all the sugar, fat and other stuff added to candy bars. Good to see that message on national TV though.
Off to Venezuela
TV of course always likes to make things sound more dramatic. El Tesoro, Willie’s plantation, can be reached by bus or Taxi from Caracas. It takes about 3 hours. Actually Chuao is about 3 hours and that includes a boat trip, El Tesoro is on the way, so maybe a little less than 3 hours. I understand from locals that Willie’s own plantation doesn’t actually produce a huge quantity of cacao compared to his neighbours, hence the need to head off to Cacao San José for more beans.
Cacao San José will be very familiar to regular fine chocolate fans. They have a close relationship with Italy’s Domori, and about half of their own plantation’s production goes to Domori. They are also absolutely excellent hosts, as I found out last year.
Again more dramatic TV moments. Willie has already been buying San José’s Rio Caribe and Carenero Superio since last year’s programme, and these beans are used by quite a few fine chocolate makers anyway, including Domori. And Seventypercent as well actually. Diehard fans will remember our lecithin free Rio Caribe 70% bar from 2004, made for us by Domori.
I can’t really see the trip is full of hazards, unless you’re trying to get money out of a Venezuelan bank that is – now that’s a real challenge! Last year Andrés Zakhour and I taxied it back from Choroni to Caracas and then flew most of the way to Rio Caribe then took another cab.
Great to see Juan de Dios Franceschi, a member of the family that owns San José, on British TV. He and Willie were wandering around San José’s own plantation, where the Franceschi ‘s are growing recovered criollos – many of which go into Domori’s Criollo range. These aren’t actually the beans Willie is buying though, the Franceschi’s buy these in from other areas of Venezuela.
All in all a good programme, which I actually enjoyed more than last year’s offering (even though Seventypercent was actually in the programme last year!) This time Willie is much more in line with the message of Seventypercent and the Academy of Chocolate, and this is the kind of boost fine chocolate really needs in the UK. I wish him every success – I’ve yet to actually sample the chocolate though.
On a final note, did anyone try to answer the More 4 pub quiz question in the advert break? The question was:
Chocolate was discovered:
A. by Galileo
B. in 1746
C. in Vienna
D. by the Mayans
The answer is more likely ‘none of the above’. New and older cacao finds are emerging all the time, dating the use of cacao further back in time with each find. The cacao of Central America was probably brought by humans from South America many thousands of years ago, so it’s quite likely that someone was using it before the Maya, and there’s no direct evidence at all to tell us that the Maya ‘discovered’ chocolate. Pedantic I know. I guess I’d lose that pub quiz.
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