Martin Christy ready to taste a 70% chocolate bar

Martin Christy, Sevent%’s editor and founder, is one of the world’s leading bean-to-bar chocolate experts. Ten years ago, a music producer trained in IT, Martin founded the one of the first websites to specialise in fine chocolate. Because of his obsession with fine chocolate, he began a journey that took him to cacao-growing countries, put him in touch with fine chocolate makers and led him to an exploration of the connections between these worlds. He tells his story to Susana Cárdenas Overstall.

Beginnings

grew up eating bad English chocolate”, says Martin Christy as we are about to have a coffee on Upper Street in Islington. Martin orders a cappuccino and he asks the waiter not to add chocolate powder on the top, as he takes a bar of dark chocolate from his bag and stirs in a few flakes to his coffee himself. Martin Christy was born at home in Slough, Berkshire, just under the famous chimney of the Horlicks factory. Maybe the morning he was born, the wind was blowing in the right direction and he was caught by the smell of chocolate, as the Mars factory lay just half a mile away from his parent’s house. Perhaps this had a strong effect on him. He grew up though in the North of Birmingham, an area he calls ‘Cadbury country’.

We are about to have a long conversation on how he got involved in this passionate world of chocolate. He explains that at some point in his life, he became vegetarian and more interested in the sourcing of food and what was behind it.

Discovering Guanaja

One day, while he was foodie shopping at Harrods’ confectionery department, he discovered French chocolate maker Valrhona. “I was reading the package and I said to myself :I have to try this”. The first bar he bought was Guanaja, which was a blend of cacao from Caribbean Criollo named after the first encounter Europeans had with cacao. Valrhona did not choose the name for the cacao source, they chose it for the story. Guanja was one of the Valrhona “Grand Cru” chocolates, created in 1987 (followed by Caraïbe with cacao from Dominican Republic and Manjari, from Madagascar). These were first made only as couverture cooking chocolate, but around 1991 were launched to the public as eating bars. Before this, there were no origin bars in the UK and the concept of the “Grand Cru” origin chocolate bar simply did not exist. (It took this long for someone to realise that this chocolate was far better than anything else.)

This was all very new for Martin.

Not long after this, he discovered some single origin bars which Bonnar had been making since 1910. Later, he discovered Michael Cluizel and then Rococo, which was the only good quality chocolatier in London. “It was a big deal to go to King’s Road and try all the different flavours in little sample trays”.

A world of cacao and chocolate

In 1999, Martin started a web design consultancy with some friends, but when the dot-com bubble burst, work was scarce and the company closed down. During this time, he was getting more and more into dark chocolate. He became obsessed with it and decided to build Seventypercent.com as a test website. He designed the website as an extension of his hobby without knowing that it would be like opening a Pandora’s chocolate box.

He started reviewing bars: Guanajo, Michel Cluizel, Lindt 70% and that was almost it. It was difficult to find new bars to review. All of a sudden, people started sending him chocolate to review. He had a forum where aficionados could discuss dark chocolate.

The New Taste of Chocolate

Lourdes Delgado & Maricel Presilla in Peru

An epiphanal moment for him came in 2003, when he was reading the first edition of American chef, Maricel Presilla’s book “New Taste of Chocolate”. Then, he fully understood what vast and complicated subjects chocolate and cacao were. It was time to travel to the source.

Cuban-American writer Maricel Presilla and a friend of Martin’s recalls, “Martin and I were left alone on a bumpy three-hour trip to Alto el Sol in Peru to see suspected Amazonian cacao which ended up being CCN-51. Sharing the back of a pickup truck, clinging onto each other for dear life, while trying to take pictures of our surroundings, I felt I had found someone I could trust, respect and whose friendship I could enjoy. He has a wicked, understated sense of humour that made me laugh – the yin to my “in-your-face” Caribbean yan – and he was so solemnly serious about cacao and high quality chocolate. This is a man after my own heart, I said to myself”.

Martin began to realise that there is a big gap between consumers and growers, that nobody – including himself – really understood both worlds: the worlds of cacao and chocolate. For a long time, most Europeans and Americans who worked with chocolate had no idea about its origin and the taste of cacao in the farm. So Seventy% started playing a crucial role in connecting people and helping consumers better understand the difference between fine chocolate, made of fine cacao, and commercial chocolate made from bulk cocoa.

Martin Christy and Lourdes Delgado sampling liquor in Piura, Peru

As Lourdes Delgado, an Ecuadorian cacao producer and Arriba Nacional endorser explains, “When I knew about Seventy%, I got in contact with Martin and agreed to meet up in London. I saw him as the fine chocolate evangelist who goes around the world converting people about a better understanding of how fine chocolate should be made and the history behind a chocolate bar”.

“Through his website he has done an amazing job of opening up the world of fine chocolate to consumers, helping its growth and development. He has also done wonders for introducing small chocolate makers to the UK”, says London chocolatier William Curley.

Cacao futures

It seems that in ten years, many people have discovered the wonderful complexity of the cacao and its origins. Many have become chocolatiers, chocolate makers or enthusiasts. You can really see how people have developed a small interest into a passion.

Is this the reason why chocolate is so fascinating? I ask. “Chocolate has this dual nature, you can flavour your pudding with chocolate or cook with chocolate, you can also sculpt a person, build a cathedral or create a tribute Berlin Wall out of chocolate. As a food, chocolate is very unusual and enchanting and now this world of chocolate is becoming as complex and as enchanting as fine wine”.

Recovery and discovery

According to Frank Homann, founder of Xoco Gourmet, Martin´s contribution to the chocolate world is significant. “He has managed to organize and communicate the aspects of quality in high end dark chocolate. He is probably the only one to do a comprehensive job at that. Seventy% is clear and easy to use. A clear message is what the chocolate world needs in order to move forward in terms of quality. In this way, Martin is one of the early pioneers in the industry, one of those few who make a difference”.”Seventy% has focused on the sensorial journey. It is obvious that Martin has a passion. He cannot help it, and it becomes very easy to work with him because he is simply so very curious about the chocolate he has in front of him. “As a true “foodie” he enjoys it and can taste things we normal beings can only learn from”, says Frank.

Martin tells me “The really exciting thing is the journey of rediscovery that many chocolate makers are embarking on. Now with DNA evidence, we have the opportunity to discover tastes that no one has ever experienced before. We are reaching back to the original Mayan and Aztec cacao, back to days when refined, chocolate as we know it, did not exist. But now with our artisanal industrial techniques, we are creating a completely new world of flavour.”

“What I expected was going to be an innocent continuation of my love for chocolate into just something a little more sophisticated, actually turned into the beginning of a journey into this fantastic, complex and never ending world”, concludes Martin.

Trinitario cacao, Ecuador

he City of London. Round the corner from the Bank of England lies a tempting chocolatier. The board outside the shop says that “a chocolate business has existed in this place for 300 years”, going back to a time when chocolate was considered an elixir, an exotic beverage brought back from the Americas. “The first chance for the Spanish court to sample chocolate as drunk by the New World natives came with a delegation of Kekchi Maya Indians who arrived in 1544 bearing the sort of rich gifts they have given to their own overloads (…including 2,000 quetzal feathers and containers of beaten chocolate).

It is a grey, rainy day and the shadows of the buildings increase the darkness further. Strangely, the aroma of the chocolate from the shop takes me back to my childhood twenty years ago, to a bright, humid day in the tropics of South America. I give in to temptation and buy a box of chocolates: 15 truffles made out of fine cacao from Madagascar, Venezuela and Ecuador, a little something to indulge my friends later that night. And, while I select my chocolate variety, my memory drifts back to my father’s cacao Arriba Nacional plantation on his farm in Manabí, Ecuador.

The shop salesman reminds me that there are four more options to choose from before he is to serve a long queue of chocolate addicts patiently waiting in line for their fix. No one is able to resist the vast range of chocolate and very few customers could imagine the fascinatingly complex journey or transformation of a naïve cacao bean into an extravagant salt and caramel truffle.

Counter display at Paul A Young's Camden Passage shop

A few blocks away from St Paul’s Cathedral, a project officer at the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), Moisés Gómez, invites me for a coffee. It would be unthinkable for anyone belonging to the chocolate world to miss an opportunity to discuss this topic.

An old myth is that there are only three different types of cacao beans which are used in chocolate production: the “noble” Criollo, the common Forastero and a hybrid between the two, the Trinitario”.

Nowadays, according to a research called “Geographic and Genetic Population Differentiation of the Amazonian Chocolate Tree” made by Motamayor, Loor, Lachenaud, Da Silva, there are more than 10 different varieties of cacao: Amelonado, Contamama, Criollo, Curaray, Guiana, Iquitos, Maranon, Nacional, Nanay and Purus. Criollo was the predominant cocoa bean two hundred years ago but it became scarce after this, mainly because of the lack of resistance of this variety towards diseases. In fact, this was the variety of cacao that Europeans fell in love with. Perhaps, they felt mesmerized by the distinctive, complex taste, which can include flavours notes of nuts, cream, cherry and citrus.

From the plantation to the bar

Cacao growing in Colombia

When we talk about a journey, we should mention the harvest, fermentation and drying process. Here, the labour of the farmers is intrinsically relevant. “The pods are ready to harvest when they have reached their mature colour, which can be yellow, orange or red. The farmers separate the pod from the stem with a machete, and then crack the pod open with a special wooden slab so as not to cut the seeds.

The seeds are still attached and bound by a white pulp at the time of harvest and all of that material is placed in the fermentation container, which can be a wooden box, jute bag, or, less ideally, a plastic bucket. The beans should then ferment for three to seven days.

During this time, the pulp ferments and drains from the boxes and the full cacao flavour develops in the beans. Once the beans are fully fermented, they are spread out on a cement or wood drying surface, usually protected by a greenhouse-like sliding roof to protect them from rain, to fully dry out for a few days”, explains Claire Nicklin of Fundación Conservación y Desarrollo, in Quito, Ecuador.

Also, cacao is sometimes fermented on the ground, covered in banana leaves, or even hung in bags (and the liquid that comes off is used as vinegar).

Fermentation and drying

Bagging dried cacao, Ecuador

Even if all these processes and events come together perfectly, unless the cacao is properly fermented and dried, the cacao is not much better than the bulk cocoa that is sold by container load on the commodities market. Fermentation and drying is a long and arduous process for the farmer.

According to Moisés, there are two important harvests: the main one begins in October and ends in March. The second runs between July and September. An average farmer would own four hectares which would produce four sacks of fine cacao per hectare. For sure, money is not the main driver as each sack is bought by the cacao exporters for US$ 140. What Moisés explains is that growing cacao is a culture inherited by the farmers’ ancestors.

It is concerning to see many older farmers at the plantations talk about the business. Clearly, they are worried. According to Conservación y Desarrollo the average farmer is 44 years old. Interesting to note that the average age of a farmer in Ghana is about 67 – higher than the average life-expectancy of 60.

In the best of scenarios, farmers are beginning to receive better education and either becoming agronomists or working in white collar jobs in the cities. Often they migrate to do construction work in nearby urban areas.

The transformation into chocolate

As I look for the most appealing chocolate bar at the chocolatier, I wonder how long it takes to make a fine chocolate bar. I am aware that for decades, fine cacao from South America has been exported to European chocolate makers who gain the reputation for producing beautiful bars. But what is really behind all this?

Grenada Chocolate 71% – low roast gives a light burgundy sheen

According to the book “Cooking with chocolate“, edited by Frederic Bau of Ecole du Gran Chocolate Valrhona in 2011, there are five stages in transforming cacao into chocolate. This is how Valrhona make chocolate: “

Stage one: Roasting. The seeds are roasted at temperatures ranging from 120C-150C for a duration of 15 to 40 minutes.

Stage two: Crushing. Under the weight of crushing hammers, the beans are freed of their shells and are reduced to minute particles of just a small fraction of an inch.

Stage three: Grinding. The beans enter a mill to be finely pulverized. What comes out is a rough powder that melts in the mouth, it is called cacao paste, cacao liqueur, or cacao mass.

Stage four: Refining. The raw chocolate paste is reduced to fined particles when ground by five to seven rollers spaced out at various intervals, and which work at various speeds.

Stage five: Conching. It improves the texture of chocolate, bringing out all its aromatic force. In a vat at a temperature of 80C, the machine churns and agitates the chocolate paste continuously for one to three days”.

But how long should you conch?

Art Pollard of Amano Chocolate

Some chocolate makers tend to keep their conching times a secret. Others strongly believe that it is not a mechanical process that takes 72 hours as if that were a ‘magic number’. It is as if top chefs such as Fergus Henderson, Ferran Adria or Heston Blumenthal were to say that the secret of a perfect roast is three hours in the oven.

“At Amano, we conch our chocolate until it is finished. We do not have a set time. It is all done to taste and that is my job. I get to taste each and every batch when it is in the conch machine at regular intervals and have to make the right decisions. In my experience, there is a 30 second window between under-conched chocolate and when the chocolate is perfectly conched. There is also a window when it becomes over-conched. When the chocolate has finished conching, it is determined entirely by taste”, declares Art.

Break it, smell it, enjoy it!

There is a saying- do not judge a book by its cover. In this case, do not chose a chocolate bar only by its packaging. Inquire about its journey, its origin, its process and its chocolate maker. Afterwards, just indulge yourself with a piece of it.

How do you taste chocolate? Break off a small piece, smell it, chew it a little bit and slowly let it melt in your mouth. Try to focus on the flavour. You can expect to discover an array of floral and fruity notes. There’s also a chance that you will be transported back in time to the very first day you ever tasted chocolate.

The Paria Peninsula in south-America must be where chocoholics go to die. Since Columbus’s uneventful first landing here (he shipped out west in search of gold) the region has grown, harvested, and eaten chocolate in astonishing quantity. Shaped like a finger, pointing north from Venezuela, this slim stretch of land is banked from coast to coast with cocoa trees, peeking from the flanks of jungle.

Many varieties grow in abundance, but for gourmets there is one kind of cocoa worth the wealth of the New World. Criollo cacao is by far the most precious of cocoa species, and grows most prolifically in Paria – otherwise known as the “chocolate coast“.

A number of plantations still operate traditional methods to process the cocoa, making supplies of the precious bean integral to local economy. One such plantation is Hacienda Bukare, which has recently opened a small number of guest rooms for tourists interested in the process of growing chocolate.

A chocolate farm in the jungle?

As a certified chocoholic I’d had my own visions of what staying at a chocolate farm might be like. I pictured waking to a frothy cup of chocolate, photographing lush fields of cocoa, and chomping through bullion sized bars of chocolate. But sucking on raw cocoa beans, in the middle of the south-American jungle had not played a part in my prescience. Unlike coffee or tea, cocoa will only grow sheltered within dense thickets of jungle. And the best way to replicate this environment, quite simply, is to use the real thing.

“The cocoa plantation has been described as ‘green anarchy’”

So explains Billy Esser, the plantation owner, who has just cracked open a fresh pod, and scooped out the beans for me to taste. “The trees grow where they want to grow, and the pickers remember where each tree is when it’s time to harvest.” Chocolate plantations, it would seem, are more Indiana Jones, than Bridget.

Fresh from the pod, cocoa beans are coated in a sweet, creamy substance, tasting similar to mango. But the actual beans are bitter, and must undergo a lengthy process of drying and fermentation before they can be used for chocolate. The cocoa trees are small and ordinary looking, excepting the vivid purple-red pods which seem to have sprung fully-formed from the slender trunks. Whilst criollo cacao is usually too delicate to grow in abundance, here it is so endemic as to grow in backyards, and families sell their diminutive cocoa crops to local farmers.

Everyone’s in on it

Driving through the region, we pass impromptu villages of tin shacks with home-made signage for “Cocoa Criollo” every few metres. The green and red symbol of Criollo leaf and pod is displayed like a jaunty tattoo, on numerous shops and buildings. A small barn, barely large enough to keep a few horses, proudly brands itself a “cocoa factory”, with the characteristic leaf and pod painted cheerily on the exterior wall. As my jeep turns the corner, the dirt-track is suddenly pavemented with a brick-red swathe of cocoa beans – evidence of the “factory” production technique.

At the roadside two boys nonchalantly work the beans back and forth, allowing them maximum exposure to the sun. It seems the entire economical psyche of this small region is bound-up in the illustrious lure of cocoa. Almost every other home has a fistful of beans drying on the front-porch, and shops stack dark bullion-slabs of chocolate alongside maize, potato-chips, and sticky Coca Cola.

More on the family run Hacienda Bukare

Hacienda Bukare is by no means the largest on the peninsula, but Billy’s entrepreneurial talents have added a small factory to the successful guestrooms and tours. The business employs a handful of locals to process the harvested beans, and transform them into a variety of chocolate products.

Waving goodbye to ‘family chocolate’

The entire Esser family is involved in producing new varieties of chocolate, and as a guest I become necessarily caught up in the tasting process. On arrival I’m presented with an austere china cup containing, quite simply, the best hot-chocolate I’ve ever tasted. It’s so good that I realise, with a certain sad resignation, I have permanently problematised my relationship with Galaxy chocolate.

Billy Esser takes a tutorial at Bukare

More than a business, it’s a way of life..

When not involved in production, it is Billy’s father (also named Billy), who conducts guided tours amongst the flowering cocoa groves. But excepting the small flow of tourists through the farm’s four guest rooms, life for the family is traditional – including the total pervasion of cacao.

Hot or cold chocolate drinks are taken for breakfast, for afternoon relaxation, or for medicinal purposes. Cocoa butter is used to treat every burn or scratch, and criollo trees lean into the balconies, like swaying interlopers. Even the surrounding region boasts a cuisine entirely indebted to the seductive scents of chocolate. If the peninsula made T-Shirts for tourists, they would probably read “I’ve been to Paria – Cadbury World eat your heart out”.

…for the whole community

The obsession stems partly from a pride in the type of cocoa grown here. Criollo cocoa is vaunted as the best flavoured cocoa, with the least bitterness. This tiny stretch of land accounts for five percent of the world’s cocoa production, almost all harvested by manual labour, and quite often by families. And one hundred percent of this output is transformed into superior or luxury chocolate. Whilst most English chocolate is made from hardier African breeds, this pure strain of cocoa is still highly prized as the “original” cacao – the only variety known to chocolate’s first consumers, the Aztecs and Maya.

Now that’s what I call a chocolate tasting

The culmination of the Bukare chocolate tour is an involved tasting session within the hacienda, where chocolate in all its glorious forms is slurped and savoured. Whilst not an experience for calorie counters (even Dr Atkins would take a dim view), for me this is the highlight of the day.

Numerous slabs of rich cocoa are washed down with Bukare’s signature chocolate drink. Raw cocoa beans are chewed, fragrant cocoa butter sampled, and dishes of fresh mango with chocolate are wheeled out from the kitchen. At the end of the tasting session, when the other guests leave, Billy makes me an offer I can’t refuse

“Catherine. Would you like some more chocolate?”

And with the camaraderie of co-conspirators, we sip coffee sweetened with a thick spoon of chocolate, and polish off the remains of the tasting session.

If you can drag yourself away from the chocolate

There is plenty to do in Paria besides eat chocolate, with thermal springs, beaches and buffalo ranches to tempt guests away from the plantations. The beaches are thought to be some of the best in the world, and certainly the most exalted in Venezuela. And the thermal-spas are a great way to relax even further into the south-American pace of life. But as a guest at the hacienda I am also party to the daily chocolate innovations, which leaves me quite content to laze in a hammock, tasting yet another variant of chocolate mango. Call me unimaginative, but I did come here to eat chocolate. Perhaps there’s room for Bridget Jones after all.