Welcome to our new website, which is finally here, albeit in a not totally finished format. Hopefully you’ll agree it’s a huge improvement and will bear with us while we catch up with all the technical tweaking needed to deliver the site we want, and we hope you’ll find easier to use and more appealing.

The new design is just the beginning. We still need to port the forum to the new format and a new software platform. Not only will this bring the old forum up to date, it will also let all our users loose on the rest of the site, and we look forward to blog contributions and comments from you soon. There’s a techy challenge involved though, so we’ll probably need to get Chocolate Week out of the way first. Please not that while the old forum sits and waits for its upgrade, we’re not accepting new registrations at the moment – we were just getting an uncontrollable amount of spam that the old ‘Snitz’ software just couldn’t handle.

Another big upgrade is bringing the review section – the old ‘Chocopaedia’ – into the new WordPress platform. This is not such a big job, but it’s still going to take some programming effort and data transfer. This is also going to take a little while, but we hope soon to a nice shiney new review section, along with new reviews and new reviewers, and we’ll be recruiting new volunteers in the near future as well.

Please let us know any comments or thoughts about the site, and look out for more changes and improvements hopefully appearing fast and furiously!

For Chocolate Week 2009,   Seventypercent.com focuses on fine chocolate made in countries that grow cacao, on new weird an wonderful drink, food and chocolate matches and also announces its new Origin Chocolate Destination partnership with a boutique hotel in Ilfracombe.

Most chocolate we eat is made in the developed world from commodity beans grown in the tropics. Now cacao producing countries are fighting back, and in a series of tastings with Melt Chocolates of Notting Hill, Seventypercent will feature Pacari from Ecuador and Santander from Colombia in Chocolate Week.

Wine, rum, beer – they’ve all been matched with chocolate, but how far can you go? Seventypercent takes things to the limits with some amazing results in a joint fine chocolate and farmhouse cheese matching with South Kensington cheese emporium La Cave à Fromage.

Fine chocolate in the UK can be a bit London biased, so in a mission to take the origin chocolate message all around the UK, Seventypercent are announcing in Chocolate Week a new partnership with family-friendly Ilfracombe boutique hotel, The Elmfield. Offering gourmet standard food, The Elmfield is an excellent location to start our first Origin Chocolate Destination, with sampling and menu specials during Chocolate Week and our first Origin Chocolate Weekend coming soon.

As well as chocolate, Duffy and I share another interest – Formula 1. Though when I say ’share an interest’, I mean in my case watching F1 on the telly from the sofa, and in Duffy’s case, spending most of his career working in the motor racing industry.

Given that rather unfair advantage for Duffy, it probably wasn’t the best idea of mine to take up Duffy’s F1 choc bar challenge.

From an email from Duffy:

“I have been reading all the so-called motor-racing experts trying to predict the season and realised that they have absolutely no idea what will happen. The best they can come up with is that Ferrari, McLaren, Red Bull and possibly Mercedes will be near the top and that Virgin, Lotus and HRT won’t.

So I figured we might enjoy a little bet. On a race-by-race basis we each pick a driver and if my pick beats your pick you owe me a bar of chocolate. Yours beats mine and I owe you a bar. We can settle up at season end. We alternate first picks so you can go first…

You have until Sunday morning to accept this challenge but be warned – with the regulation changes good qualifying pace is unlikely to completely translate to good race pace…”

So, I’ve foolishly agreed to the bet, and am now stocking up 19 chocolate bars to hand over at the end of the season, but hoping I might get lucky and end up with a few Red Star Chocolate bars as well.

We’ll be recording our picks in comments to this post, and you’re all welcome to join in, though I’m not taking on any more chocolate bar bets though – not sure I can afford to take on any more losses.

Duffy Sheardown monitors his chocolate refiner

Red Star chocolate

Today Kate Johns (of Chocolate Week and Nudge PR) and I made our way up to the North East of England, to Cleethorpes. This traditional English seaside town is the unlikely home of the UK’s second bean to bar fine chocolate maker, Red Star Chocolate.

Despite the impression some British chocolate companies like to give, until very recently no one in the UK was making fine chocolate directly from cacao. In fact, probably Cadburys were the only company in Britain making any kind of chocolate from the bean.

That all changed when Willie Harcourt-Cooze came along, in a big TV media splash launching ‘Willie’s Delectable’ chocolate and finally putting Britain on the fine chocolate maker’s map.

Willie is now joined by another new artisanal chocolate maker, Duffy Sheardown. Duffy has just made his first batch of commercial chocolate, using beans from Calceta, Ecuador. These were provided by Jorge Felix and his Italian based World Foods company. Calceta is Jorge’s ancestral town in Manabi province, Ecuador and home to some of the finest cacao I’ve tasted in Ecuador. (I was lucky enough to visit with Jorge during a visit to Ecuador last June.)

Racing formula

Duffy was first inspired to start making chocolate a few years ago, when he heard that “Cadburys was the only company in the UK making chocolate from beans”. Duffy’s background is in motor racing, but that sounded like a challenge he couldn’t resist, and he began to wonder exactly how hard it would be to make your own chocolate.

Adding sugar slowly controls the temperature

A few years later and the result is a modest and inexpensive setup in a small industrial unit in Cleethorpes. Here Duffy has proved that making chocolate is both easy in principle, and difficult in the detail.

From the samples we’ve tasted though, Duffy has shown it’s possible to make a pretty good quality of chocolate without building a million dollar factory.

On the other hand, as Duffy tells us, while there’s plenty of help out there for the budding chocolate maker, some things you just have to work out for yourself, such exactly what is the best temperature to conche at.

Chocolate making is a progressive art. The best producers are constantly trying to improve their quality, tweaking recipes and adapting their machinery. It’s early days for Duffy, but he takes an approach he picked up from his motor sports days – change only one thing at a time, then if the result is an improvement (or negative), you know what made the difference.

Duffy’s chocolate making equipment may not exactly be high end, but he is making good use of the most important tool available to any chocolate maker – taste. For example, his approach to roasting – keep tasting the cacao every few minutes until it stops tasting better.

Too many chocolate makers get lost in technical details and sophisticated quality control tests and expensive equipment, while ignoring basics, like how the cacao or chocolate tastes at every stage of production. Without this kind of approach, the results are rarely good.

Sources

Duffy with Calceta cacao bags

As ever, there’s a simple message in Duffy’s cacao sources, common to good chocolate makers and chefs alike – choice of ingredients.

If you start with good ingredients and treat them with respect, you will usually have a good result.

As well as Jorge Felix’s single origin Calceta from Ecuador, Duffy is experimenting with cacao from Brazil and Panama, and also finishing liquor from a number of other sources, including Madagascar, which from what we tasted turned into a pretty good chocolate.

We tried all of these in various percentages in both dark and milk. As these were test batches, the results were mixed, but a few really stood out, like the Madagascar milk.

While we were at Duffy’s factory, he was finishing some Peruvian liquor into chocolate, and from the sample we tried off the refiner, this could turn into a pretty good chocolate too.

Local chocolate

Duffy is very much about making chocolate for his local market, aiming at local retailers and local shows and fairs as his company gets going.

Perhaps here he could be the harbinger of a new trend – for local, micro-brewery type chocolate makers.

It was be easy to imagine that in a few years time the UK would have a handful of small chocolate makers spread around the country, all with some national presence but grounded in their local economy.

Red Star's Indian made refiner/conche

This is a model that seems to be taking hold in the US and just starting in Italy.

There’s no doubt though that if Duffy can keep going in the right direction and maintain his flavour based approach, you could well be seeing his chocolate on sale in high end chocolate emporiums and national outlets soon.

It’s very likely that the first, commercial, eating chocolate bar was a British invention, made first by Fry’s then Cadburys.

It’s been a long wait, but we finally have another two independent chocolate makers in the UK, this time working with fine beans from around the world.

Red Star Chocolate is a very welcome addition to the fine chocolate world.

As usual with most BBC programmes featuring fine chocolate, my hopes of something informative are dashed. The BBC have a misinformed policy of not naming brands in their programmes. (Unless the company is larger enough to turn their products into ‘news’, so Cadburys Creme Eggs are ok to feature in the main evening news, apparently).

This policy is understandable if we’re talking Coke or Nike or Kellogs. It doesn’t make much sense for fine chocolate though. In fact, it completely blurs the message and in this case, the point of the programme.

Take the mousse, the first recipe. Only three ingredients are needed – chocolate, sugar, eggs. Blanc tells us “It is actually the quality of the chocolate that is very, very important … if you have a great chocolate, you have a great chocolate mousse.” I absolutely agree, the difference is enormous.

Does choice of ingredients matter?

Do we get to find out what the chocolate Blanc is using is? No, of course not. (Though the sharp-eyed will have spotted ‘Valrhona’ on some of the blocks – which most of the time are childishly turned upside-down.) Raymond Blanc is clearly a Valrhona man, but we’d never find that out without recognising the chocolate or being very canny with our pause buttons.

Do we get any clue what makes the quality of chocolate or how to choose it? No, of course not. Couldn’t we have at least been told it was French?

If we were being shown a matching wine to go with the mousse, we’d be told the region, vinyard, vintage. Here, nothing. We just get the extremely patronising “There are hundreds of varieties of chocolate on the market, and for Raymond, 100% dark chocolate is irresistible”. Is it? Any 100%? Paste chocolate, as Valrhona would call it, has to be pretty good to be eaten at 100%. Manjari can just about do it. That’s not true of many others.

I feel sorry for Raymond giving his staff Dairy Milk. If you can’t win people over with Manjari 64%, then you’re definitely doing something wrong. Or was that ‘reality’ editing?

We get to the Delice. “For this, Raymond’s using a dark chocolate with seventy per cent cocoa solids” we’re told in the sexiest drama-doc voice possible, as if this is somehow a sign of quality or is going to give viewers any idea of how to create this recipe. Percentage is not a sign of quality in chocolate. (For those who do want to know, the chocolate he used is almost certainly Valrhona Guanaja.)

Brands matter

Fine chocolate IS about the brands, and it’s about the artisans behind those brands. It’s not about random bulk packaged chocolate bought from supermarkets. The taste is completely different.

So a whole programme of chocolate recipes from a great chef, with no hint at all allowed about how to choose the prime ingredient.

We’re told all the time how easy these recipes are. Well, maybe, but they’re sure not going to taste very good if you’ve just popped down to Lidl and spent £0.89p on on 100gs of unbranded 70% ‘dark’ chocolate.

By the end we’re at William Curley’s Richmond shop – great of course to see Raymond and William together. Knowing William, I am pretty sure he will have talked about the quality of chocolate he uses. (William exclusively uses Amedei). Obviously this is edited out.

We have a nice time in William’s kitchen, but no mention at all of ingredient quality, no mention of freshness. These are key to the modern chocolatier, choice of chocolate is king. No clue at all why William is one of the UKs best. Doing it ‘by hand’ is apparently enough according this programme.

It was good to see Blanc in action, but all we got was chocolate fudge.

I would like to be reassured by the BBC that next time I watch a wine programme, they’ll be no mention of the names of any vinyards or companies, no matter how prestigious. Or perhaps we could have a more grown up policy about fine chocolate?

Taste of Chocolate

Taste of Chocolate is our new series of tasting events bringing a whole new approach to the art of chocolate appreciation.

Fine chocolate is fast becoming as sophisticated as wine, yet we are conditioned to eat chocolate as a sweet snack with little chance of noticing its finer points.

These new events will help to unravel all those years of chocolate snacking by working through each of our chocolate senses one by one.

Rather than tell you what chocolate you should like, Taste of Chocolate gives you the tools to start you on your own journey towards becoming a chocolate connoisseur.

Through our courses and workshops we explore the gastranomic senses with a series of interactive modules, awakening and educating our palates along the way.

Two hour starter course

Our two hour starter course is suitable for beginners and connoisseurs alike. Using fun and engaging games and taste experiments we will awaken your chocolate senses.

We’ll take you through the basics of tasting chocolate and leave you with some simple steps that will allow you to quickly tell a good chocolate from a bad one and set you well on the way to becoming a connoisseur.

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

.

7.30pm-9.30pm, Thurs 16 Mar 2010
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society
London Members’ Rooms
19 Greville Street
London
EC1N 8SQ

Taste of Chocolate

Special date as part of The Chocolate Festival, Brighton and Brighton & Hove Food and Drink Festival.

Taste of Chocolate is our new series of tasting events bringing a whole new approach to the art of chocolate appreciation.

Fine chocolate is fast becoming as sophisticated as wine, yet we are conditioned to eat chocolate as a sweet snack with little chance of noticing its finer points. These new events will help to unravel all those years of chocolate snacking by working through each of our chocolate senses one by one.

Rather than tell you what chocolate you should like, Taste of Chocolate gives you the tools to start you on your own journey towards becoming a chocolate connoisseur.

Through our courses and workshops we explore the gastranomic senses with a series of interactive modules, awakening and educating our palates along the way.

Three hour starter course

Our extended three hour starter course is suitable for beginners and connoisseurs alike.  Using fun and engaging games and taste experiments we will awaken your chocolate senses.

We’ll take you through the basics of tasting chocolate and leave you with some simple steps that will allow you to quickly tell a good chocolate from a bad one and set you well on the way to becoming a connoisseur.

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

.

7.30pm-9.30pm, Sun 21 Mar 2010
myhotel brighton
17 Jubilee Street
Brighton
BN1 1GE
EC1N 8SQ

Chocolate making stages

The Connoisseurs Club is our new series of fine chocolate appreciation sessions for more advanced chocolate enthusiasts. These new events will give you a chance to share your passion for fine and origin chocolate with fellow enthusiasts and guests such as our official reviewers or industry specialists.

The event will be led by Seventypercent, the format though will be more informal than our regular tastings. We will be providing a selection of the best and most interesting chocolate at each event, but you will also be welcome to bring along any samples you have found for group discussion and tasting – no matter the quality.

Connoisseurs Club tastings will be a chance to try some of the latest samples from new and established chocolate makers – including works in progress, source ingredients like cacao, and will be an opportunity to experience the weird and wonderful in fine chocolate.

While beginners are welcome, we will be giving only the briefest of introductions into how to taste chocolate and will be going straight into tasting and comparing this month’s samples. As usual, there will also be a chance for a whisky and chocolate match at the end of the event.

(Please note: if you are bringing your own samples along for the event, please ensure they are fit for retail consumption and commercially available, unless otherwise agreed in advance. In general, unflavoured dark bars will be of the most interest).

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

.

7.30pm-9.30pm, Thurs 20 Apr 2010
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society
London Members’ Rooms
19 Greville Street
London
EC1N 8SQ

Art Pollard in a cacao plantation

Art Pollard of Amano

In a specially arranged last minute event, Art Pollard – the chocolate maker behind award winning US chocolate maker Amano – will be our featured guest at our February tasting.

Art will explain the philosophy of this new US chocolate maker, and will tell us how Amano went from kitchen samples to leading fine chocolate maker in just three years.

Amano already make one of the widest ranges of origin bars, and Art will take us through sampling their growing range of dark and milk chocolate and tell us about the sources of Amano’s cacao.

As usual, we’ll finish off with an optional dram of whisky with matching chocolate, or you can just stay around and chat with fellow chocolate enthusiasts.

Limited places are available for this short-notice event, so book your tickets soon. Price includes a free bar of Amano dark or milk chocolate to take away, worth £8.

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

7.30pm-9.30pm, Thurs 11 Feb 2010
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society
London Members’ Rooms
19 Greville Street
London
EC1N 8SQ

John Scharffenberger

The Academy of Chocolate presents:

An audience with John Scharffenberger

John Sharffenberger is paying one of his rare visits to London so this is a unique opportunity to meet him.

John Sharffenberger, together with his partner Robert Steinberg founded one of America’s first ‘artisan’ chocolate makers back in the early Nineties.

John started his professional life as a Californian wine maker and while Robert’s expertise was in medicine – a perfect combination to produce chocolate!

The Scharffen Berger chocolate company started in a ‘garage’ and concentrated on using cocoa beans from selected South American cocoa plantations that John developed with the ‘campesinos’.

In 2006 Hershey bought Scharffen Berger chocolate. Now John travels the cocoa growing world working with farmers to improve their stocks, their environments and their livelihoods.

Info

6.30PM WEDNESDAY 27TH JANUARY 2010

THE ARTS CLUB
40 Dover Street
London
W1S 4NP

TICKETS: £25

How to book:

Download and complete the attached booking form and return with a cheque to:

Academy of Chocolate, 53 Cavendish Road, London SW12 0BL

Cheques should be made payable to: ‘Academy of Chocolate’.

PLEASE NOTE: This event is run by the Academy of Chocolate, which has no commercial connection with Seventypercent.com. We’re just listing it to promote this great event.