We won 4 gold awards at the 2017 International Chocolate Awards held on June 27th in New York.

We won gold for

Gianduia – Dark Hazelnut

Gran Blanco – Peru 66%

Milk Hazelnut Log

and gold for the Peru bar as Chocolate Maker

We also received Bean to Bar Chocolatier Award.

We couldn’t be more happy with our recent success. Thank you for the support!!

We are thrilled with winning Gold in the Flavoured Dark Chocolate category of the 2017 AoC Awards. We won gold for our Gianduia – Dark Hazelnut bar.

And we picked up two silvers for

Gran Blanco – Peru

Acul du Nord – Haiti

Thank you for supporting us!!

I have made a blog post about the journey to get the chocolate out to you. It was quite a challenge and took ways longer than we imagined, but we had to get it right. Love to hear your feedback about it.

This could be our best chocolate yet so we would love to hear the response from you. Its 68% which some would think as sweet because its under 70%, but its all flavour, rich and dark with notes of Butterscotch and fresh date, absolutely delicious. We only got a few sack of this cacao from Uncommon Cacao but we hope to continue with it.

You will notice we have modified the package too, with a lovely gradient to bring some colour to the pack.

This cacao is expensive stuff, but we are offering the bars at the same price as the others, get yours now!!

To do a test roast I use a normal kitchen convection oven, spread the beans out on thin oven trays one bean deep, around 500 grams. I preheat the oven to around 180 and put the beans in with a thermometer to watch the temperature.

That seems to have worked for the last couple of years, and still does. But what made this bean challenging is that the flavours we found when roasting in the small oven weren’t there when we put the beans through the big roaster, and each sample roast/batch came out different. We certainly found some lovely flavours in the samples but trying to replicate it on a larger scale was like herding cats. I had to be very methodical in my note taking and recording of the processing so I knew exactly where the changes were being created but that didn’t really help either. I started thinking this is simply one of those beans that has a mind of its own.

The whole process was taking ages because we found the chocolate was changing day by day after it was made, at the beginning of the week a sample tasted banana, cinnamon. By the end of the week the same sample had changed to coconut. Was it the chocolate or was it our palate that was changing?

Even the timing of the sugar was making a significant difference. If the sugar went in late the chocolate was mellow, if the sugar went in shortly after the nibs the chocolate seemed to retain more intensity. The amount of cocoa butter we used was fiddled with as well. The cocoa solids it the chocolate ended up being 67.5%, how ridiculous is that? We rounded it up on the package.

The main factor was definitely the roasting. Slight changes in the roasting were making significant changes in the chocolate. Simply warming up the roaster vs putting the beans in a cold roaster made all the difference. We got the best results from putting the beans in cold and using a very low flame to bring the temperature up slowly, this flies in the face of convention where beans require strong heat for a short time, mainly to vaporise any moisture in the bean and puff the shell away from the nib, we didn’t have that luxury with the Haiti, we were basically warming them up slowly, causing the water vapour to express gradually. We started calling the chocolate Voodoo Chocolate.

What I love about this is it has got me thinking how these changes to process might affect our other beans, I’ll be tinkering away with it in the coming months, seeing if I can nuance out some interesting flavours from our existing range. We also have Bolivia and Guatemala to test and one other exciting addition I won’t mention now.

Enjoy!

Rather than rant on endlessly I’ll make short blogs about the things I find on a regular basis that “float my boat”. There’s quite a bit to keep my boat afloat in chocolate making, so we should have plenty of material to play with.

Green Stuff

This week I took a photo of the water I collect in the dehumidifier in the grinding room, where the nibs go into grinders and grind continuously for up to 4 days. It had this beautiful aquamarine colour, and while it looks delicious I can guarantee you its not (I had to have a wee taste and nearly died).

This mysterious liquid answers some questions about why we Conch.

Conching is a process where heated chocolate is agitated under shear force to round out the tiny particles of cocoa, it coats them in cocoa butter, and expresses off any volatile acids in the beans. The process gets its name from the shape of the first machines developed by Rudolph Lindt that were shaped like the seashell, or conch. The acids are remnants of the fermentation process (that’ll be a blog on its own one day), mainly acetic acid. These acids are simply evaporated off by the heat and constant agitation, if we don’t conch the chocolate will be bitter and acidic.

In our process we don’t use a separate machine to conch (like most industrials do) we simply run the grinders for longer and allow the acids to naturally evaporate off, (which is why it takes us 4 days to make a batch compared with hours using high-tech machines). I run a dehumidifier running in our grinding room to keep the air as dry as possible, as the dehumidifier is condensing and collecting the water vapour it is also collecting the acids, hence the discoloured water. Now we wouldn’t want this ending up in the chocolate would we!

Cheers Rudolph!! Love your work.

Check our what Simon has to say on his Instagram page here

MOTHERS DAY IS SORTED!

We have lovely little cards available to send to your Mum along with a box of NZ finest chocolate. We will hand-write your message to Mum on the card. Send Mum some chocolate and a personalised card this year and you don’t even need to leave the house, perfect.

Forget Whittaker’s and Cadbury’s there is a hot new chocolate maker on the block.

Hogarth Craft Chocolate is a boutique chocolate maker based in Nelson which hand crafts chocolate starting with a raw cacao bean and finishing with a tablet of deliciousness.

Karl and Marina Hogarth have been selling their handcrafted chocolate at the Nelson market for a while now but have recently started selling their premium product through retail outlets. These chocolates aren’t flavoured with caramel, peppermint, peanut butter or other additives, they are simply single origin cacao beans made into chocolate with different levels of pure cacao, each has a distinctive flavour that reflects its origins.

The 72 per cent dark chocolate from Venezuela for example has subtle flavours of tobacco and a fresh, almost juicy aftertaste while the Conacado bean from the Dominican Republic, used to produce the 75 per cent chocolate, has quite distinctive tangy mandarin citrus and toffee flavours.

Let’s deal with the cost upfront – not cheap at $14 about 65 grams of chocolate – it definitely sits in the premium chocolate treat market and that is where it deserves to be.

Last week I visited Karl and Marina to find out what makes their chocolate so special.

While Marina was working with a photographer creating wonderful images of their products, Karl showed me the chocolate-making process from beginning to end, including tasting raw cacao beans, freshly ground cacao nibs (the middle bit of the bean that becomes chocolate) and dipping a gloved hand into liquid chocolate going through various stages of the production process.

I got to taste some partially processed, very special chocolate, made from rare white beans called porcelana that tastes like truffles and if this small sample of beans sent to Karl were to be fully processed it would sell for about $25 for about 65gms. It won’t be on the market anytime soon so I felt very privileged to taste a treat like this.

The thing that I find really interesting and inspiring is that Karl Hogarth left school when he was 16 and went to sea fishing for Sealord back in the 80s. He became a skipper at the young age of 26 for another company and had “a few escapades around New Zealand, Australia and South Africa before I decided I wanted to do something different”.

He gave up fishing in 2003 and went to NMIT where he completed a diploma in business and then to Victoria University where he did a bachelor of commerce in marketing and commercial law.

“I came out thinking I would be the most employable person in the world but couldn’t get a job. Who wants a 30-plus year old ex-fisherman with a couple of degrees and not much experience. So I went travelling. What was going to be a month in Bali surfing ended up being a year travelling from the bottom of South America to Mexico.”

While chocolate was to feature in his future – in the whole time he travelled in countries that grow cacao, he never visited a cacao farm.

So how did he get into making chocolate?

“It started with a trip to South America in 2009 where I came across chocolate in Guatemala that was made by the Mayan. It was pure cacao beans made with little panela (evaporated cane juice) and was the first time I realised how good chocolate could taste when it is handcrafted using the very best ingredients rather than produced on a huge commercial scale in a style designed for the mass market and as much profit as possible.

“As I continued the trip, I continued tasting chocolate and read about guys in the US making chocolate and thought ‘what a great way to make a living’.”

He met Marina, who has a background in marketing and was head of PR for Converse Argentina when they met in Buenos Aires, and they lived in Argentina for a year before they came back to New Zealand and started a family.

“I found some work going back to sea but with kids I was looking for a way to stay at home and this little chocolate making seed was growing in my mind.”

Karl and Marina bought a little bag of cacao at an organic shop in Golden Bay and started working out how to turn it into chocolate.

“Not overly successful the first time” says Karl.

But after more research he found an online forum of people making chocolate at home and found out the machinery he needed was available in Singapore, where he travelled regularly for work at the time. That was the beginning of an exciting new future for the Hogarth family.

Hogarth Craft Chocolate sources the highest quality cacao beans from around the world to create small batches of chocolate using traditional techniques. From “Bean to Bar” means Hogarth’s sort, roast, crush and classify, winnow, grind and conche, age, melt, temper, mold, and wrap their hand crafted chocolates. Each bar is literally wrapped by hand.

As their website says: “Our process uses minimal ingredients and is focused on preserving the natural flavours within the cacao to bring fine and exquisite chocolate.”

They source five types of raw cacao beans, each with distinctive flavour profiles, direct from reliable plantations and from co-operatives via TradeAid.

However, this is just the beginning for this premium artisan producer. Karl and Marina have a range of things they are working with and trialling, they have plans to produce gianduja which is an Italian chocolate made with hazelnuts. They have bought the entire next harvest from a local hazelnut orchard.

As Karl says: “In the craft world, makers focus on making great products as well as they can, not as cheaply as they can. We are bean to bar chocolate makers so we focus on very high quality cacao, rather than cheap bulk beans. With a focus on the best quality beans with the best flavours we don’t need to add any flavouring to the chocolate, the cacao is all that is needed.”

Hogarth Craft Chocolate is already fielding calls from the US and the UK after just three month’s commercial production. The rest of the world is already discovering this wonderful Nelson producer and their handcrafted products, it is time you did too.

www.hogarthchocolate.co.nz

Wine pick

Blackenbrook Nelson Sauvignon Blanc 2015 RRP$19

This Sauvignon Blanc has bright, fresh flavours with a certain purity we have come to expect from Blackenbrook. Ripe melon, apricots, passionfruit, zesty green capsicum and firm lime characters dominate the flavours while the ripe acidity leaves a wonderful juiciness in the long finish. Perfect summer drinking.

– Stuff