Chocolate for Christmas: Craft vs Big Chocolate – Event Recap

As part of our Conversations Around The Cookery School Table series, on Monday 21st October we brought together a panel of experts to discuss chocolate at Christmas.  We introduced you to craft producers and retailers of specialty or artisanal chocolate who have very different goals to the big, mass produced, highly sweetened chocolate brands that make up the majority of the chocolate consumed at Christmas.

Chocolate for Christmas Panel - Food Talk

A fascinating panel of expert speakers included – leading chocolatiers in the UK chocolate industry Chantal Coady & Paul Young. They were joined by two leading craft chocolate retailers Spencer Hyman – Co-founder and Chair of Chocolate at Cocoa Runners  & Nathan Coyte – UK Sales Lead at Original Beans Chocolate.

To round off UK Chocolate Week, our event was packed with chocolate enthusiasts and fellow experts. Chocolate Tour Guide and Chocolate Expert Jennifer Earle very kindly shared her thoughts on the panel in her excellent weekly newsletter. She said

I love live panel discussions where nothing is recorded, the panel speak freely and you learn interesting things. The Cookery School ones are always open to the public and are very inexpensive given you get some food as well.”

Craft Chocolate Panel

What is Craft Chocolate?

Jennifer  began with the problems of defining craft chocolate: “There is no formal definition but the generally agreed upon interpretation is that:

*  craft chocolate refers to chocolate made by people/companies who carefully source their beans for maximum flavour and ethics and then make chocolate with minimal ingredients, from the cocoa bean.

*  In craft dark chocolate the only ingredients should be cocoa beans (without their shell) and sugar, sometimes with the addition of more cocoa butter than already present in the beans in the bar.

*  Sunflower lecithin is an acceptable but less common – and less welcome / necessary – ingredient. Soy lecithin used to be acceptable but is being phased out (in the case of an early pioneer of the craft chocolate, the Grenada Chocolate Company) or has already been removed. 

*  Milk chocolate should only have milk powder as an additional ingredient m. You will not see vanilla or vanillin (or some variant) in craft chocolate unless it is a flavoured bar, as described on the packaging.”

Here’s what was said on craft chocolate:

*  According to Spencer Hyman of Cocoa Runners, the best way to get people to start eating craft chocolate and fewer UPFs is to help people pay more attention to flavour. We need to make flavour part of our cultural expectation and language.

*  Taste is only the base senses and is picked up within a tenth of a second. Flavour can take 4-5 seconds to experience and requires our sense of smell to get involved too (this includes through the retro-nasal passage from our mouth, past our nose to our brain).

*  UPFs are very short on flavour. There is never complexity or length to a UPF. It’s short and intense and therefore leads us to repeat the experience to get that dopamine hit again.

*  We also often eat too quickly to even notice flavour that is in a food. Perhaps we’re conditioned to do this because of UPFs that only deliver taste in those first few milliseconds?

Tony’s Chocolonely is not paying enough to really move the needle on problems in the cocoa supply chain.

* According to Nathan from Original Beans, the higher prices in cocoa this year allowed some farmers in South and Central America to consider investing in their farms, families and communities for the first time. That sentence feels bittersweet. Only now?

*  The high prices did not translate to higher income for farmers in West Africa due to lower yield and government involvement. It was the lower yield from weather and plant diseases that was, in part, the cause of the price spike.

*  There is still a child labour problem, specifically children that could and should be in school, but are working on farms that do not belong to their family. This is a symptom of not paying enough for chocolate/cocoa.

*  There is no way to know if enslaved labour is not occurring unless you are paying for people on the ground. said Chantal Coady . It is particularly a problem on the border of Cote d’Ivoire and Congo where the border is “leaky”. All of the craft chocolate makers I support with mentions in this newsletter buy from farms where they, or the organisation they buy from, know the farmers well and they know that there is no slave labour on the farm. It is difficult to buy good quality beans to make award-winning chocolate unless you have people regularly on the farms supervising the fermentation process. They are therefore privy to who is picking the cacao, too.

*  Some studies show that the industrialised process of making chocolate destroys the fibre in chocolate, making it less bioavailable.

*  Paul Young explained that Dutching /alkalising cocoa also decreases the polyphenols in chocolate and chocolate products.

*  Most confectionery chocolate also includes emulsifiers and other preservatives which, in some studies, show a negative effect on the gut microbiome. Apparently sunflower lecithin is an exception to this. It is made by pressing sunflower seeds (a natural extraction vs chemical for soy lecithin) and has been shown to have a positive effect on heart health.

Jennifer loved the Chocolate Mousse made with Original Beans and Olive Oil served at the end of the evening which  she photographed above.

Join our next Conversations event – All I want for Christmas is Artisan Cheese:

Our next event is all about buying and serving artisan cheese for Christmas and is on Monday 25th November. See here for tickets.

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Events