Chocolate is what we are all about. Making the best, most tasty and beautiful chocolate we can!
Sourcing our chocolate
Great tasting chocolate is no respecter of ethics but wherever possible we source fair trade and sometimes organic. At the very least we make sure the supplier has a good ethical reputation.
These days nearly all our chocolate is fair trade.
We use a lot of different chocolate.
Chocolate Pallet
Like fine wine, a good quality chocolate is a complex blend of flavours with each and every chocolate being different. This is especially so for single origin (from a single country) and single estate chocolate where the soil, the climate and many other things makes taste of great distinction if not always quality.
There are three distinct ways of creating flavoured chocolate;
- Take a chocolate and overwhelming flavour it. You’ll get the flavour but not the complexity of the chocolate.
- Choose a good quality chocolate and use it as a standard base for all your flavours. Taste is good and you do get the subtleties of the chocolate. The chocolate will though go better with some flavours and not so well with others. Good for producer economics and creating a less expensive product.
- Balance the flavour required with the best chocolate for the job using a chocolate pallet; a range of different chocolates from different sources and parts of the world. This guarantees the best flavour/chocolate balance and you should always be able to taste the richness and distinctiveness of the chocolate in harmony with the flavour. Produces the kind of taste and flavour that fine wine tasters eulogise about with comments such as "a long peppery flavour with a finish of raspberry and blackcurrant".
Sue always, always chooses the third method. Slightly more expensive but well worth the effort!