The Lighter Side of Chocolate
Chocolate has always had something of a bad reputation. Overweight women often point the finger of blame at their “chocolate addictions”, dentists warn off the sweets and chocolates to prevent tooth decay, and dieticians shun it. But now the owners of small artisan chocolate company Honest Chocolate, Anthony Gird and Michael de Klerk, are taking a fresh approach to the art of chocolate making, and are hoping to dispel some of chocolate’s biggest criticism at the same time.
Anthony and Michael’s chocolate slabs and truffles are made entirely by hand, using traditional chocolate making techniques. This includes tempering the melted chocolate laboriously by hand on a granite table top. But while this is noteworthy in itself, it is not unique to other small scale chocolate makers in South Africa. Instead, what does differentiate the pair is the fact that the cocoa beans that they use in their chocolate are left completely raw. “Most chocolate makers will take the cocoa bean and roast it,” explains Michael. “They roast it for flavour, but it is also done to get rid of mould and to make storage easier.” Michael and Anthony, however, buy only superior quality cocoa beans from Ecuador. The flavour of these is already so good that they don’t need to be roasted. Unlike commercial chocolate companies, the true flavour of the bean in Honest Chocolate is also not masked by the addition of sugar, dairy, emulsifiers or preservatives.
Honest Chocolate prides itself on the fact that, other than the cocoa bean itself, the only additional ingredient in the slabs is agave nectar (a natural sweetener that is derived from a plant that grows wild in the Karoo), while the centre of their truffles contain cold-pressed organic coconut oil and freshly cut vanilla pod seeds to give them a rich creaminess. As a result, Honest Chocolate is suitable for diabetics, as well people who suffer from soya allergies and lactose intolerance.
So does that mean that Honest Chocolate is, for want a better word, “healthy”? “The cocoa bean is pretty healthy. It’s high in anti-oxidants and magnesium and is a mood enhancer,” explains Michael. “We use cold-pressed, organic coconut oil instead of dairy and we use fresh vanilla pods instead of vanilla essence. The agave nectar is a fructose, so it’s still a form of sugar, but it has a very low glycaemic index (GI), so it won’t spike your sugar levels. So yes, it is a healthy chocolate.”
It was, in fact, a mutual interest in healthy eating that led to the establishment of Honest Chocolate. Even though the two friends were living on separate continents (Anthony in Cape Town and Michael in London), they both decided to cut sugar out of their diets for health reasons. “Ant started making smoothies from raw cocoa, and then we went on holiday to New York together and met someone who makes raw chocolate there. Ant came back to Cape Town and started making raw chocolate and selling it at a stall in the market. Then I came back from London and began helping him out in between work,” explains Michael. At first the pair made their chocolate on a part-time basis, but as the popularity of it grew, it began to take up more of their time and about ten months ago the pair decided to turn their side business into a full time one.
It hasn’t been an easy road, however. “We started working from home, but neither of us had any money, so all of the money we made went straight into buying more stock. To temper chocolate you also need a cold room, but as we didn’t have an air con and it was summer, we were waking up at 02h00 when it was cool and trying to temper chocolate with all the windows open! Also, if you get a drop of water into the chocolate when you are tempering it, it gets ruined. So in the early stages, we went through times of having to throw away whole batches. And when you have no money, that’s really hard!”
Later, the pair rented a room from which to work and also managed to swap a batch of coconut oil for an old air conditioner. Proper chocolate making machinery is prohibitively expensive, so Michael and Anthony do everything by hand, including hand dipping every single one of their truffles. As if this wasn’t labour intensive enough, their deliberate choice to not use refined sugar or emulsifiers has also made the production process more difficult.
Their determination and hard work is finally starting to pay off, though. They currently stock about 20 shops in Cape Town, including Wellness Warehouse, as well as several shops in Gauteng. They are also in the process of lining up stockists for KwaZulu-Natal. At the end of August they opened their own shop in the heart of Cape Town, near the colourful suburb of Bo-Kaap. Here, lovers of chocolate can purchase their own Honest Chocolate, and peek through the window into the little kitchen behind to watch Anthony and Michael hard at work making it. Ideally, however, Michael and Anthony would like to grow their business to a stage where they can hire people to help them with the making of the chocolate in order to free them up to experiment more with different products and flavours – such as the maca flavour they currently make, which comes from a Peruvian super food and is said to improve one’s libido!
In the meantime, Michael and Anthony are just enjoying doing something that they love and watching others derive enjoyment from it too. “The satisfaction comes from making something yourself and then watching people’s faces as they enjoy it,” says Michael. The two also continue to strive to educate people about chocolate whenever they can: “That’s our big thing, is that we are trying to give chocolate a better name. People think that chocolate is bad for you and it’s totally not. It is everything else in chocolate, like the sugar and the preservatives, that’s bad for you. And our chocolate has none of that and only the good stuff.” So what are you waiting for? Pick up a slab or indulge in a decadent truffle or two – after all, it’s good for you!
For more information on Honest Artisan Chocolate, as well as a list of their stockists, visit http://www.honestchocolate.co.za/. Alternatively, pop in to visit Michael and Anthony at the Honest Chocolate shop at 66 Wale Street, Cape Town.
Chocolaty Goodness
Not only is Honest Artisan Chocolate free of preservatives, emulsifiers, sugar and dairy products – making it a guilt free treat – but it is also guilt free in terms of the planet and its people. All of the ingredients are from ethically sourced farms. This is particularly important in terms of the cocoa beans, as Michael explains: “The cocoa farms that we buy our beans from are paid really well. This also prevents them selling to huge companies that take over the land and replace the cocoa trees with palm oil and soy, mass produced crops that destroy the rainforests.” All of the ingredients used in Honest Chocolate – bar the agave nectar which is currently going through a certification process – have also been certified organic.
Story by Nicky Furniss
