An ode to chocolate and chocolatiers

It’s official. We are in the midst of a full-blown artisanal revolution. Words like raw, handmade, organic, and local take on new meaning when they’re attached to food, and our favourite vices suddenly don’t seem all that bad.

Another piece of chocolate? Sure, it’s bean to bar. A double espresso shot? Definitely, it’s single origin. More than a passing fad, it’s a movement, one that Bazaar applauds. In a special series over the next few months, you’ll meet the names behind the country’s hottest homegrown food businesses. The entrepreneurs who have turned local ingredients into bona fide stars that can rival their very best gourmet counterparts. And we start with dessert: Chocolate.

For those who don’t speak hipster or millennial, bean to bar is chocolate that has been produced entirely under one maker’s control. No mass production here—only visits to farmers who supply raw cocoa beans. These are then quality checked, cleaned, sorted, roasted, cracked, winnowed (de-shelled), and stone-ground to release cocoa butter. Once the sugar is added, the batch is aged, tempered, and moulded into the rectangular bars we know and love. We’ve handpicked three chocolatiers who commit to the whole process, from farm to finish.

Jane and Fabien Mason: Mason & Co, Auroville

An act of serendipity created Mason & Co, and we’re the ones that got lucky. Because where else would we go for a fix of organic, vegan chocolate bars and powders in peanut butter, espresso, roasted sesame, and coconut milk flavours?

“I was moving to Brazil to start a surf-and-yoga school and Pondicherry was only a pit stop to visit my yoga teacher,” says Sydney-born Jane Mason, who launched Mason & Co with her husband Fabien, in 2011, from their Auroville kitchen, “But once I got there [Brazil], something told me, I should go back,” and so she did.

A few months later, at the end of a dinner party at home, the raw food chef and chocolatier served a batch of her seriously dark, single origin, organic chocolate as dessert. “I used to experiment with it for personal consumption, being vegan and India offering no options. Also, any good, dark chocolate is vegan,” she asserts. One week later, a guest from the party knocked on the front door asking to buy some. Just like that, Mason & Co was born.

Fabien, who gave up a career in business to be a sound engineer and acoustician, stepped in to manage the economics of an enterprise that runs on small batches. From a two-room factory shop, the Masons and seven employees cook 10-100 kgs a week that yield anywhere between 200-2,000 bars. The pair’s attention to detail doesn’t stop with the high-grade, raw cacao they source from three organic farms in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka; they also marry it with organic palm sugar from north India before introducing pairings like peppermint and sweet nibs, chilli and cinnamon, and zesty orange.

There isn’t much by way of ingredients in the artfully spartan, brown paper packaged bars—just cacao and sugar. The very best in quality justifies the no-frills approach. If you happen to be visiting, drop Jane a mail to visit the factory or stop by the duo’s latest venture, a café called Bread & Chocolate, which they run with chef/baker Daniel Trulson from NYC. The four-month-old space, says Jane, germinated from the idea of a small bread and chocolate shop to a breakfast and lunch café overnight, with a food philosophy that is fresh and partially organic.

Available at Mason Chocolate and select retail outlets

David Belo and Angelika Anangnostou: Earth Loaf, Mysore

We can’t help but think of how Earth Loaf’s partners, David Belo and Angelika Anangnostou, have had a life that is, “like a box of chocolates”. Especially if you consider that David began his journey as a cocktail bartender before becoming an artisanal bread baker/pastry chef in the UK and studying healing arts, sacred geometry, and music in Mysore. Angelika, on the other hand, helmed London’s beloved 1930s-style speakeasy cocktail bar, Milk & Honey, for 14 years, while training to be a yoga teacher and alternative therapist, also in India. The two met at a bar in West London nine years ago and have been together since in all their endeavours, travels, and passion projects, the Mysore-based Earth Loaf included.

What do they offer? Single estate chocolate bars (dark chocolate, cacao nib and palmyra sugar, gondhoraj and apricot, and smoked salt and almond chocolate), cacao teas and infusions, raw cacao nibs, and two types of bonbons (chai masala and Tiramisu coffee cream). All made from the superfood of the century: Raw cacao. “As a chef, I respected the raw food movement because it meant retaining the highest nutrient value of most food, chocolate included,” says David.

Their company’s launch was as organic as the products they create—they chanced upon an organic farmer in Dakshina Kannada (a coastal district in Karnataka) in 2014 on one of their many trips to southern India, and the idea clicked. Days later, they flew to London to crowdfund a bean to bar business. A few months later, Earth Loaf emerged.

These days, the Cape Town-born and UK-educated David has taken a backseat on developing recipes, packaging, and mechanical engineering by stepping up as head chef and general manager. His British partner has moved from production and concept development to new recipe design and steering the company ahead, as the range expands. One bite of their 72 percent (and gms) bars of goodness and you know that they pride themselves on being a green, sustainably-sourced brand that uses organic ingredients, including palm sugar and coconut oil.

Currently, the label produces 60kg worth of bars a week so don’t be surprised if your sweet delivery takes over three weeks to arrive. And in case you were told that this brand’s fame lies only in their beautifully packaged product—each “Indo-chic” slab comes elegantly wrapped in foil and silk-screen printed, handmade paper, using a Chitra motif that symbolises the area from which David sources his cacao—we ask you to taste and tell.

Available at Earthloaf and select retail outlets.

Luvin Paryani: Indah, Pune

The newest kid on the bean to bar block is a 24-year-old who calls himself a chocolate wizard, but also answers to Luvin Paryani. “Working with chocolate was my natural choice when I realised that the global rage—simple, handmade, quality chocolate—didn’t exist in India,” he says. The 2013 Lavasa’s Ecole Hoteliere alum decided to go straight to work after graduation, at Big Tree Farms—Southeast Asia’s first bean to bar chocolate factory in Bali—no less. There, he learnt the A to Z of the dark dessert from his mentor, the critically acclaimed American chocolatier, Frederick Schilling of Dagoba Organic Chocolate.

Six months later, “I was back and started experimenting. Within three months I found two cacao farmers’ cooperatives in Kerala and Karnataka,” recalls Luvin, speaking to us from his 2,000 sq ft chocolate factory in Wagholi. Unlike his predecessors, who source their beans from one or more standalone farms, the unorthodox millennial opted to buy them from co-op farmers. “I have a variety of quality produce to choose from, and all of it is GMO and pesticide free,” he explains, adding he can also trace a particular estate, should he need to. What came next was a little wizardry and machinery modification when he realised that India only made machinery for mass production. “I altered coffee roasters to slow roast the cacao and revised idli-dosa grinders to pulverise beans instead of rice.”

By mid-2015, Indah (which means beautiful in Indonesia), was available in Pune and online, delivering across India. Only, don’t expect any unusual pairings or flavours when you add to cart, because, as Luvin puts it, “all good chocolate is made with only four ingredients”. Currently, his factory produces 7,000-8,000 dark and milk chocolate bars a month, along with approximately 3,000 kgs of cocoa powder and drinking chocolate, besides chocolate chips and cocoa butter. Our favourite is the vibrantly wrapped (the Indah symbol is a cross-section of the cacao pod, which depicts the full life cycle of the cacao plant, from bean to flower) 61 percent dark chocolate dotted with salted almond, which tastes as good as it looks.

Available at Indah Chocolate and select retail outlets.

(This artcle first appeared in Harper's Bazaar)

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