Day 13: Scots pine infused plain chocolate

Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris



This was the first wild flavoured solid chocolate that we ever made, and I cannot now remember when that was!  We had been making wild flavoured ganache filled chocolates and then later sea salt caramels, but I had not started out making any bars or things at all.

I went to a chocolate event in London, I think run by Home Chocolate Factory, and met a very lovely chocolatier who ran a company called Lick the Spoon, in Wiltshire I think.  We had coffee after the meeting and chatted about our businesses – hers much more established and larger than mine.  She told me about infusing cocoa butter with flavours to then use to flavour solid chocolate, and as I travelled home on the train, I was eagerly planning to experiment; I knew that I needed to produce a longer shelf-life product as the ganaches with their two week shelf-life were a difficult sell back in those days.

Scots pine was the first flavour we tried – I had used the young pine shoots in ganache, and imagined that they would do well in cocoa butter as well.  This was so long ago, that the only couveture I could find to use that was distinctive enough to pair the Scots pine with, was Callebaut’s Madagascar single origin chocolate.  And we didn’t make bars – we made patterned thin discs!  I always think chocolate tastes nicer thin – it melts more quickly in the mouth, and you access the flavours more easily than in a chunky bar.

We made thins and shards for a long time before we made bars as well – and making bars was a whole new learning curve for us, as well as investment in moulds and packaging!  So making that first flavoured chocolate opened up a whole new world for us!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2025 Advent Calendar

2025 Advent Calendar As this will be our last Advent Calendar, because I am retiring this year, we thought we would look back over the almost 20 years that I have been exploring the chocolate and wild foraged flavour worlds.  So much has happened in the time since I started out on my chocolate journey - the chocolate landscape is totally different now from what it was 20 years ago; then there were no craft bean to bar makers in the UK, and certainly none that you could buy couveture from.  Even buying Fairtrade certified chocolate or any other ethically credentialled chocolate was hard, and there was very little focus on origin and flavour. The foraging world has opened up as well - information is more easily available, there is the Association of Foragers that enables all these individuals to link together.  My foraging knowledge has grown over the years through contacts with other foragers and what they do, with confidence through practice, with more easily accessible i...
Read more

Day 5: Sea buckthorn berry caramel filled chocolate

Image
Sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides    Sea buckthorn is an amazing plant that we first became aware of in Nepal, where its berries were renowned as having more Vitamin C than any other fruit and where it was a valuable plant for feeding goats as it grows at a very high altitude. We were amazed to find that it grows so well in a coastal sandy environment here in the UK - so different ecologically from the Himalayan mountains. However, its berry is as sour and as Vitamin C rich here as it was there. It has a really strong 'tropical' flavour to it that persists when cooked. Looking up Sea Buckthorn on Wikipedia I was amazed to read that it is now classed as a superfood due to its high levels of anti-oxidants ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_buckthorn ).   There is now an excellent community company based near Gullane, Sea buckthorn Scotland , where they pick and process the berries each year, selling juices, concentrates and many other sea buckthorn wonder-based produ...
Read more

Day 16: Our own bean to bar plain chocolate

Image
Lachua, Guatemala 80% plain chocolate    This is the only unflavoured chocolate in the whole calendar and as this is a reflection on our chocolate journey oer the years, I felt it was important to mark our attempts at bean to bar chocolate This was made with cocoa beans grown by two farmer organisations in the northern area of Alta Verapaz, Lachua region, Guatemala.  Here there is a pristone cenote lake within a national park, and te farmers focus on organic and ecofriendly farming. I bought the beans from Uncommon Cacao, an organisation that sources speciality cocoa from farmers and sells to craft makers.  These beans are sourced from, as explained on their website . Uncommon Cacao was started by CEO Emily Stone in 2010, and is one of a small handfull of ethically driven companies from which you can buy small amounts of cocoa - by which I mean one 50 or 60kg bag to a tonne.  So, not just a small pack for tasters!  Their website is full of information about...
Read more