Day 6: Beech nut and blaeberry in a dark milk chocolate

We wanted to include a combination of two flavours in one of the squares - we don't often do these, usually focussing on one flavour at a time.  However, a wild version of the famous Fruit and Nut combination seemed very achievable and we were delighted with this little bar.

I have read that in lean times people used to make flour out of beech nuts, Fagus sylvatica; having spent hours each winter gathering enough nuts to put in chocolate, I can see why hunger would be the only thing that would drive you to out so much time and effort into gathering a food - despite it being really delicious.  And it is delicious - they reward the hours spend picking and processing, fiddly little things that they are.  We have lightly roasted these, and it brings out a gorgeous roast chestnutty flavour.

Blaeberries, Vaccinium myrtillus, have been eaten in Scotland for ever - staining fingers and lips for thousands of years! Traditionally, i am told, August 1st was the start of the blaeberry season - and they certainly are ready then - but nowadays also much earlier, and have a long season often into early September. Some years they are fantastic - some approaching the size of the cultivated ones you find in the shops, but in other years we seem to miss the season if there even was one!  Picking sparsely distributed tiny berries is very very tedious!

I do tend to pick with a berry comb now - a small dustpan sized and shaped receptacle with a combed edge to rake through the small stems holding the berries.  I like to think that it was inspired by watching bears use their claws to rake up the berries (that in itself is an imagined image - I have never seen bears eating blaeberries but imagine with those long claws and their large bodies to feed, picking the berries off the bushes one by one would be really really tedious!).  But even with this device, berry season is peak midge season, and berry habitats are peak midge habitats, so picking fast is imperative.

The plant has also been used as a dye - although to fix that lovely purple you need an alum mordant; it is very versatile though and depending on the mordant can give you blue, violet, red brown or green.  It has a long history of use within our culture - hence its many names I think; bilberry, whinberry, blaeberry.

When I have a good harvest, I am able to experiment with different preservation techniques - drying, making into concentrated jellies, making into leathers and in the last few years, lacto fermenting.  The latter is transformational - making jams and drying seems to some how lose that earthy, rainwatery edge to the berries, but lactofermenting brings does the opposite - the first time I tried it was extraordinary.

We have semi dried the fermented berries for this chocolate, and combine them and the beech nuts with this gorgeous dark milk 60% Haiti chocolate from Pump Street Chocolate.  A very grown up version of that famous milk chocolate.