Going nuts for chocolate with unique local twist

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy meets the team behind a cottage industry based on top cocoa beans

We Irish are a nation of chocoholics. Survey after survey has shown us to be among the top consumers in the world – 24.7 pounds per person a year, according to a 2013 report. And, increasingly, our tastes are moving away from mass-produced bars to high-quality, high-cocoa treats.

“Chocolate is like wine or coffee,” says Kilcolgan man Darragh Conboy, the manager and chief roaster at Hazel Mountain Chocolate, based in Oughtmama in the Burren, just south of Kinvara.

“A few years ago people didn’t know much about coffee – they thought it was all the same, but there’s a whole world of flavour to it,” explains Darragh, who trained as a coffee-roaster with the London School of Coffee Roasting.

Darragh then got involved in walking tours of the Burren, which were set up by John Connolly on his family farm at Oughtmama. John and his wife Kasha subsequently expanded this business, opening tea-rooms in his grandparents’ old home on the farm.

Polish-born Kasha is a talented baker, and some years ago, she decided to go one step further and train as a chocolatier. Darragh, with his experience in coffee, was an obvious choice for the business, as “the rules for roasting coffee beans are applicable to chocolate”, he says.

Like the Connollys, Darragh now lives in Galway city from where he travels to Oughtmama daily.

Hazel Mountain Chocolate is a cottage industry, albeit a unique one in an Irish context. This small producer imports fairly traded cocoa beans and roasts them onsite to produce small batches of what is known as bean-to-bar chocolate. Hazel Mountain Chocolate is one of only a couple of places in Ireland doing this, and its factory and shop in the shadow of the Burren have become a tourist attraction in their own right, according to Darragh. Certainly, on a Friday morning in early May, the tearooms are full of chatter and the clink of china, as tourists sample Kasha’s gluten-free home-baking.

Other visitors have come especially for the chocolate shop, located behind a small professionally equipped kitchen.

However everything begins in the roasting area once the beans arrive from countries including Madagascar, Ecuador, Cuba and Venezuela, explains Darragh. And all told, it takes about a month to convert the beans into finished bars.

Darragh explains what’s involved on a tour of this small space – a timber structure with a grass roof – in keeping with their environmental ethos.

The simply designed room has several machines at one end and an exhibition from a local artist at the other. In between are hessian sacks, with a variety of cocoa beans. These have already fermented in their country of origin by being left to dry in the sun.

The fermented beans are sorted by hand to ensure that only those of sufficient quality go through to be roasted – sorting is the most labour-intensive part of the process, says Darragh.

Roasting helps to develop a rich flavour and caramelises the beans, helping to get rid of bitterness, he explains.

It’s done in a Giessen Roaster, a converted coffee-roasting machine with a drum rotator which “gives a nice, even roast”. As the moisture evaporates the beans give off a crackling sound, somewhat similar to corn when it’s being popped, The roasted beans then roll out onto a tray, where a fan underneath cools and dries them to stop the cooking process.

Another machine separates the cocoa shell from the nib, in what is a time-consuming process.  At the end of this, the redundant shells come out on one side and the nibs on the other. Nothing is wasted and the shells are dispatched to a woman in Kilfenora who feeds them to her pigs.

The cocoa nibs are then put into a mill, which looks like a large stainless steel churn. Here they are milled over the course of a couple of days to produce fine smooth particles. Sugar is added, and milk powder for milk chocolate. The milled chocolate is put into steel containers, wrapped up and left to age for three weeks. There are shelves full of containers, each marked to identify the origin of the chocolate and its cocoa percentage.

The chocolate needs to be aged, explains Darragh, as new chocolate is very astringent and mellows over time.

The whole process takes over a month from when Hazel Mountains import the beans to when the completed chocolate bars go on sale.

Read the ingredient list on a bar of mass-produced chocolate and you’ll find cocoa way down the list of ingredients, with sugar and bulking ingredients well ahead. Here it’s top. And there is very little else included, except for unrefined sugar or milk powder. Darragh stresses that they use no soya, no emulsifiers and no palm oil. When their bar says 72 per cent cocoa, it’s purely 72 per cent of the bean, he says.

Darragh, Kasha and her fellow chocolatier Anna Murphy use Trinitario beans for their bars and truffles. Trinitario is a low-yielding bean, which represents just three per cent of the cocoa produced worldwide, says Darragh.

This species and its subspecies provide chocolate that is a lot more flavoursome than high-yielding beans, he explains.

Concerns have been raised recently about potential cocoa shortages, because people’s demand for cocoa is increasing, while the world’s supply is declining. While Darragh agrees that a potential chocolate shortage looms, this should not affect Hazel Mountain as they use Trinitario beans, rather than high yield crops.

“The shortage applies more to chocolate growers in West Africa who are affected by bad trading conditions and are moving away from cocoa growing,” he says.

Hazel Mountain trade directly with growers, via trade fairs and co-operatives and events such as the World Chocolate Exhibition, which took place in London last year.

From the roasting area we move into the shop, which has a glass window allowing visitors to see into the small industrial kitchen where the chocolate is tempered – this means the sugar melts totally to give a smooth texture. Here too, ingredients such as rhubarb and pink pepper, seaweed, elderberries and roasted caramelised hazelnuts are added to the bars – these sit on top and in addition to looking pretty, they ensure that the tastes don’t get blurred. The fruit used in the chocolate is freeze-dried and that’s the only process it goes through, says Kasha.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.