Hot chocolate the traditional way
The gleaming red roasting machine, topped by a giant funnel and with a meandering silver arm, resembles a freakish metal monster. Next to this cartoonish contraption, an ancient wooden winnower, spitting cocoa nibs into plastic boxes at its base, has the air of a DIY job - an amateurish amalgamation of dilapidated church organ and a couple of dodgy fan belts.
Tucked in a smaller room next door, two enormous sandstone wheels, like a pair of duelling steamrollers, churn a rich and velvety mixture the colour of mahogany.
This unlikely chocolate-making equipment easily could have sprung from the imagination of Roald Dahl and into the pages of his children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
But the chocolate-maker who toils in this cavernous building, making block after block of his very special confection using a mere two ingredients, is not anything like eccentric candy factory owner Willy Wonka.
Josh Bahen is a thoroughly modern manufacturer; the new face of chocolate-making who believes the future lies firmly in the past.
With his wife Jacq, the former head winemaker at Margaret River's prestigious Moss Wood vineyard has travelled the globe in search of long-forgotten chocolate-making machinery, repaired it and shipped it home to produce chocolate the old-fashioned way - without added fats, emulsifiers and preservatives often used to disguise below-par beans and poor production in mass-produced confectionery.
The pair ethically source raw cocoa beans from farming communities in remote regions, hand-roasting them back at the Yallingup shed they've built on the edge of the family vineyard as the base for their fledgling business, Bahen & Co. After roasting, the nibs are cracked and separated from their hulls in the winnower, then stone ground with nothing more than organic cane sugar, which reacts with the beans' natural fats to achieve a rich and luscious chocolate. This mix is then conched and tempered, before being hand-moulded into 75g dark chocolate bars containing 70 per cent pure cocoa that, like the wines Bahen once made, speak of their terroir.
Josh and Jaqui Bahen in their chocolate factory at Yallingup.
It was while working on vintage in Burgundy in 2004 that Bahen had the epiphany that would see him leave winemaking.
"I came across some chocolate by a French producer called Bonnat. I bit into it and it tasted like a piece of fruit," Bahen, 35, says.
"It really intrigued me and I wanted to work out why that was so. It planted the seed to find out who else was making chocolate in this way."
It wasn't long before Bahen hit a brick wall: the mysterious world of old-style chocolate making would prove to be something of a closed shop. "There was so much secrecy," he says. "Some of the larger [European] producers would rather destroy their machinery than sell it on to others [and reveal their secrets]."
Bahen eventually tracked down two young American chocolatemakers who shared his desire to preserve traditional methods. They also embarked on a series of global reconnaissance trips from Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic to Indonesia - to meet farmers and the few manufacturers willing to pass on their knowledge.
By 2010, the Bahens had sold their house and bought 25 tonnes of chocolate-making gear, including the equipment that whirs quietly in the background as we speak: the enormous red 1930s roaster from Germany; the 100-year-old winnower Bahen found in an abandoned chocolate factory in El Salvador and the 105-year-old grinding machine repaired and rescued from Spain. There is more on the way - including a second grinder Bahen found online languishing in Beirut - and during our conversation a delivery truck backs up to unload two chocolate-coating machines that resemble space-age cement mixers.
If the couple thought making artisanal chocolate was the road to riches, however, they were initially disappointed. "We only sold our first block 18 months ago despite having the machinery here for more than three years," Bahen says. "The problem was getting quality beans - that was a lot harder than anything else."
With the help of Bahen's father, Mark, now a shareholder in the company, the couple worked hard to establish relationships with cocoa farmers, ensuring quality control over the beans and, in turn, fair-trade practices for poor communities. After much trial and error, the company sources from producers in Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and Brazil.
To help safeguard the dwindling heirloom genetics of the world's cocoa bean supply, Bahen & Co has embarked on an ambitious plan. The pair educate farmers in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, hoping they can compete with South America and produce beans that replicate the ancient flavours of Aztec and Mayan chocolate making.
"There is a goldmine of heirloom cacao genetics close to Australia," Bahen says. "When people think chocolate, they think Central America, as that's where it all came from originally, but a lot of the genetics, the heirloom stuff, has died out [there] due to disease or because it was replanted with hybrids for high yield and disease resistance."
While genetics is crucial, farming practices make or break a product. "You need a good farmer who can prune the trees correctly, harvest the right pods and do the fermentation properly - timing and temperature is crucial, as it's during the fermentation process that hundreds of flavour precursors develop," Bahen says.
Warming to his theme, he places 50 cocoa beans sent to him from Papua New Guinea inside a small rectangular contraption called a cocoa guillotine. He slides a razor-sharp blade down its centre, splitting the pods into neat halves.
A light-coloured bean crisscrossed with cracks and fissures is a top-quality specimen (as opposed to several others that are more solid and purple in colour - "if you make a chocolate out of those it's going to be very bitter").
This attention to detail is bearing fruit. As production cranks up, Bahen & Co's blocks of chocolate (including some with added extras such as almonds, sea salt and roasted coffee) are being snapped up by local and international chefs, as well as chocolate purists keen for something a little more sophisticated than a block of Cadbury's Dairy Milk. The pair have healthy online sales, distribute through about 100 retailers nationwide and began selling into the US last month. Bahen says they are days away from beginning exports to Singapore, where consumers cannot get enough of the artisanal chocolate wrapped in paper, hand-designed by Jacq.
It is clear, though, that money is not the major motivator, and it's hard to separate the chocolate-maker from the vintner in Bahen. As we try a few squares from bars produced from three different beans, he points out the flavours and aromas inherent in each, as if analysing a particularly good vintage.
The first chocolate, made from beans that originated in Venezuela, he describes as "not too chocolately, very fruit driven". Madagascan beans, on the other hand, "are very citrusy with red berry characters."
"For us, flavour is the number one thing," he says. "We don't want to appeal to the masses. We want to be edgy, but also for someone to have a unique experience, to say, 'Wow, that really is unusual'. That's the experience I had [with Bonnat] in 2004 that I remember so distinctly."
And how do Bahen & Co's meticulously produced bars compare with that holy grail of French chocolate that changed Bahen's life a decade ago?
"We did a side-by-side tasting a while ago. Ours were probably a bit more edgy and explosive in flavour," he says, with a satisfied smile.
bahenchocolate.com
Source: The Australian, 16 November 2013
