Our lexicon of chocolate-related terms has expanded thanks to a new breed of chocolatiers in India. Mysore’s Earth Loaf, Pondicherry’s Mason & Co. and Mumbai’s Bean Therapy and Vivanda Chocolate Co. are encouraging consumers to consider provenance and quality of ingredients while purchasing chocolates. Their single-estate, handmade, small-batch bars are creatively packaged and typically crafted with dark chocolate that is infused with inventive ingredients such as spices and herbs. Here’s our pick of artisanal chocolate bars to try.
EARTH LOAF
If this list was a ranking, Earth Loaf would be at the top. The brand of artisanal chocolates is handmade in Mysore by British nationals David Belo and Angelika Anangnostou, mixologists who traded a life of bartending in London for “bean-to-bar” chocolate production in India in 2010. This means that the entire process of chocolate making, from harvesting the cacao beans to packaging the bars (they also sell bon bons and truffles) is controlled by the pair.
A bar of Earth Loaf is much like the socially awkward person at a party incapable of making a good first impression. Some friends have described their 72 per cent dark chocolate bars as offensively bitter (one said it tastes like henna), while a couple of others have dismissed them as plain weird. There’s an assertive umami flavour to their 72 gram bars that prompts these reactions. Since we first sampled their chocolate in 2014, the year the brand was launched, we’ve learned to appreciate the intense, unsweetened flavour of their organic cocoa sourced from a single plantation in Karnataka.
From their selection of six flavours, which include Himalayan fruit and nut and gondhoraj and apricot, the cacao nib and palmyra sugar bar and smoked salt and almond bar are our favourites. While the palm sugar adds a touch of sweetness to the crunchy cacao nibs, the smoked salt flavour is distinctly savoury. They’re both earthy, mood-altering chocolates that break with a satisfying snap and have a lingering finish. The bars are made up of 16 squares of chocolate that are sold in handmade, block-printed paper packaging.
The price of a 72 gram bar starts at Rs270. Get them here and here.
BEAN THERAPY
This brand by Mumbai chocolatier Sanjoy Solomon is a tasty union of Belgian Callebaut chocolate and Indian spices. Solomon clearly likes pairing savoury with sweet as his bars are spiked with black pepper, chilli, cinnamon, cardamom, fennel and rock salt, ingredients that he sources from across the country.
Like his peers, Solomon only employs “extra dark” chocolate. More specifically, he uses couverture. Bean Therapy’s bars are closer in taste to commercial chocolate unlike Earth Loaf and Mason & Co., which are vegan and raw (their cacao beans are fermented and dried, but not roasted as they are for commercial chocolate because it alters the chemical fabric of the bean). There’s an artistic whimsy to Bean Therapy’s packaging that features vibrant abstract drawings and paisley prints.
While the Guntur chilli chocolate, with 62 per cent cocoa, is mild on the nose, you feel its burn a few seconds after you’ve popped a square. The firm-textured Himalayan rock salt flavour, which contains 70 per cent cocoa and a generous hit of rock salt, is our pick of the lot, as the salt helps highlight the flavour of the chocolate. The 70 per cent Belgian dark chocolate with cocoa nibs, while adequately bitter, pales in comparison to Earth Loaf’s delightfully crunchy cacao nib and palmyra sugar bar.
The price of an 80 gram bar starts at Rs260. Get them here and here.
VIVANDA CHOCOLATE CO.
Our approach to consuming chocolate is fairly straightforward – extract the bar from its box, unwrap the foil and hastily polish off the squares before anyone else gets to them. This is the opposite of what Vivanda Chocolate Co. advocates in their printed guide to eating chocolate. As per their guidelines, chocolate should be savoured. They recommend sniffing the chocolate, getting a feel of the bar by holding a square between your fingers, and finally leaving a piece to melt on the tongue rather than wolfing it down.
We discovered the two-year-old made-in-Mumbai brand, which has been marketed primarily at food exhibitions, on Foodesto.com last month. Their handy 41 grams bars are enclosed in striking cardboard boxes illustrated like a vintage food advertisement. The packaging is crammed with text describing the provenance of the chocolate, various ingredients, drawings of cacao beans and an image of the Gateway of India. They use single origin chocolate from Uganda and Vanuatu to craft bitter bars that linger on the palate, as good chocolate should. The 80 per cent single origin bar has a smoky flavour and a sticker that reads “bitter is better”. Equally enjoyable is the sea salt bar with 70 per cent cacao that has snowy flecks of salt lodged inside.
The price of a 41 gram bar starts at Rs160. Get them here and here.
MASON & CO.
Helmed by Auroville-residing French couple, Fabien and Jane Mason, this is also a bean-to-bar brand of single origin chocolate that is organic, vegan and raw. Their bars are retailed in elegant cardboard boxes minimally embellished with a bright band of colour to denote the flavour. They offer eight, including espresso dark chocolate, natural coconut milk and dark chocolate with peanut butter.
Sourced from an estate in Tamil Nadu, the Masons’ chocolate didn’t win us over. Their 70 per cent cacao chip dark chocolate enriched with cane sugar has an odd medicinal aftertaste, while the 70 per cent chilli and cinnamon dark chocolate is hardly spicy or cinnamon-y. Mason & Co’s chocolate is the priciest of the four brands we tried – a 70 gram bar costs Rs295 – but also the most widely available. The bars are sold online on Amazon.in, off the shelf at the Nature’s Basket chain and at Bandra’s Bad Cafe.
The price of a 70 gram bar starts at Rs295. Get them here and here.