In a micro-factory on Henry Lawson Drive in Mudgee, about five tonnes of chocolate a year are made from beans that were fermented in timber boxes on the west coast of Malekula, in Vanuatu. Luke Spencer used to manage that plantation. When he noticed a Malaysian chocolate company buying the beans, he decided to import them himself, and Spencer Cocoa started in 2013 with output measured in kilograms.
That is one way to make chocolate: buy raw beans and do everything yourself. Another is to start with cacao paste and cacao butter that someone else has already roasted and ground, and put your effort into the recipe, the filling and the sweetener, which is how Loco Love in Byron Bay and Pana Organic in Melbourne work. Neither is the "right" way, but they produce different things, and the label rarely tells you which you are holding.
So this is a walk through how a pod becomes a bar, what the percentage means, what bean-to-bar, couverture, raw and mylk are actually telling you, and a paragraph on each of the four makers we stock.
From pod to bar
Cacao pods grow straight off the trunk and branches of the tree. They are cut down, split open, and the wet beans are scooped out with the white pulp that surrounds them. On Malekula this happens twice a year, done by farming families in the field. The beans then go into fermentation boxes or under leaves for several days, longer for Forastero types (five to seven days) than for Criollo (one to three). The pulp sugars ferment, the pile heats up, the germ inside each bean is killed, and the compounds that will later become chocolate flavour begin to form. Inside, the beans turn reddish-brown.
After fermenting, the beans are dried in the sun or a kiln to around 6 to 7 per cent moisture. Drying over a smoky fire leaves a "smoke taint" in the finished chocolate, which was a long-running problem in Vanuatu and has largely been fixed. Dried beans are bagged and shipped.
At the factory, roasting develops flavour, softens acidity and astringency and loosens the shell. Winnowing cracks the shells and blows them away, leaving the nibs. Grinding breaks the nibs' cell walls and releases the cocoa butter, turning dry nibs into a flowing cocoa liquor. Sugar goes in, and in milk chocolate milk powder, and then comes conching: hours of mixing and agitation, anywhere from 4 to 72 hours at 55 to 88 °C, which smooths the texture and drives off volatile acids. Last is tempering, a controlled cooling and reheating so the cocoa butter sets in the right crystal form (Form V, which melts at about 34 °C). Good temper gives snap and gloss. Bad temper gives a dull, soft bar and a white film called bloom.
What the percentage means
The number on the front is the share of the bar's weight that came from the cacao bean: cocoa mass plus cocoa butter, added together. The rest is mainly sugar, and in milk chocolate, milk powder. A 72% bar is 72 per cent bean and 28 per cent other things. That is all it tells you.
It is not a grade. Two 70% bars can taste nothing alike, because origin, fermentation, roast depth and conche time all shape flavour, and none of them appear in the number. A higher percentage means less sugar and a more intense, more bitter bar, not a better one. The ratio of mass to butter is also hidden inside the figure, so one 70% might be creamy and another dry and chalky.
Bean-to-bar, couverture, raw and mylk
Bean-to-bar means the maker buys beans and does the roasting, winnowing, grinding, conching and tempering themselves. Of our four, Spencer Cocoa is the one that works this way. Couverture is finished chocolate with a high cocoa butter content, roughly 31 to 39 per cent, made to be melted, coated and moulded by chocolatiers. Loco Love and Pana work from cacao paste and cacao butter rather than roasting beans, and Pana sells its own couverture-style baking blocks. It is a legitimate craft, just a different one, closer to a pâtissier than a roaster.
Raw is a word to treat with suspicion. Fermentation on its own reaches 45 to 50 °C, so cacao that has been fermented is rarely raw in any literal sense; "unroasted" or "low-roast" is the accurate term, and roasting is also a food-safety step. Pana began life as a raw-chocolate brand, mixing cold-pressed cacao butter and powder by hand, but the current Pana Organic range is not described that way and the ingredients have changed.
Mylk with a y signals a milk-style chocolate with no dairy in it. Milk powder is replaced by coconut milk powder (Pana and Loco Love both do this), or by oat, rice or nut powders, and each base changes the texture and flavour. Coconut gives a soft, slightly fudgy bar with its own faint taste; it is not a copy of dairy milk chocolate and is not trying to be.
The makers on our shelves
Loco Love (the full range) was started by Emica Penklis, whose first product, a coconut and cashew bar, was made at her kitchen table. The company was established in Bondi in 2013 and later moved to Byron Bay, where Penklis is fifth-generation local and where everything is still made by hand. The filled bars use organic cacao from small farms in Peru, occasionally Ecuador, Papua New Guinea or Guatemala, sweetened with coconut blossom sugar and brown rice syrup, sometimes maple, and never cane sugar. They are vegan, gluten-free and soy-free, though Loco Love does not state a third-party organic certification for the finished product, so we don't call it certified. The bars come as 70 g twin packs: Classic Chewy Caramel, the recipe created in 2017 and an award winner at Naturally Good; Hazelnut; Pistachio Mylk Praline; Peanut Butter Caramel; Maple Macadamia Caramel; Black Cherry & Raspberry; and Double Chocolate Truffle. The Butter Caramel Pecan five-pack shows the recipe style: 48.5% cacao solids, coconut blossom sugar, brown rice syrup, pecans, coconut milk, maple, cinnamon and Australian sea salt. The Luvio blocks, Roasted Hazelnut & Fleur de Sel and Peppermint & Cacao Crisp, are maple-sweetened and made with Fair Trade beans from South America and Africa, and contain a little soy lecithin. For baking there are Dark Choc Drops. Allergens: tree nuts run right through the range, the peanut bar contains peanuts, and everything may contain traces of milk from shared equipment.
Spencer Cocoa (the full range) is Luke and Thea Spencer's family business, founded in 2013 in Mudgee. The beans are fermented and sun-dried on Malekula, then roasted, cracked, winnowed and stone-ground in small batches in Mudgee before cocoa butter and sugar are added and the bars are tempered and moulded by hand. The Dark 72% is three ingredients: roasted cocoa beans, cocoa butter and Bundaberg raw sugar, and the maker describes the Vanuatu flavour as tropical fruit, toffee, caramel and malt. It is vegan and free of soy lecithin. The Milk 42% and White 33% both contain dairy. Spencer is not organic-certified and not Fairtrade-certified; the Spencers describe paying above fair-trade prices through direct trade with the growers. All three bars are nut-free and gluten-free, at $12.70 to $13.50 for 100 g.
Pana Organic (the full range) began in 2012 when Pana Barbounis started delivering handmade dark chocolate around Melbourne on a Vespa. The first shop opened in August 2013, and production is now in Coburg. Pana is certified organic (the ACO badge is on the packs), vegan and gluten-free, made in Australia from imported ingredients. The Mylk recipe gives the picture: cacao butter, mass and powder, raw and coconut sugar, tapioca fibre, coconut milk powder, carob, sunflower lecithin and vanilla. We stock the small Hazelnut and Mint bars, the Golden Comb, Pecan Brittle and Coconut Rough, and the Dark Hot Chocolate. Pana's packs carry a "may contain peanut and tree nuts" warning, and the hazelnut and pecan lines contain those nuts by design.
Mindful Foods (the full range) started in 2015 with muesli, made in a kitchen in South Murwillumbah in the Northern Rivers, with an emphasis on plastic-free packaging. Their "activated" nuts and seeds are soaked in kombucha, filtered water and Australian rock salt, then dried until crunchy. The Cacao Powder is a single ingredient, certified organic, grown in Peru and packed in Australia, and the Cacao Nibs are the cracked, winnowed bean before any grinding, which makes them the most direct way to taste what the percentage is made of. We also carry their Chocolate Clusters. Mindful Foods describes its ingredients as certified organic rather than claiming a company-wide certification, and its nut-based products contain tree nuts and honey, so they are not vegan.
Storing and using it
Chocolate wants to be kept cool, dry and away from strong smells; craft makers generally suggest under 20 °C. A Sydney summer pushes past that, but the fridge is a poor fix, because condensation on the surface causes sugar bloom, a grainy white coat. A bar that has gone white from heat is fat bloom instead: cocoa butter that melted and re-set in the wrong crystal form. Either way it looks tired and loses its snap, but it is safe to eat and melts perfectly well into a cake.
Loco Love's Chuncho Drinking Cacao is a different product altogether: six 33 g discs of a single ingredient, organic Chuncho cacao from the Sacred Valley of Peru, 100 per cent cacao solids and nothing else. You dissolve a disc in boiling water. Half a disc makes a lighter cup, a whole disc a thick, intense one, and the maker's tasting notes are woody cognac, sweet fruity wine and toffee. At $57.75 it is dear, and it is bitter, so it is for people who already like their chocolate at the dark end.
Questions people ask
Is cacao different from cocoa?
Same plant, same bean. "Cacao" is commonly used for less-processed or unroasted powder and "cocoa" for the roasted kind, but there is no legal distinction in Australia, so read the ingredients rather than the name.
Is dark chocolate vegan?
Often, but not automatically. Check for milk fat or milk powder, and for "may contain milk" warnings; Loco Love's bars are vegan by recipe but carry that warning because of shared equipment. Spencer's dark is vegan; its milk and white are not.
Where does Australian craft chocolate come from?
Australia grows very little cacao, so the makers import beans or paste. Spencer uses Vanuatu, Loco Love mainly Peru, Mindful Foods' powder is Peruvian, and Pana's ingredients are imported.
What is ceremonial cacao?
Traditionally, 100 per cent cacao paste prepared as a drink. Loco Love's version is a single-ingredient Peruvian Chuncho disc dissolved in hot water. It is strong, unsweetened and not to everyone's taste.
Every bar, block and disc above is available online with delivery across Sydney, and on the shelves at Leichhardt and Crows Nest, where the chocolate lives away from the front windows for good reason.
