GUAYAQUIL | ECUADOR
Our Ecuador cacao comes from Hacienda Victoria in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Buttered Toast & Sea Salt
Buttered Toast & Sea Salt
Here we have captured our morning ritual of slathering pure New Zealand butter over rye toast. That savoury, salty delicious morning get up and go… is now available in chocolate! Yum.
We use Vogels Original to flavour this bar, that’s right…there is actual bread in the chocolate! Combining Ecuador cocoa, butter and Vogels we have created a buttered toast flavoured bar.
Ingredients: Cocoa solids 48% (cocoa beans, organic cocoa butter), sugar, bread 12% (water, wheat flour, mixed grains 24% (wheat, rye), skim milk powder, wheat gluten, iodised salt, white vinegar, yeast), milk solids 13% (milk powder, milk fat), pink Himalayan salt, non gmo sunflower lecithin. May contain nuts, sesame, soy.
Weight: 70g
Regular price $11.00
Unit price per
ARRIBA NACIONAL
The cacao variety is Arriba Nacional, a species whose natural home is in Ecuador where it is known as “Fine Flavour” cacao. Hacienda Victoria are experts in fermentation and have no less than 11 different fermentation protocols to choose from. We chose a protocol that gives the cocoa very low acidity and a mild fruitiness, focusing more on the chocolate flavour rather than fruitiness.
featured ingredient | vogels bread
Vogels bread has been a legend in New Zealand since 1967. It’s a dense, dark rye bread which takes some considerable toasting, but once toasted correctly it caramelizes beautifully, ready to be slathered in salty butter and devoured with a cup of tea.
Sort
We hand sort every batch to ensure only the best beans make it into our chocolate. We discard broken, mouldy and germinated beans, plus any other foreign matter which may have made it into the sack.
Roast
We roast batches of 10-15kg in our modified coffee roaster according to a roast profile we have developed for that particular bean. We roast to tame acidity, develop chocolate flavour, evaporate moisture and puff the husk away from the bean centre to allow easier winnowing.
Crush and Clasify
To successfully winnow (remove the husk) the bean needs to be broken apart and the pieces sorted into different fractions according to size. We do this in our home built classifying machine that vibrates the pieces through a series of sieves.
Winnow
Winnowing is the process for separating the husk from the bean’s meat, which is known as Nib. We use a system we built ourselves where the broken beans are allowed to fall through an airstream going in the opposite direction, the light husk is pulled up the airstream to be removed while the heavier nib falls to the bottom.
Grind and Conch
The goal is to grind the nibs and sugar until we reach our desired texture and the cacao’s inherent acids left over from the fermentation have been released (conched), being careful not to over grind or over conch.
Age
Once the grinding/conching process is complete the chocolate is poured out into blocks, wrapped and stored for a minimum of 1 month. Ageing allows the remaining acidity in the chocolate to mellow, it is an important and unique step in our chocolate making.
Melt, Temper and Mould
The aged chocolate is re-melted and tempered. Tempering is a complicated process of heating and cooling where we force the chocolate to set in the correct crystal structure that will give the best shine, the loudest snap and longest shelf life. The tempered chocolate is deposited into each of our custom moulds.
Hand Wrap
Once taken from the moulds, each bar is sealed in a gold foil pouch, then enclosed in one of our beautiful colourful envelopes, all by hand.
