UPFs & Big Chocolate vs Craft Chocolate
Things I've learned. Plus deliciousness available now and some to look forward to for next week!
In the past 36 hours I’ve had a parking fine due to Newham’s (IMO) ambiguous parking signs and paid £1137 today for someone to conclude that they can’t narrow down where the apparent leak under the concrete foundations of our house is better than we can. And a delivery driver banged so hard on our door he broke the glass. Not all the way through, but it will need replacing. Fun times.
But apart from those things, I’ve been living a dream since I last wrote.
Three times last week I got to do what I love most. Then other things I love too!
This week:
I’ll share what I found most interesting at two panel discussions I attended,
some delicious things available in London or online that I’ve enjoyed recently
Finally, make sure you scroll all the way down for some delicious things to plan to attend next week! (And tap the heart while you’re there? 🙏 It helps other people to find these words!)
My favourite thing
I absolutely loved running two public special edition chocolate tours last Friday and Sunday and the preview tour for the Notting Hill Bakery Tour I’ll be hosting with
last Wednesday with some of our friends. I’ve shared all of the brilliant posts those friends made and saved them to a highlight on the chocolatetours Instagram page.It’s probably not clear from what’s shared on social media, but, as with all of the tours I run, I point out sights and share stories of the area, too.
I really love being with people in person and sharing food.
There are a couple of spots left for Sunday 10th and a few on Friday 15th November.
Eat chocolate with me?
Because one of my favourite things is to meet people and share food, I’m really excited about bringing a group together to taste bars from Salon du Chocolat on Sunday 8th December at 1:30pm near Farringdon station.
This is only for paid subscribers because I want to show some appreciation for the people who help cover my time in writing these. I think it should be ok - at least until the room starts to fill up - for paid subscribers to bring a guest (they will need to contribute the same amount to the kitty). This will be a relaxed tasting and conversation. I’ll try to buy a range of bars so it’s really interesting, but it’s also about hanging out with a group of people who enjoy tasting interesting and delicious things. I’m not intending to make money from this event - the (planned) £20pp is just the contribution towards the bars I will buy at Salon du Chocolat and carry back.
If you’re planning to come along to join can you reply to let me know? I’ll need the £££ by next Thursday so I know how much we have to spend! You can also leave a comment to tell me if you prefer / didn’t get this via email:
Craft Chocolate vs “Big Chocolate”
After last night’s panel discussion on this topic at The Cookery School on Little Portland Street, I remembered more of the things I’d heard at a different panel last Wednesday on Ultra Processed Food (UPF), which was hosted at the Danish Embassy.
I love live panel discussions where nothing is recorded, the panel speak freely and you learn interesting things. The Cookery School ones are always open to the public and are very inexpensive given you get some food as well. The next one is on cheese on Monday 25th November. See here for tickets.
Here are some of my takeaways from the two talks that you might find interesting. Please do chip in with your thoughts in the comments section!
But first:
What is Craft Chocolate?
There is no formal definition but the generally agreed upon interpretation is that:
craft chocolate refers to chocolate made by people/companies who carefully source their beans for maximum flavour and ethics and then make chocolate with minimal ingredients, from the cocoa bean.
In craft dark chocolate the only ingredients should be cocoa beans (without their shell) and sugar, sometimes with the addition of more cocoa butter than already present in the beans in the bar.
Sunflower lecithin is an acceptable but less common - and less welcome / necessary - ingredient. Soy lecithin used to be acceptable but is being phased out (in the case of an early pioneer of the craft chocolate, the Grenada Chocolate Company) or has already been removed. More on lecithin below.
Milk chocolate should only have milk powder as an additional ingredient m. You will not see vanilla or vanillin (or some variant) in craft chocolate unless it is a flavoured bar, as described on the packaging.
“Big Chocolate” is appropriate alongside “Big Pharma”, “Big Tobacco”, etc, because most chocolate confectionery is sold by a small number of enormous companies who wield disproportionate power and use that power to negatively impact the world, socially, environmentally, financially and from a health perspective.
Here’s what was said on craft chocolate:
According to Spencer Hyman of Cocoa Runners, the best way to get people to start eating craft chocolate and fewer UPFs is to help people pay more attention to flavour. We need to make flavour part of our cultural expectation and language.
Taste is only the base senses and is picked up within a tenth of a second. Flavour can take 4-5 seconds to experience and requires our sense of smell to get involved too (this includes through the retronasal passage from our mouth, past our nose to our brain).
UPFs are very short on flavour. There is never complexity or length to a UPF. It’s short and intense and therefore leads us to repeat the experience to get that dopamine hit again.
We also often eat too quickly to even notice flavour that is in a food. Perhaps we’re conditioned to do this because of UPFs that only deliver taste in those first few milliseconds? (My question.)
Tony’s Chocolonely is not paying enough to really move the needle on problems in the cocoa supply chain.
According to Nathan from Original Beans, the higher prices in cocoa this year allowed some farmers in South and Central America to consider investing in their farms, families and communities for the first time. That sentence feels bittersweet. Only now?
The high prices did not translate to higher income for farmers in West Africa due to lower yield and government involvment. It was the lower yield from weather and plant diseases that was, in part, the cause of the price spike.
There is still a child labour problem, specifically children that could and should be in school, but are working on farms that do not belong to their family. This is a symptom of not paying enough for chocolate/cocoa.
There is no way to know if enslaved labour is not occurring unless you are paying for people on the ground. It is particularly a problem on the border of Cote d’Ivoire and Congo where the border is “leaky”. All of the craft chocolate makers I support with mentions in this newsletters buy from farms where they, or the organisation they buy from, know the farmers well and they know that there is no slave labour on the farm. It is difficult to buy good quality beans to make award-winning chocolate unless you have people regularly on the farms supervising the fermentation process. They are therefore privy to who is picking the cacao, too.
Some studies show that the industrialised process of making chocolate destroys the fibre in chocolate, making it less bioavailable.
Dutching /alkalising cocoa also decreases the polyphenols in chocolate and chocolate products.
Most confectionery chocolate also includes emulsifiers and other preservatives which, in some studies, show a negative effect on the gut microbiome. Apparently sunflower lecithin is an exception to this. It is made by pressing sunflower seeds (a natural extraction vs chemical for soy lecithin) and has been shown to have a positive effect on heart health.
We were served these gorgeous pots of mousse made with Original Beans chocolate.
And on Ultra Processed Foods:
Based on the current definitions, there’s a 90% overlap between UPFs (Ultra Processed Foods) as defined by the NOVA classification and HFSS (High Fat, Sugar, Salt) products, as defined by the U.K. government.
There is a group at the University of Copenhagen about to start looking at a new way of defining UPFs (it’s currently broadly accepted as being defined by the NOVA system) which intends to consider nutritional content as well (the current system doesn’t).
Broadly the conclusion seemed to be that if a food became a UPF primarily through bulking agents (i.e. flour and sugar) that made the food item cheaper and less nutritious (rather than just extending shelf-life or making it quicker to cook or consume) that these are the ones that society and individuals should be worried about.
Additionally certain ingredients that are added to foods during processing may be both encouraging excess consumption and deleterious to our health, and therefore our intake of these should be minimised (this came up in the chocolate talk as well).
A school district in the middle of England went from 30% of the students being eligible for free school meals pre-COVID, to 75% now. This is a trend across the whole of the UK and highlights the biggest concern with consumption of UPFs with minimal nutritional value, but also the problem with any government intervention to discourage their production or consumption.
Government budgets can’t (won’t?) stretch appropriately to these increased numbers so more UPFs - of the definition above - are appearing in school meals.
Denmark has been successful in prioritising organic food through a multi-pronged approach: supporting farmers, retailers and communicating to consumers too. As a result 12% of products in Danish supermarkets are organic. Less than 2% in the UK are.
There are many benefits to organic foods; there are also some organic UPFs.
The biggest challenge to tackling the prevalence of UPFs is the huge influence that food manufacturers and retailers have on Government policy.
The second challenge is the risk that implementing taxes on UPF’s that are cheap and low on nutrients, without providing alternative and subsidised complete meals and snacks for lower-income families (or time-efficient support to produce them), would be disproportionately punitive. This could potentially be overcome with enough resources and good communication and support.
I’d love to hear if you have anything to add, or if it’s raised any questions for you:
And, now, for…
This Week’s Delicious Things
Chocolate bars from Spice Kitchen
These are a collaboration between Spice Kitchen and Coco Pzazz and were kindly sent to me to sample. They have the following flavours:
chai spiced milk chocolate
cardamom bun white chocolate
gingerbread & honeycomb milk chocolate
The spices from Spice Kitchen are truly superb (they sent me some of their gorgeous tins, too) and it was fun to try them in these bars. My favourite was the gingerbread and honeycomb: texture plus excellent spicing.
Chocolate mousse from Le Choux
This feels a little cruel as it isn’t a product Le Choux currently sell, but perhaps if enough of us petition for it? Everything Le Choux makes is excellent but these were particularly amazing. Le Choux is on our Notting Hill Bakery Tour and the best thing about the bakery tour is being able to try so many different things in one morning.
The mousse was made with Firetree Chocolate and was exclusive to Chocolate Unwrapped on the weekend. Did you go? I know Kate and Paul would be interested in your feedback if you did.
📌 Le Choux, 332 Ladbroke Grove, London W10 5AD
🚊 Ladbroke Grove (15 min walk)
Caramel Cheesecake at Pachamama
I was invited for lunch here. It’s not the first time I’ve eaten here or its sister in Shoreditch, Pachamama East. They were celebrating 10 years since opening. The food is a fusion of South American cuisine and PACKED full of flavour. Make sure you order the mushroom ceviche if you go and you could also go just for the dulce de leche cheesecake. It’s gorgeous. If you like churros, theirs are a perfect example of them and the dulce de leche to dip them in is gorgeous. There’s a chocolate sauce option, too, which I’m pretty sure is made with Original Beans.
📌 18 Thayer St, London W1U 3JY
🚊 Bond Street
📌 Pachamama East, 73 Great Eastern St, London EC2A 3HU
🚊 Old Street
Millionaire’s Shortbread at Toklas Bakery
It’s all about the hazelnut shortbread. Just a thin layer of soft, condensed milk caramel and an even thinner layer of Pump Street milk chocolate. So good.
📌 9 Surrey St, Temple, London WC2R 2ND
🚊 Temple
They’re only open Monday to Friday.
Chocolate Detective Chocolate Eggs
Chantal Coady founded Rococo. She’s not involved anymore but is back in the chocolate world and these are her best selling product. Totally understandably. For anyone who grew up loving M&Ms or Smarties (if you didn’t, why not?!), the crisp shell is seductive, but wrapped around quality chocolate AND a centre of either salted caramel or praline, they’re impossible not to love. They’re available year-round. Not just for Easter, folks.
Gabriella Cugno chocolate bars
You’ll know Gabriella - if you know her - as the chocolatier-on-set for the Willy Wonka film. Even before this her drops of bars, Easter Eggs or Advent Calendars would sell out within minutes. She came to the industry dinner last week with some of her bars. They were cut and shared and the pieces I tried were as stunning as her egg I had in 2022.
Chestnut Bakery honey croissant
You might remember Chestnut Bakery just took home the prize for the best croissant for the second year in a row. If you’re going to go and try it, make sure to also get the honey croissant. It’s half a croissant, squashed and doused in honey, served to you with thick cream, salt and more honey. It’s hard to explain just how delicious it is. I haven’t had it recently - I went for the monthly specials - but I’m hopeful it’s just as good as it was and I’m guiding you well.
📌 24 Floral St, London WC2E 9DS
🚊 Covent Garden
📌 17-21 Elizabeth St, London SW1W 9RP
🚊 Sloane Square / Victoria
Meetty Chocolate
returned to Ukraine again to continue her incredible charity work and reporting and visited a chocolate factory that’s managed to rig up a remote to start the generators when the power goes out and he’s not present and can’t get there because of curfew. You do not want half-conched chocolate solidifying around those stone wheels!She brought some home to share with me and other chocolate lovers. You can’t buy them yet but hopefully they’ll be available at some point. I’ll let you know.
Kooky Freeze Dried mangosteen
This is my current obsession (amazon aff link). They’re pricey for how quickly I consume them, but each packet does contain the fruit from 4-5 whole mangosteen so, in that context, the price makes sense. They hit that sweet spot for me without me eating candy or more chocolate, so for that it’s worth the spend as well.
Though, I wish that sentence was actually true. Mostly I’m also eating the chocolate as well.
On my delicious radar…
Diwali feast by Tarunima Shah & Ravneet Gill
I wish so much that I was around to go to The Standard next weekend and have a meal created by Tarunima Shah and Ravneet Gill. They are both incredible cooks. It’s all vegetarian/vegan and really reasonably priced.
From 1-3 November.
📌 Isla, 10 Argyle St, London NW1 2ST
🚆 Kings Cross / St Pancras
The Humble Crumble Diwali special
On from Tuesday 28th October until Sunday 3rd November:
“Our mixed berries and shortbread crumble (gluten friendly option), topped with a mango and cardamom cream, mango pulp, pistachios, freeze-dried raspberries, edible petals and edible shimmer.”
I want it. I’m planning to go on Wednesday to get it.
At all four of their locations (Old Spitalfields, Borough Market, Camden and Covent Garden).
Populations Bakery returns for one day
And it’s partly for charity! I’ll be in Paris but you should all go!
On Saturday 2nd November from Spitalfields.
You can order now for collection on Saturday 2nd.
Also on Saturday 2nd November:
Cookies & Hot Milk pop up
At Loop Dining in Leyton. I can’t believe I’m missing so many good things. I hope you go and enjoy! There will be guest appearances (in cookie form) from Toad Bakery,
and others.See more on organiser, Lucy’s, Instagram here.
📌 216b Francis Road, London, United Kingdom E106PR
🚆 Leyton / Leyton Midland Road
Next week is half term and I’m judging both the Academy of Chocolate Awards and the International Chocolate Awards, as well as heading off early on Thursday to Paris for Salon du Chocolat. 😅 (Let me know if you’ll be in Paris from Thursday 31st to Monday 4th!)
Given how long this has ended up being, I will probably skip next week unless I see some amazing Halloween specials or other deliciousness that is time sensitive.
Let me know which of the delicious things above you’re most excited about? Or weigh in on UPF’s / the state of the food system?
I will see you in the comments and in your inbox after Choc-tober ends! 🤪🫠
And hopefully on a bakery tour or tasting chocolate in December!
Jen x
I’ve seen people ask for a ranking on other emails I subscribe to. It’s pretty basic as far as feedback goes. If you want to be more specific I’m always open to your thoughts! But here goes anyway: assess me (it’s anonymous!):
If your answer was A and you’re not up for being a paid sub but you would like to buy me a coffee (or Humble Crumble Diwali special) you can do that here. 🥰
Hi Jennifer
Glad to hear you enjoyed the panel discussion at the embassy. :)
I have a small correction: The organic share in retail is currently 12 % in Denmark, not 20 %.
Have a good day.
Cornelius Simonsen, Danish Agriculture & Food Council.
Thanks for highlighting lovely Meetty Choc! They were so thrilled to see people enjoying their chocolate (although I did have to buy a THIRD suitcase to carry it all back. Every time I come back from Ukraine I have to buy another extra suitcase. I now have six suitcases, FML)