After a whisky chocolate dinner and an interview with David Bello, Earth Loaf’s founder, I’m trying to gather my thoughts, but the bar of chocolate is distracting. Wrapped in candy pink bearing a peacock motif, it’s anything but candy. Deep dark chocolate of Kerala origin, made with palmyra sugar and locally-sourced ingredients, 72 per cent is wood-fermented in cedar boxes. The chocolate is dark and slightly bitter, has a fruity finish and a woody earthiness that comes from the cedar wood boxes, a first in many ways.
For the socially conscious consumer, Earth Loaf ticks all the right boxes. The cocoa is single origin, sourced from either Karnataka or Kerala — there’ll be one from Tamil Nadu soon — the sweetener used is local palmyra, the farmers are closely involved in the production and it’s all hand-made. From ‘bean to bar’, as Bello is fond of saying, it’s a local Indian product but it took a Londoner with Greek roots to make it.
Originally, the name of Bello’s bakery in London, Earth Loaf, came to India when the Londoner moved to Mysore with his partner Angelika in 2012. What started as 3-4 kg of hand-made chocolate for friends and family became a registered company that works with cocoa farmers in Karnataka to create a sustainable Indian chocolate brand. A one-man show today, Earth Loaf is Bello’s baby, as he calls it, and he does everything from sourcing cocoa beans to web-designing for the site and even creating the lovely packaging that features a peacock motif from the Chittara art of the Malnad region. Today, Bello calls Mysore home, and having grown up in South Africa, took to Indian climes like a fish to water. “I love the heat! I thrive in it,” he grins.
Artisan, vegan, raw: there are many labels that Earth Loaf identifies with, but that’s not what its selling point is. For Bello, it’s simply his vision, translated through fine chocolate. Which is why the bars are specific in their flavours; they aren’t trying to cater to a variety of palettes. “There have been people who tried our chocolate, disliked it or found it too bitter. But they came back, to try another flavour. A second, third, even a fourth time. They are willing to experiment and they keep coming back,” he says. Well aware of the Indian sweet tooth, Bello is just putting out into the market something he enjoys himself: dark chocolate with some unusual pairings. And there’s also the story behind each bar.
Bello knows the farmers personally; he’s even learnt Kannada to converse with them. And he prices his products a bit on the higher side, because he believes that the farmer should get his fair share. The bars are all processed by hand, from the grinding of the beans to the final packing. His 72-per cent bars of single-origin raw chocolate are paired with unusual ingredients like gondhoraj, a lemon that’s somewhere between the Italian lemons used to make limoncello and an African kaffir lime found only in parts of Bengal and Assam, smoked salt, dried apricots, nuts and more. Bello’s background as a mixologist is reflected in how he pairs flavours, often reworking an idea for months at a time, until he gets it right. “Even when I was bartending back in London, I’d work on a single cocktail, like a Martinez, for about six months till I got it right,” he says. And it’s the same with his fruit pairings. Recently, he’s been trying to infuse a jamun-like fruit native to Karnataka into his chocolate, without much success. “The chocolate keeps overpowering it, so I’m trying different things. I’ve been trying to squeeze the essence out of the rind of the fruit, like how you would a bergamot, but it didn’t work. So now I’m trying to dry the rind, powder it and see if that will work better.”
For a country that’s quite a prolific producer of cocoa, India seems to be a relative newcomer when it comes to the bean-to-bar chocolate.
“Cocoa was originally brought to India from Indonesia in 1798, by the East India Company,” Bello says, “and India has had varieties of cocoa growing, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that Cadbury decided to push cocoa farming in India.”
Much like the coffee culture that came from the West to show us the amazing varieties we have in India, there’s a wave of chocolate appreciation that’s slowly gaining ground.
A far cry from the candy bars you see at grocery stores, today’s artisanal chocolate is locally sourced and handmade. Its tasting notes range from woody and fruity to acidic, and is affected by the terroir, and lends itself to all kinds of pairings from food to wine and whisky.
And this chocolate evangelist from Mysore is more than happy to introduce us to our own hidden chocolate treasures.
