The beginnings of our chocolate...
I’d like to share my story of how I came to make Adam’s Chocolates.
Unlike most chocolatiers, my journey into cacao came as I search for health. It began with a need to improve my diet, to help me recover from a sports injury. And it ended with the knowledge that incredible ingredients = incredible foods!
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
It started more than 20 years ago when I was playing hockey with every spare moment I had. It was a huge part of my life not just for the competitive element but for the social side.
I suffered a back injury. Years of muscles twisting around two fused sections of bone had eventually torn and left me with crippling pain whenever I moved. It impacted everything I did, and completely cancelled hockey. I was patient with recovery, however time passed and I wasn’t improving. I had plenty of support, chiropractors and physio, but the fact was my muscles had grown around an unnatural shape of my spine and had torn. They weren’t healing.
As much as my doctors supported me we seemed to be going round in circles. I would read and read, try any ideas that came my way, and talk to anyone who had suggestions they could share them with me.
FOOD IS YOUR MEDICINE
I was living in the Wye Valley, on the edge of the Forest of Dean where I grew up, which has some lovely communities and plenty of people in touch with nature. It was one of these who heard my story and made it quite clear to me that the solution was in my diet. I had a good diet at the time, or so thought. At least two veg on every plate. Plenty of fruit, a few nuts, I thought there was a reasonable balance and variety to what I ate.
I hadn’t thought there was more I could/should do. But I was so far down the road and still not on the right path, I was ready to try anything.
Here is where I was fortunate, I had time to focus on this, as previously described I was desperate to try anything, and so I was taken in and taught how to work with food to support my body; to eat in specific ways to support bodily functions as opposed to simply balancing a diet. I found it was possible to feel fuller and more satisfied than I had previously through any sort of massive meal or Sunday roast I’d had in the past.
RAW FOOD
Convinced by early progress, I committed to a raw food diet with the specific purpose of giving my body the nutrients to enable it to repair the damage to my muscles itself, to grow and heal back stronger. At least that was the idea.
The point of a raw food diet is that you benefit from the full micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, all those building blocks that the foods have to offer. You don’t cook above a certain heat (in order to avoid damaging any valuable ingredients during the cooking process). And essentially you also cut out specific foods which might work against your body's ability to process as much good stuff as possible.
Easy examples of the negatives are processed fats,such as milk, which when you look into ingredients labels appears in so many packaged foods. Of course this is because our bodies like it, it gives us an initial boost, and helps flavours. But really it gets in the way of nutritious consumption; our bodies process and digest the easy fats as a preference instead of picking up on the minerals in a food, and we miss out on digesting as much of the beneficial content as we could be doing.
A raw food diet is a commitment, and it may not be right for people at certain stages of their lives, but it worked well for me. My goodness did it work. It blew my mind actually. Within 6 months my back was pain free, strong and had repaired itself. I was back on the hockey pitch and have been for the 20 years since.
THE ANSWER
As I had been eating for a purpose I was pushing to find the strongest food containing each mineral. And when you start to search for the plants with the highest recorded levels you start venturing to areas of the world lesser known to UK palettes. I’d discovered a seemingly endless range of foods, roots, powders, syrups, nuts and seeds: maca, yacon, suma, lucuma, camu, goji, agave. People thought I was making things up. After a while, I started to wonder too.
Like I said, a raw food diet is a commitment and you need time to obtain and prepare the foods to really benefit, so once I had healed my injury I scaled back gradually and have relaxed my diet, although I am still a vegetarian.
But I wanted to keep this powerful lesson I had learnt at the forefront of my diet. I was so attuned to keeping high nutrient food in my daily life that I noticed if I wasn’t getting the boosts I had become used to, the satisfaction of eating meals without additives. I wanted to continue in some way dosing myself with the highest nutrient foods that I could, to keep myself strong and in the best condition to face the challenges of life.
CACAO
And that brings me to cacao. Certainly for me, the most pleasing element of a raw food diet is chocolate. How had this been kept so quiet?!
Cacao is hands down the most mineral rich plant in the world. It’s mineral content is way too long to list. A highlight of the 200 or so benefits is the inclusion of all 9 essential amino acids - these are the ones that our body cannot produce itself. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which do a lot of hard graft to help our body repair when we have a problem. Cacao has them all.
To support my raw food diet I’d been making my own chocolate recipe, as many raw-foodists will do. I was heating raw cacao gently over steam from a saucepan of water (to this day a traditional Peruvian/Andean method of preparation) and stirring myself (for hours) and then pouring into a tray and leaving to set in the fridge. I didn’t want to add dairy, gluten or soy as they would impact the effectiveness of the benefits. And absolutely no refined sugar. That is an instant no.
I’d found the Peruvian root yacon came as a syrup and could sweeten the choc without impacting the richness and natural feel of the flavours. It gave a lovely fudgey texture to the mix and as I ate this around friends I was quickly realising I had to make larger batches or I wouldn’t have enough for myself.
Yacon is a world until itself and I’ll write more on another day.
GETTING THE BENEFITS
Free from negatives I wanted to encourage my body to process the mixture, and the key for this is vitamin C. We all know it’s good for us, and the reason is it helps us to absorb the beneficial products in our foods. I couldn’t add fresh oranges, but I didn’t need to as camu, lucuma, and whole goji berries have an awful lot more vit c per gram than an orange does.
After that it was all about variety, trialling different flavours to see what was interesting and works. Our Coconut & Banana came from experiments with virgin coconut oil which has plenty of good fats, and the texture works perfectly with the quite incredible sun dried bogoya bananas.
MInt and Blood Orange are the pleasing results of working with essential oils. Pistachios, hazelnuts, blackcurrants are all excellent and recognisable flavours without processing the fruit or nut, just nature as it should be, meaning the benefits are as full as they can be. The mildness of the yacon allows these flavours to really be pronounced.
And that is really how it all started. Over time and with encouragement I realised there was real popularity to what I had produced. I’d pushed the benefits on those around me and in turn they pushed me to spread the health I’d found to others.
Through the years my techniques and controls have improved but the essential recipes have stayed the same. The depth of flavours we’re able to achieve is all down to the quality of ingredients and our choice of production methods. The satisfaction I get from the richness of our flavours holds to this day, and all this whilst really I’m just trying to get ahead on my diet and give my body the best intake of micronutrients.
CHOC A BLOC’S
Thanks for reading through my story. I wanted to finish by saying that the health factors within my chocolates are also the reason I wanted to make our Choc A Blocs available for customers to try. It is the chocolate in the format it was originally produced when I was stirring it myself over a steam bowl in my home kitchen.
It is the format we use to bulk deliver for cafes and restaurants. Able to be kept in the fridge and chopped up as we need and want, it retains its freshest texture. You really notice the difference in the quality of the texture. If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should.