Chocolate starts out looking nothing like the sweet treat so many people love.
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Its taste bud-tickling qualities are derived from the beans inside the large, yellow pods that grow on the cocoa tree, a tropical plant native to South and Central America that has spread to equatorial Asia and Africa.
Now, one Bendigo chocolatier has gained first-hand experience of the origins of the delectable food in a recent trip to the western African country of Ghana.
Hayley Tibbett, owner of Indulge Fine Belgian Chocolates, travelled to Ghana last month with importer F. Mayers and Barry Callebaut, which makes the products from which she creates her chocolate.
While there she visited cocoa plantations, processing plants and warehouses, seeing for herself the very first steps in the chocolate creation process.
Even with her nine years of experience making chocolate and running a business, the trip still presented educational and eye-opening experiences for Ms Tibbett.
She explained to the Bendigo Advertiser how she saw plantation workers cut the cocoa pods from the trees with long pieces of bamboo topped with a blade, collect the felled pods in baskets balanced on the tops of their heads, and use machetes to cut them open to harvest the beans.
"When I saw this on the first day, I thought, 'Oh, this is how they used to do it’,” she said.
“(But) this is how they do it now. So they're still using the same techniques, nothing's changed, there's nothing amazingly different."
After harvesting, Ms Tibbett learned, the beans are fermented in banana leaves for several days, then left out to dry on big mats in the sun.
Once the beans are ready, the farmers send them to a local purchasing clerk where they are bagged into 65-kilogram sacks, sent to a district depot, and eventually on to production and processing sites to create the ingredients for chocolate: cocoa liquor, and from that, cocoa butter and cocoa powder.
Ghana has become the second-largest cocoa-growing country in the world since the first cocoa trees were planted there in 1879.
But Ms Tibbett said most of the farms in Ghana were small, family-run operations of only about five acres in size, on average.
On her trip, she also learned more about how the Barry Callebaut company supports cocoa growers and their communities, and promotes sustainability; while it was the company’s chocolate she fell in love with when learning her trade, she said it was good to know she was dealing with an organisation with an ethical outlook.
Ms Tibbett told the Bendigo Advertiser her trip to Ghana was “life-changing” and had given her a revitalised view on her chocolate.
“I have an appreciation of where it's actually come from now,” she said.
“Because I knew the process, but actually seeing it… now I get how much goes into it.”
She also has a greater appreciation for the people who work at the very beginning of the chocolate chain.
“Every part of the process from the beginning to the end is all about the people that are involved,” Ms Tibbett said.
“They love what they do... to get those cocoa beans to grow, it's not just a matter of sticking a tree in the ground and having it, it pops up, and that's it…. You're not going to do your job well unless you love what you do."
She said visiting a country where residents were less well-off than those people in Australia had also given her more gratitude for her day-to-day life.
“It also comes back to appreciating what I've got here, and how much we all should be thankful for where we do live and how lucky we are,” she said.
Inspired by her trip, Ms Tibbett has since launched an ‘origin’ chocolate bar, which, unlike most chocolates which contain a blend of beans, is made exclusively from Ghanaian beans.
"So I can actually talk about it and go 'I went there, I saw it, this is how it does happen and it's special',” she said.
Like wine and coffee, the flavours of chocolate are influenced by the place in which the cocoa beans are grown.
Ms Tibbett said her Ghana chocolate was slightly richer with 40 per cent cocoa, compared to her standard milk chocolate of 33.5 per cent, and had a smooth flavour with caramel notes.
“So hopefully, by buying that, it all helps,” she said.
Ghana is a long way from the renowned Savour Chocolate and Patisserie School in Melbourne, where Ms Tibbett first learned the skills of her vocation about 10 years ago.
Ms Tibbett came from a family immersed in food – her parents owned the former Pasta Pantry on Mitchell Street – and before she ‘discovered’ chocolate, she worked in administration and as a gym instructor.
It was after talking to someone else who worked in chocolate that she realised it was something she, too, could do.
Next month she will celebrate the ninth anniversary of the opening of Indulge in the Bendigo Bank building.
"I've always loved chocolate, but when I actually found the difference between... supermarket chocolate and couverture, artisan chocolate, it's a whole different ball game,” Ms Tibbett said.
“And I thought, I've been in food but... that food didn't excite me – but this is like 'Oh my god, if only I'd found this when I was 25, instead of over 40, it would have been great'.
“I found it at the wrong time in my life, but at least I found something I love.”