Australia’s own Willy Wonka competition
October saw lucky winners embark on a plantation tour of Ghanaian cocoa farms. We spoke to two of the attendees to see how it went.
Earlier this year, a group of pastry chefs and chocolatiers held their breath, hoping their name would be drawn from the pool of hopefuls who had entered the competition for the trip of a lifetime. The draw, hosted by F. Mayer Imports, was to select a group of 46 guests to travel to Ghana to visit cocoa plantations.
Bernard Chu from Luxbite in Melbourne was one of the contestants chosen.
He said, “You had to cut out the label from the Callebaut chocolate bag and send it in. They announced my name. I can’t believe it because I’ve never won anything in my life.”
Bernard headed to Ghana with pastry chefs from all over Australia, including Jordan-Clair Newland from Mrs Jones the Baker in Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
“I’m still pinching myself that it happened,” said Jordan-Clair.
Bernard says visiting the working farms was touching.
“A guy was talking about drying the beans and one person added, ‘If I’m not at home my neighbour will pull the beans inside if it starts raining.’ The whole village was looking after each other. I thought it was just beautiful.”
Bernard and Jordan-Clair experienced picking and cracking open the beans, and fermenting, drying, competition and processing them into cocoa butter and cocoa mass.
The only drawback, according to Jordan-Clair, was a lack of chocolate to eat.
“I thought there would be lots of chocolate but there wasn’t,” she laughs, then adds. “It’s not a big part of their diet in Ghana. They grow it and they process it but they don’t eat it.”
And that’s something Bernard wants his chefs to know.
“The farmers don’t get to see the chocolate. Their life is the plants and then [the chocolate] gets shipped out. They never see what people do with it.
“I can pass down my knowledge to the younger chefs so they don’t open the bag of chocolate and take it for granted. People have been staying under the sun for hours and hours trying to survive with that plant, it’s all they have. If they have a bad harvest, it will affect their life. I want the younger chefs to appreciate that.”
Jordan-Clair adds, “I just didn’t know how much work went into cocoa and chocolate. It makes me appreciate chocolate so much more. I am trying not to waste any chocolate. It’s just not worth wasting.”
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