Bean-to-bar chocolate made in one room on Brickfield Road, Salt River.
See the barsOur beans come off a co-operative of about four hundred smallholders in the Western Region of Ghana, shipped once a year in a container we split with two other makers down the road. It is a Forastero crop and not a fashionable heirloom variety, and we buy it because it is honest, because it arrives the same every year, and because the growers are paid against a published price we are happy to show anyone who asks at the door. Everything on this page is made from that one delivery at percentages between forty-five and seventy, so when a bar tastes different to the one you bought last winter, that is the harvest talking and not us quietly changing the recipe.
Nomsa roasts on a converted coffee drum every Tuesday and Thursday, twelve kilos at a time. The winnower is a shop-vac, two buckets and a length of stormwater pipe, and it works. Every batch turns in the melangeur for seventy-two hours, which is what makes it smooth — not anything we add to it. Tempering is the last step and the only one that decides whether a bar snaps or bends, so it is done by hand on the marble and tested before a single mould is filled.
Unit 4, 118 Brickfield Road, Salt River — weekdays 09:00 to 16:00. Oranjezicht City Farm Market, Saturdays 07:00 to 14:00. 021 447 9026, or say in the message what you are after.
