Big Interview
A new world of flavour
Kennedy’s Confection Editor, Kiran Grewal, sits down with Martin Christy: expert, educator and consultant of fine chocolate & cacao who tells us about ancient cacao and appreciating the origins of chocolate
Could you give us a background on your career in the chocolate industry? I was born in Slough, downwind of the Mars factory, so I like to think that chocolate got into my DNA somehow. I grew up though in Birmingham, eating Cadburys. Later in life, my chocolate journey moved up a gear when I got more interested in what was behind the sourcing and origin of food in general and of course my attention turned to chocolate. I first discovered good chocolate in 1992 in the chocolate section of Harrods in London. Valrhona had just began marketing their ‘Grand Cru’ chocolate bars in the UK. They were something completely new and it was the first time I saw chocolate mentioning the origin of cacao, Latin America and strange words like ‘criollo variety’. After a couple of bites, I was hooked, a new world of flavour opened up. Valrhona were much smaller then and it was something quite unique. When you taste the best of something you realise there is another level of quality you’ve been missing. It was hard to go back to ‘normal’ chocolate. Other chocolate makers soon followed, like Bonnat or Michel Cluizel. At that point I was a poor musician working as a computer programmer to earn an actual living. With friends, we set up
seventypercent.com as a technology test site and my hobby site. It turned out to be one of the three first websites talking about and reviewing origin chocolate. That really gave me a head start in the chocolate world, with a community formed around our chocolate forum. We also started to attract professionals from cacao countries, something I never expected, so this opened up the world of cacao for me, which was a whole new fascinating vista.
I always ate chocolate slowly, making the most of it. It took me until my 50s to realise that not everyone was the same, many people were munching! Eating chocolate slowly and giving it a chance to melt is key to understanding fine chocolate and paying a higher price for something good. Munch and the flavour won’t be there, the cocoa butter will have no time to melt.
6 Kennedy’s Confection May 2022
KennedysConfection.com
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