Food for Thought: Willie’s Cacao
Back in 1993, Willie Harcourt-Cooze was lying on Choroni beach in Venezuela when a beach-umbrella seller called Mervyn told him about a hacienda in the cloud forest for sale. The next day, Harcourt-Cooze went up to investigate “Hacienda El Tesoro”, a farm perched up in the Henri Pittier National Park’s treetops. He walked up past a river and into the shade of the canopy of the trees, all in full fruit with kaleidoscopic colour. The one-thousand-acre cacao farm left him lost for words, bar a mere three: “This is it.”
After three years of back and forth, he bought the farm, and Harcourt-Cooze’s chocolate-dipped odyssey began. The journey would see him travelling between the shores of Devon to the shores of Venezuela in the quest to create the best bean-to-bar chocolate money can buy.
Harcourt-Cooze explains why his Willie’s Cacao chocolate is truly “bean-to-bar”. The process begins with a pod ripening on a cacao tree; the pods are then opened; the beans are exposed to oxygen and fermentation begins. The beans develop their flavour in boxes covered with banana leaves before being sun-dried and shipped to his chocolate factory in Uffculme, Devon. Once they arrive, the cacao beans are roasted in antique ball roasters and in the conching stage, the bitterness is removed by adding extra ingredients, such as sugar – this step can take anything from two hours to two days. The chocolate is then tempered, warmed and cooled to the right consistency before the melted chocolate is poured into a mould. After the chocolate has cooled and solidified, it is wrapped and beautifully packaged, taking it from “bean-to-bar”.
Harcourt-Cooze says he is the biggest of only ten chocolatiers in the country that make the chocolate “bean-to-bar” and that your run-of-the-mill chocolates are not up to the right quality: “The reason big chocolatiers put a ton of vanilla and sugar in their product is to hide the fact their beans aren’t very good quality and not up to standard. If you see chocolate has soya lecithin in it, it means they are making it for profit, not for quality.”
As he tells me this, I feel as if I am talking to the real-life Willie Wonka – but think less Gene Wilder, more Johnny Depp. Like the fictional character, Harcourt-Cooze’s raison d’être is chocolate, “I am obsessive about it,” he tells me. “I wake up thinking about it; I’m constantly thinking about pairings and combinations.” A self-confessed insomniac and workaholic, he tends to be up far before the crack of dawn, heading off to his chocolate factory.
I ask for a grand virtual tour of the factory and as he proudly shows me, there are – disappointingly – no marshmallow pillows, candy cane lollipops, nor chocolate waterfalls. Instead there are lab-like rooms full of boxes, machinery and jars. The 56 year-old chocolatier has a slight air of crazed scientist about him – his passion for his craft is slightly maniacal but highly infectious. One room for example, has stack-on-stacks of jars; the contents of which include everything from pots of pickled garlic to elderberries in vodka, Indonesian seaweed, dates in rum, raisins in rum and kimchi. His love for foraging can be traced back to childhood, one which was spent on Horse Island, a wild stretch off Ireland’s South West coast. In this time, he and his four sisters made cheese, smoked fish, grew vegetables and pickled fruit. It therefore comes as no surprise that Harcout-Cooze stresses a “totally purist” approach to chocolate.
He tells me the jars are full of edible souvenirs he has picked up on his own Gulliver’s travels to the 35 countries he now sells to. “The experiences of my travels largely define the flavours of my products,” he explains. “I once went to see a Japanese tea master near Kyoto which inspired my Hojicha chocolate. Hojicha is made by toasting green tea in porcelain pots over charcoal which gives it a smoky, caramel taste; one that works perfectly with white chocolate.”
Harcourt-Cooze strongly believes that people should start treating chocolate as a fine commodity: “People need to start thinking of chocolate like a wine. For example, if I were going to make a hazelnut and raisin chocolate, I would get my cocoa from Peru as it has a raisin profile that complements it. A bar of orange chocolate? I’ll go to Cuba as it has honey-tones and honey and orange complement one another. It’s all about the pairing.”
However, some of the chocolate entrepreneurs’ pairings can seem rather unusual: “I did a cheese and chocolate pairing, soft cheeses with Columbian 88, ginger and lime chocolate, with a manchego”, he tells me – I feel rather queasy. “Some of the people were rather apprehensive but were amazed at how well it paired!” I take his word for it. A more recent pairing he’s done in lockdown – which he tells me with vehement enthusiasm – is a salt beef he did over a week ago: “The beef brisket was soaked in salt and brine solution and a few hundred grams of roasted cocoa nibs and left it for ten days. It was off the spectrum!”
All this chocolate chat sent appetites soaring, which meant it was time for the ultimate digestif – what is Willy Wonka having for his last ever supper? For his starter, Harcourt-Cooze will have homemade toast with avocado with two fried duck eggs “from his own ducks”. along with a little bit of kimchi, chilli and, naturally, 100% cacao on top of the eggs. For his main, he shouts “a mole poblano!” (a Mexican dark red or brown sauce served over meat). He’d refine that into a paste, cook it with chicken and use vegetables from his garden to make a celeriac puree or some steamed leeks. For pudding, it’s a Mexican chocolate ice cream with chilli. To wash it down, Harcourt-Cooze will have some Japanese whisky – a bottle of Hibiki 21.
Willie’s Cacao is a unique chocolate business driven and inspired by an even more unique entrepreneur. It is exciting to see just how enthusiastic Harcourt-Cooze is, in “raising the bar” of chocolate; it’s clear he is in the game for pleasure as well as profit. I ask Devon’s own answer to Willie Wonka if he has anything in the pipeline, to which he smirks, and says he is bound to secrecy. “It’s all about flavour,” he hints. A hint so ambiguous it catapults all my wild guesses into a world of pure imagination.
We hope Reaction readers didn’t give up chocolate for Lent as Willie Harcourt-Cooze has given a gift to subscribers with a 20% discount off any full priced item on their website www.williescaco.com. Just use the code: reaction15 (expires 18/3/21).
Chestnut, walnut and chocolate cake served with salted caramel ice cream and rum-soaked raisins
Serves 8-10
Ingredients
100g slightly salted butter
90g unrefined granulated or caster sugar
5 large eggs, separated
400g vacuum packed cooked chestnuts in a jar
120g 70% chocolate, chopped into small pieces/ or use 100% instead
80g walnuts, roughly chopped
40g raisins, soaked 48hrs in 4 tbsp of chocolate Nocino, rum or Cognac
Method
Beat the butter, sugar and egg yolks in a mixer for a few minutes.
Meanwhile blend the chestnuts in a food processor until they are slightly coarser than ground almonds. Then add to the butter mixture along with all the other ingredients except the egg whites.
Whisk the egg whites until quite stiff and fold into the butter and chestnut mixture.
Then tip into a 28cm tin which has been lined with parchment paper and buttered. Place in a 180oC oven for 25 minutes or until set. Allow to cool.
Serve with vanilla ice cream or cream.
Best eaten warm on the day.
Notes: add a little lemon zest / or orange zest if you like.