When we considered the idea of making chocolate professionally, we didn’t know if it would be possible to make good stuff on a small scale, since the best chocolates we’d eaten had always been produced by large, longstanding names like Guittard or Valrhona. I had some serious concerns about the unfamiliarity of tropical agriculture, industrial machinery costs, et cetera, so I read every book and research paper on cacao and chocolate making I could get my hands on. A couple years and lots of planning later, I was convinced we could do it, but a different question kept nagging at me: We could make chocolate, but could we make great chocolate? Wait, what is great chocolate?
Mary, having said something untoward about Ethel's shoes, was shunned all day Tuesday.
It turns out that is harder to quantify than you might initially think. Before we began making chocolate, we set about defining great by tasting as many different chocolates as we could. Most were good. Some were not. Some were interesting and some were not. Eventually we found ourselves gravitating toward bars with unusual or complex flavor profiles since we found them the most fun to taste. We thereby established
Leleaka Principle #1: Great chocolate is interesting, so we will make interesting and complex chocolate.
"Clay pot" and "wet gravel" are two of my favorite flavors.
With that established, I focused our research tastings exclusively to bars/manufacturers that were famed for having unusual flavor profiles resulting from the cocoa bean origin or processing techniques. Some of our tastings involved five or six bars where each was indeed unique and enjoyable to taste, but when the tasting concluded, we weren’t left compelled to eat the remainder of any of them. $80+ on six bars of chocolate and we only consumed about 10% of each bar before losing interest. Chocolate had been “elevated” to dry, coarse bars that evoked a wealth of flavors that you needed an organoleptic wheel to pinpoint, but they were not inherently pleasant to eat. There was a fatigue from these tastings because chocolate had become inflated with all the pomp of wine while losing characteristics that make it pleasant.
Leleaka Principle #2: We will make chocolate we want to eat, not just taste.
Driven by those two principles, we push chocolate flavor to a higher level and pay equal focus to enhancing what that makes it such a pleasure to eat: its smooth, silky richness with the right amount of sweetness. Welcome to Hawaiian luxury chocolate from Leleaka.
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