Willie's Cacao | Chocolate: Luscious Orange (50g)

BB Dec 7 2024

Simply delectable orange chocolate. It only took one visit to Cuba to fall in love with these exquisite single estate beans from Baracoa. Their delicate honey flavour is simply born to be with orange. Crafted from ‘bean to bar’ in my artisan chocolate factory in England, all my chocolates are 100% natural. Here you have one deliciously desirable square of chocolate. Pure Flavours. Pure Pleasure. Made in the U.K.

Ingredients: Cocoa solids 65% minimum. Cocoa mass, raw cane sugar, cocoa butter, essential orange oil 0.1%.

About Willie's Cacao: ‘Melt into a World of Adventure’. My passion for chocolate was born of a love of adventure. That spirit took me to Venezuela and led me to buy Hacienda El Tesoro in the cloud forest. Fifteen years later I started the first bean to bar chocolate factory in Britain for hundreds of years. I am a cacao farmer first, and an artisan chocolate maker second. My philosophy of chocolate? I’d like to introduce everyone to the beautiful dancing flavours of real chocolate, made with the great single estate cacaos of the world and 100% natural ingredients. The first thing I made with my own cacao was hot chocolate. Sitting on the mountainside we added water and fresh raw cane sugar to 100% cacao. It blew me away. When I tasted that purity of flavour I realised that the world had lost touch with what real chocolate is. Something that was once revered as the food of the gods had become nothing more than a sugary confection. I want everyone to experience some of the awakening I did. Few things give me more pleasure than watching someone gasping with delight as the chocolate melts and the realisation dawns that all that flavour comes simply from the cacao. My quest to make great chocolate takes me on the cacao trail into the forests of the world, in search of the finest beans. All my beans are traditionally shade grown Trinitarios or Criollos coming from single estates. Single estates cacaos are like fine wines, each one with its own stunningly individual flavour born of its genetics, soil and climate. One might taste naturally of nuts, another of summer fruits. I buy my beans direct from the farmers, and pay never less than $500 a tonne over world cocoa prices. The fair trade premium is $200 a tonne. That is $12,500 on a 25 tonne container and none of this goes to middle men. It is to capture these subtle notes and unique flavours that I make all my chocolate in small batches from bean to bar. I roast in antique ball roasters, and then take three or more weeks to make the chocolate at low temperatures. Industrial chocolate is made in a few hours. I grew up in a large family leading a virtually self-sufficient existence on an island off Southern Ireland. We kept goats for milk and cheese, milled our own grains and evaporated off sea water for salt. So using completely natural ingredients and making everything from scratch comes naturally to me. My dark chocolates contain just cacao, raw cane sugar and natural cocoa butter – no soya lecithin, no vanilla – nothing that gets in the way of the flavour of the bean. I don’t buy anything in. I caramelise the sugar and clarify the butter to make sea salt caramel as you would in a restaurant kitchen. I roast my own nuts to make pralines. The cacao takes a long journey from ‘bean to bar’. It is not something that can be hurried. In the Chocolate Factory, my role as Chocolate Maker is simply to help each bean develop and show its unique flavour as completely as possible. You could say it is a celebration of cacao.