Milk, Magic & Myth

For five years we scoured the supermarket shelves, and trawled the internet, trying to find a decent vegan* milk chocolate. And 95% of the time, it went straight in the bin. Why? It tasted terrible. Again, why? Well, many were just dark chocolate masquerading as a milk. Some were gritty, not smooth. Most didn't melt right. Quite a lot had weird stuff like rice or coconut in them. Almost all were thin bars, not satisfyingly chunky. And a larger-than-ought-be-allowed proportion didn't actually have enough chocolate in them to be called chocolate, but 'choc'. And in one uniquely sad case, one bar committed all of the above deadly sins. We called this the insta-bin. 

Looking back, and knowing what we know now, what is unbelievably frustrating is that vegan chocolate doesn't need to be like that. It absolutely does not need to be like that.

What we have learned in our time making chocolate, is that it is fundamentally about two things; quality ingredients, and balancing flavours. After all, the principles of making good chocolate don't just go out the window because you add milk or not. Milk is not a magical ingredient. It's just an ingredient. But if you remove something creamy, you'd better make damn sure you've got something creamy to replace it with. 

Our offering to this dilemma is oats and hazelnuts. Walloping, dirty-great hits of the stuff, to offset the cocoa punch of 49% cocoa solids in our chocolate. And it works stupendously well. After all, who hasn't enjoyed lashings of hazelnut spread on toast, or partaken in a silky-smooth oat latte?

The key is balance; such that one ingredient doesn't overpower the other, and you're not getting a stodgy hit of breakfast oats, or a bitter cocoa bite. That's where it just takes time. We spent hundreds of hours refining our formula. Batch #25 is our main recipe, and between each batch were 7 to 8 test batches, taking some 3 days apiece. Adjusting this, tweaking that. It all takes time. And then making it yourself. That's the bit so many don't do, which I never understood. How can you call yourself a chocolate company if you don't actually make your own chocolate? Thats like a farmer who gets someone else to farm his crop, or a chef who gets someone else to make her food. Where's the passion?

Of the thousands of people we've spoken to, overwhelmingly they say the same thing, that vegan chocolate doesn't taste right. But when we ask those same people if they could tell our chocolate was plant-based? NOPE, is the astoundingly overwhelming response we get. (Apart from less than 10 people. We have actually been keeping count...don't worry, we'll get them eventually).

That's why we set up Chocoholics Anonymous. To solve the problem of vegan chocolate. Milk chocolate, without the milk. 

Yours Chocfully,

The C.A Team

*we lump plant-based and non-dairy under the same umbrella here.