This is not just chocolate. This is not even M&S chocolate. This is chocolate from the Venezuelan village of Chuao, and probably the finest in the world. Made from cocoa beans harvested during the summer of 1998 and dried in the sun-baked courtyard of the small village church, this is a close as it gets to heaven on earth for Damian Allsop, a chocolatier. “It is the most exciting, the most incredible, the most perfect sensation. It has changed my perceptions of chocolate,” he says.
Allsop, it’s fair to say, is enthusiastic about chocolate. Cut him, and his blood might well turn out to be a delicious shade of brown. But it’s not the ordinary run-of-the-mill, sugar-based chocolate that attracts him. His new chocolate shop, Melt, in Notting Hill, West London, is all about the premier end of the market, pure cocoa-butter-rich chocolate.
Today, he’s making hand-dipped truffles in the shop’s open-plan chocolate kitchen. The truffles are one of his bestsellers, but soon he plans single cocoa-bean estate chocolate products. Chocolate, he suggests, is following the evolutionary path of wine. “Twenty years ago all people had was Blue Nun, now even the wine choice in corner shops is huge. The same is happening to chocolate,” Allsop, 36, says.
“Chocolate is the ingredient of the moment. People are appreciating the differences in taste that comes from where and when the beans are grown and how they are processed.”
Chocolate has something else in common with wine, too, Both were once regarded as being bad for the health. Now, reasonable amounts of red wine have been shown to have a protective effect in heart disease, some cancers, and a number of other disorders. And there has been a sea change recently in health attitudes to chocolate, too. Research indicates that it can have beneficial effects for a wide range of problems, from depression to high blood pressure. One study at the Erasmus University Medical Centre, in Rotterdam, and reported in the British Medical Journal, suggests that eating 50g of dark chocolate — which has to contain at least 35 per cent cocoa — a day may reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke by 10.5 per cent. Another study, at Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, found that cocoa can reverse some of the ill-health effects of smoking, while yet another, at the University of Kuopio, Finland, reports that dark chocolate increases good cholesterol.
The debate over whether or not chocolate is healthy revolves around two key groups of ingredients. Chocolate contains saturated fats, which have been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, but it also contains significant amounts of antioxidants, which have an established protective effect. Until relatively recently it was the saturated fats that held the high ground in the debate, so chocolate was seen to be bad, but the beneficial effects of antioxidants are now emerging as being more important. It’s also thought that one of the main saturated fats, stearic acid, does not have such an adverse effect as originally thought. It may, in the parlance of the researchers, be cholesterol-neutral.
The antioxidant effects of chocolate are considerable. The benefits increase with the cocoa content, with products containing 70 and 80 per cent cocoa healthier. According to Dr Eric Ding and colleagues at Harvard University, writing in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism, cocoa products contain a greater antioxidant capacity and larger amounts of flavonoids than tea, red wine, apples and cranberry juice.
“It is, therefore, important to explore chocolate’s potential effects on heart disease,” the Harvard researchers say in one of more than 500 scientific and medical papers to emerge worldwide in the past few years on the merits of chocolate and cocoa.
Dr Ding and his team also show that dark chocolate contains more than twice the amount of flavonoids as milk chocolate. Dark chocolate is also healthier, it is suggested, because milk may stop the body soaking up antioxidants.
Much of the research has centred on heart disease and strokes, and the emerging theme is that reasonable amounts are protective, largely through the antioxidant effect, although some of the studies caution that longer trials are needed.
A study at the University of California, for example, lists the potential benefits as lowering blood pressure, reducing risk of clotting, and less inflammation, but adds: “Larger, long-term clinical trials investigating the potential beneficial effects are certainly warranted.”
Effects have been found in other areas, too. Dr Chiaki Sanbongi, at the St Marianna University School of Medicine, in Japan, has shown that the antioxidant cacao liquor polyphenol, or CLP, is a major ingredient of chocolate and has a beneficial effect on the immune system. At the University of Helsinki, Dr Katri Räikkönen found that expectant mothers who ate chocolate daily were more positive and less stressed six months later.
Roger Corder, a professor of experimental therapeutics at Barts and The London, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, is pushing forward the debate over chocolate as a healthfood by applying for ethical approval for a trial of dark chocolate on 40 patients with heart disease. It’s likely that patients could get about 25g a day of 85 per cent cocoa chocolate.
However, not all the research shows benefits. An Italian study, for example, at the Instituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, in Milan, into the diets of women, found that those who ate the most sweets, including chocolate, had a slightly increased risk of breast cancer.
The realisation that a moderate amount of chocolate can be healthy has led to the arrival of chocolate healthfoods. A Yale University study suggests that Hershey’s Extra Dark chocolate can improve blood pressure and blood flow, while Mars has marketed CocoaVia, launched in the US last year, which contains flavonols and plant sterols that lower cholesterol.
Mars advises people to eat a CocoaVia bar (which carries the slogan “Be good to your heart every day”) daily to get the health benefits. Shops in the United States stock it next to muesli and it is also being sold in healthfood stores. Mars claim their special cocoa-extraction process means the chocolate retains more heart-boosting cocoa than normal chocolate.
But we may have to wait a while before we can reap the supposed benefits of “health” chocolate, as there are no plans to launch it on this side of the pond.
However, the majority view that eating chocolate has health benefits is good news for all chocoholics, many of whom will at some time find their way to Melt, Allsop’s chocolate emporium. They may even get to hear about, but, alas, not to taste, the fabled 1998 Chuao.
“Yes, the Chuao,” sighs the chocolate master, as he dunks another truffle. “The taste was like nothing I had tasted before. It was exciting. The way it opened, the way the flavour developed in the mouth, the whole structure was a new experience . . .”
Melt, 59 Ledbury Road, London W11; 020-7727 5030, www.meltchocolates.com
