The shift to organic, fair trade and higher cocoa varieties over the past five years may have lessened our favourite treat food’s impact on the world, its people, and our waistlines. But now there’s a new type of chocolate on the block and it looks set to further raise the bar for green and healthy confectionary.
Producers of this kind of chocolate are expecting interest in it to far exceed the hype around the goji berry last year. They say what they’re offering tastes superior and will appeal to the rapidly growing number of people interested in living a more natural lifestyle.
This is raw chocolate: the bean, or nib of the bean, in its natural state – not cooked, over-processed or mixed with a vat of cheap filler ingredients. It’s also known as cacao and is being fused with coconut butter or agave syrup, as well as berries and nuts, to create confectionary. No vegetable fat, milk or sugar goes near it and, importantly, it isn’t heated above 42C, the point at which nutrients start to die.
“Cacao was never meant to be a candy bar loaded with rubbish – it is a powerful, healing, alchemical ingredient,” says Richard Turner, founder of the Raw Chocolate Shop.
Indeed, cacao is a very complex foodstuff with more than 300 chemically identifiable compounds. It is said to be significantly richer in antioxidant flavanols than green tea, red wine or acai, and contains protein, fats, calcium, iron, carotene, thiamine and riboflavinWe’ve been selling raw cacao nibs for some time now, amongst a wide range of other superfoods and at the recent Natural and Organic Show – raw snack bars and chocolate were being launched left, right and centre.WeThese new chocolate bars are both good for you and have less impact on the planet too.
We’ve been selling raw cacao nibs for some time now but a wide range of raw products are growing in popularity as witnessed by the sheer number of raw product launches at the recent Natural and Organic Show. In this piece we are focusing on raw chocolate but we’ll be adding a number of other snack products to our range in the near future.
What is raw chocolate? It’s the bean, or nib of the bean, in its natural state – not cooked, over-processed or mixed with a vat of cheap filler ingredients. It’s also known as cacao and is being fused with coconut butter or agave syrup, as well as berries and nuts, to create confectionary. No vegetable fat, milk or sugar goes near it and, importantly, it isn’t heated above 42C, the point at which nutrients start to die.
Indeed, cacao is a very complex foodstuff with more than 300 chemically identifiable compounds. It is said to be significantly richer in antioxidant flavanols than green tea, red wine or acai, and contains protein, fats, calcium, iron, carotene, thiamine and riboflavine.
As with many of the ’superfoods’, it doesn’t come cheap but a little goes a long way! We’ll be adding more raw products to our range but we have some fantastic bars to kick off with.
Click here to buy online at Garlands Organic.
