Treat time: the chocolate bar-making class at Cocoa Jones delivered to our own tastes
Roving reporter KEN TOWL visited Croydon’s own chocolatiers and got a flavour of the hand-made chocolate business
“Your next assignment,” said the Editor, “is to visit Cocoa Jones in Purley and make a bar of chocolate. That’s what they do there.”
The clue, as usual, is in the name: “cocoa”, the plant from which the popular drink and confection are derived, and “jones” the 60s jazz slang word for addiction.
Ethically sourced: a cocoa pod and beans
Fortunately, I am pretty resistant to temptation and wasn’t too worried about getting hooked, so I booked via the user-friendly Cocoa Jones website. This was for one of the last of the “School’s Out: Passport to Chocolate” events which ran up to last Saturday, and which cost Inside Croydon a reasonable £15.
The session was run by siblings Zain and Zara. Their mother is the chocolatier while their father “deals with the finances”.
Cocoa Jones has two properties on The Parade at the bottom of Old Lodge Lane in Purley, a shop and an atelier. We started in the shop with Zain, who showed us a cocoa pod and some cocoa beans and gave us a brief history of chocolate and its origins in the Americas.
Slow and smooth: it is important to temper the molten chocolate just right
We were Navya, Aishani, Frederick and me, the four people who had booked for that 3pm session, though they have capacity for up to a dozen or so people.
After learning about the social and historical context of the product, we were ushered next door to the workshop, where Zara invited us to don hairnets. “You don’t want hair in your bar,” she said, then explained the tempering process, and gave us the good news that we would be making two bars each.
Tempering chocolate is a careful process of heating and cooling melted chocolate, so the cocoa butter fats form stable crystals.
Our tempered chocolate was poured into moulds and we were given a choice of flavourings to add. I added coconut and fudge to one and mango and biscoff crumbs to the other. There was also pineapple and hundreds and thousands for those who fancied them. Frederick fancied pineapple while Aishani made a bar loaded with coconut and chunks of biscoff.
End product: everyone must know someone who likes chocolate
While our bars cooled, we returned to the shop where we had a short class in marketing, with a focus on packaging design. We were then invited to…design our own packaging. Thus, we went next door again and coloured in the plain white wrappers that were to house our treats. I used stamps and a fairly minimalist approach, the best tactic, I thought, to disguise an almost complete lack of creative ability.
Our bars wrapped, we returned to the shop and were asked if we wanted to try a few samples. The question felt superfluous.
Unsurprisingly, the chocolate, especially the dark chocolate, is deep and complex of flavour, a world away from the cheaper mass-produced version. Turns out that Cocoa Jones source directly from producers and pay ethical prices. So, morally good chocolate – what’s not to like?
The hour was up and it had been fun. I would recommend making chocolate bars with Zain and Zara. Even if you don’t like chocolate, you almost certainly know someone who does…
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