On the other side of the lake, with the Alps in the distance, Simon Mouttet, co-director of the annual FOOD ZURICH festival, shows me around the city’s old town. From the high-end boutiques of Chocolat Dieter Meier and Max Chocolatier to the traditional H. Schwarzenbach cafe and the gaudy displays at famous confectioner Teuscher, the number of chocolate spots in Switzerland’s largest city is astonishing — each of them an integral part of the city’s identity.
From the guild houses and medieval churches of the old town, we head to the buzzing Binz quarter. Once little more than an industrial site, it’s now home to hip bars, restaurants and start-ups. A warehouse-like building now houses DasProvisorium, a collective that supports and promotes innovative, sustainable food projects, including Simon’s festival. Here, I meet Nadja Zehnbauer, of chocolatier La Flor, who tells me about the bean-to-bar movement shaking up Zurich’s chocolate scene. “The entire process should be sustainable, clean and fair,” she says. “The idea is to foster relationships with cacao farmers and, once you’ve received their fermented, dried beans, complete every step of the manufacturing yourself.”
The air in La Flor’s workshop is heavy with the smell of roasting cacao nibs. In the background, warm, chestnut-coloured cocoa mass (cocoa nibs combined with sugar and cocoa butter) is being ground between stone rollers in a shiny silver mill. In an adjoining room, vast plastic tubs of hardening chocolate will later be melted, conched and tempered before being piped into portions and cooled into bars. The final step, of wrapping individual bars in thick, pink paper, is being carried out by the mother of Laura Schälchli, one of La Flor’s founders.
Outside La Flor’s workshop entrance, in the communal area that forms part of DasProvisorium’s co-working space, I sit down with agronomist Fränzi Akert. She explains how she and her business partner Andi Brechbühl started Garçoa with the aim of promoting chocolate in its purest form. Only two ingredients are used in their bars: cacao beans and raw cane sugar.
The information on the back of their eco-conscious, tie-dyed packaging includes the origin of every cacao bean— imported from Ghana, India and Peru — as well as their harvest date.
“The basic flavour of the beans remains the same,” Fränzi tells me. “But because of changes in the weather, ripeness and fermentation, every harvest will taste different — just like wine”.
The next morning, at his workshop in the city’s green, gently hilly outskirts, I meet Taucherli’s Kay Keusen, who moved to Zurich in 2006, fell in love with the place and stayed. Kay has just returned from a chocolate-related trip to Indonesia. “My life is chocolate,” he beams, hopping up and down with excitement. A cacao bean is tattooed on the inside of one forearm; a bar of chocolate is inked on the other.
Kay started making chocolate in his garage four years ago, listing his flat on Airbnb and sleeping in his cellar to raise the capital. Today, his extraordinary passion and drive, his fastidiousness with bean quality and his global cacao connections has resulted in him producing two different kinds of chocolate: classic milk and an internationally renowned bean-to-bar offering. Kay’s goals are clear: he wants to make really, really good chocolate — and he wants everybody to eat it. And it turns out that, in fact, everyone here is eating chocolate. In the UK, consumption averages around 7kg per person each year. In Switzerland, that figure is around 10kg.
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Zurich: a dazzling tribute to all things chocolate - National Geographic UK
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