Phil Landers, Chocolate Bars
LAND
Bethnal Green, East London
The east London bean-to-bar chocolate maker swapped a career in radio for the sweet stuff after discovering cacao on a trip to Central America. On his return, the self-confessed sugar addict worked at chocolatier Paul A Young before joining Mast’s London flagship in Shoreditch. In 2016, Phil started LAND from an old furniture maker’s workshop in Bethnal Green, making single-origin and single-bean chocolate bars by hand – from roasting, winnowing, grinding and conching to wrapping.
”I’ve really been enjoying our Filipino dark chocolate. I’ve got a sweet tooth and, although I do enjoy dark chocolate, I still automatically go for milk. However, this seems to have changed my natural choice: it’s not too intense and tastes like a chocolate digestive. I surprise myself with how often I’m eating it, although I’m always eating some sort of chocolate.
There is a bit of irony in that my parents owned a health-food shop when I was a kid, so I was always pushed towards a healthier diet. I still haven’t met anyone with as sweet a tooth as mine. My dad also had a tuck shop, so he used to store confectionery in the garage, and I remember trying to work out how I could get in there.
I had been working at the BBC for five or six years and I was taking a break. I wanted to go travelling; I pretty much closed my eyes and put a finger on a map and ended up going to Central America. I found myself in Nicaragua and did a couple of days work on a cocoa farm, and that’s where I started to realise that this was where chocolate begins, as a seed from a fruit tree. I then went to Guatemala, did the same thing again and first made my own chocolate – the trip was really eye opening. I never realised how chocolate could be interesting on so many levels, from the bean to the final product.
When I came back, I couldn’t really get this out of my head, to the point where I walked into [chocolatier] Paul A Young and asked for a job. Luckily they were looking for a shop assistant, so I started on the shop floor. Paul was great, he essentially taught me what quality chocolate is and how to hand-temper, which is a very small but crucial part of the process. He also taught me how to taste chocolate, which sounds strange, but there is a right way of doing it. Paul had a guest bar selection and that’s where I saw Mast Brothers, Duffy’s and Dandelion Chocolate – it was my first introduction to bean-to-bar chocolate. I started to buy my own DIY equipment and make chocolate at home to bring in for Paul. I was making some pretty terrible stuff for years.
“It’s about the quality of the chocolate, the sourcing and the farmers you work with
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I then worked at Mast Brothers when they opened in London, making chocolate from the get-go. I built up enough holiday to go back to Nicaragua to spend two weeks with the farmers, to go through the fermentation, drying techniques, going into the field and harvesting. It was that trip in 2015 that sealed the deal. I found an old furniture-making shop in Bethnal Green on Gumtree and as soon as I had that, I was ready to go. There was a growing interest in coffee and bread in east London, and I knew that chocolate was going to be like that eventually. The bean-to-bar aspect of the industry is still quite small.
It all starts with the cocoa bean; at the moment, I’ve got five or six different origins – mainly from South America and, as mentioned, I have now delved into the Philippines. The first job is to hand-sort all of the beans, then every origin has its own roasting profile because every bean has its own personality; it has hundreds of flavour compounds naturally within it and the roast is the first bit that encourages that development of flavour. I generally roast anywhere between 16 and 35 minutes, and there will be a lot of trial and error.
Once roasted, the next stage is cracking open the bean and winnowing [blowing away the outer shell, leaving the cocoa nib, which is what turns into chocolate]. The cocoa nib is then put into a stone grinder where the heat and pressure will break it down to liquid, and this is where you’ll add all of your other ingredients: sugar for dark chocolate or milk powder and sugar for milk. It’s in the grinder for at least 72 hours, then we throw it into the conching machine, which is the flavour development stage – it’s the kneading of the chocolate and also introduces hot air. (Raising the temperature of the chocolate will start to push out all the volatile flavours you get in the cocoa bean, and bring through the nuanced, nicer flavours.)
Again, you have different conching profiles, so you can conch for days (if you want to be left with a neutral chocolate tone) or you can do a short conch and leave in some of the acidity, which is sometimes quite nice and leads to more interesting flavours. Conching gives you a lot more control. Then it’s put in the tempering machine; chocolate needs structure to get that nice shine and snap, and it allows you to mould it into bars. Then we hand-wrap everything. It’s a four to five-day process, and a labour-intensive one – it’s not glamorous.
It’s all about the quality of the chocolate, of your sourcing and of the farmers you work with, and making sure everyone you work with is getting a fair chance of having a sustainable life. At the moment the people who are getting screwed over the most are the farmers. It’s a typical story you hear in the coffee industry, but it’s probably worse in chocolate. As soon as chocolate became a mass-market industry, big corporations generally wanted to make money so they sacrificed things: sometimes that was good-quality ingredients but also the livelihoods of farmers. The demand was so high for chocolate that farmers needed to make more, and it got out of control. The only reason I think it is now slowly changing is because we are now taking a lot more interest in our food and what goes into it – we never questioned chocolate before.
For small-batch chocolate makers like me, we’re working as directly as we can with farmers and giving them three or four times the Fairtrade price, because we all know that is nowhere near good enough either. We believe in sourcing the best-quality cocoa, so farmers deserve to get the right amount of money for it. It’s about working together. For example, if you do a great fermentation it improves the quality of your cocoa bean and therefore improves the quality of your product and you can get more money for it. There are now chocolate makers out there who will pay for that, and farmers are now like, hang on, if we work with chocolate makers to improve the farming side, then they will get more money for their product. That’s what they need to survive. It’s not a sustainable model for the farmer.
I can do a couple of batches a week – one batch of chocolate is about 50 to 60 kilos, so that’s about 800 bars. We’re getting to capacity now and growing out of our machines. We’re planning the next step of going bigger, better and more efficient. I always have about a tonne or two of cocoa beans in my workshop, which takes up a lot of space. We’ll stay in the same area; Hackney Wick looks like a potential, but we’ll see.”
For more, visit landchocolate.com
Photography: Land Chocolate
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