Find my Bean-to-Bar Chocolate on FoodiePages.ca!

As some of you know, I have been making bean-to-bar chocolate for some time now. I started out making stone-ground style chocolate several years ago, and have helped many people use various home equipment to make simple chocolate for personal consumption. You can find a variety of recipes posted to this blog.

I have also been testing different cocoa beans for review for suppliers for quite some time with a more professional refiner, making creamy, smooth chocolate.

Since then, I have been testing cocoa beans for my own chocolate business (Ultimately Chocolate) and began selling my new chocolate bars locally at events, and more recently at a few of my local retailers. I have new packaging in the works and will officially 'launch' when that is ready, but in the meantime, you can now find my chocolate online on the FoodiePages website.

Making chocolate is a labour of love. Sorting, roasting, winnowing, refining, molding and hand-wrapping chocolate takes weeks to complete from start to finish. It has truly been an 'eye-opener' for me to understand the process, and better understand the craft chocolate and chocolate makers that I have been reviewing over the last several years. It has taught me more about cocoa beans than I could ever have learned from research, and improved my palate a great deal when tasting both chocolate and cocoa beans.

In addition, selecting just the right cocoa beans, then deciding which recipe will bring out the best flavour of those beans is a part of the craftsmanship of chocolate making. I have been testing a variety of beans, deciding on roast times and temperatures, deciding on my 'cocoa butter philosophy' and how creamy I like my chocolate to be, and choosing sugar % and cacao % for each bar. I have made test batches using different sugars, and have created tasting kits of different origins.  And now, I've finally settled on a few bars that can be found on FoodiePages (as well as sold locally in Northern Ontario): a Mexico 60% dark chocolate, a Honduras 70% dark chocolate, a Buttermilk 48% dark-milk chocolate, and a 100% Honduras unsweetened chocolate.

In addition, my crunchy, flour-free CacaoCookie is now made entirely from bean-to-bar using my Honduras-origin chocolate.

This has been the most enjoyable-yet-pain-staking process I have every gone through (aside from carrying and delivering my children, of course). I am super excited to introduce these products to you, and to my loyal local customers of the last 8 years here on Manitoulin Island and in the Sudbury region. It is also exciting to be the first bean-to-bar chocolate maker in Northern Ontario!

For more information about my bean-to-bar chocolate, or if you would like to purchase Ultimately Chocolate's products from outside of Canada, please send me an e-mail at info @ ultimatelychocolate.com.

And don't worry, I will still be sampling hundreds of other makers' chocolates, and telling you about them here on the blog! I am a writer, chocolate reviewer, and recipe developer at heart, and this blog is still an outlet for my passion for chocolate makers and their work, chocolatier and artisan chocolate, and chocolate made all around the world.

Have a great day!