LONDON TO MYSORE
I was a pastry chef in London and, before that, a bartender. As a reaction to alcohol and working with toxins, I got interested in the raw food movement, which was looking at the nutritional value of what was going into food. There was a stark contrast between cold processed, healthy cocoa and mass-produced industrial chocolate.
It all started out as a hobby and wasn’t supposed to be a professional thing. In the UK, I used to source my chocolate from Peru. I was looking towards Asia and discovered that Kerala had cacao and Karnataka was one of the biggest producers in India. I got some beans when I was on holiday in Gokarna and they were good.
At that time there was no good chocolate in India. My Indian friends would say that the chocolate is too sweet! So I thought that someone should do something good with the cacao growing in these states and that’s how it all started. I came to India in 2011.
KARNATAKA VS KERALA
The quality of the cocoa is the same but the flavour, really different. Which is funny because we’re not talking about Madagascar and Venezuela. The Kerala cacao is more feminine, meaning it’s much softer, smoother, not as fruity or acidic as the Karnataka cacao. The latter is more umami with hints of tobacco, much more aggressive. Connoisseurs tend to prefer the Karnataka cacao.
I plan to do a range of chocolates using cocoa from the different cacao-producing states in the country to show the range of flavours that’s available in India.
BEAN-TO-BAR
It means starting with the cocao bean and ending with a chocolate bar. Traditionally, chocolate-making is broken into two segments. One takes cocoa and mass produces liquid chocolate. The other takes that and adds flavours, seasonings and brands to it. So what we’re doing is bringing two industries together. That’s important as we can work with much smaller farmers and can directly impact and influence what they’re doing. We don’t use any milk solids in our chocolates and only use palmyra (palm sugar) and yes, our chocolates can be quite bitter. But they’re true to the cocoa we get in this country.
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GOING INDIAN
I had a bakery called Earth Loaf in the UK, which is where the name comes from. My experience as a bartender helped me come up with wacky flavours; Coffee & Pineapple, then there’s Gondhoraj & Apricot using gondhoraj from Bengal and apricots from Ladakh…. So all the work I’ve done, mixing drinks and flavours, influences the flavours for Earth Loaf chocolates. Most are very Indian. One I really like is the Mango, Red Capsicum & Chili with its vanilla flavour because these are not flavours one would expect from a chocolate bar. Another one that means pure south India for me is the jackfruit and black pepper chocolate.
Name: David Belo
Age: 30
Profession: Artisanal chocolate maker
Hometown: Cape Town, South Africa
Careergraph: I started by cleaning glasses and mopping the floor at TGI Fridays, Piccadilly Circus, and trained there as a bartender at 18. I ended up running the VIP room at Cafe de Paris, heading the LAB Bar (both in London), helped open a nightclub in Egypt (and you thought India’s bureaucracy was bad!), and helped set up the UK’s biggest whisky bar, Boisdale of Canary Wharf. I retrained as a bread baker in 2010 before opening Earth Loaf bakery. I moved to India in 2011, discovered cacao growing here and started this current chapter.
Claim to fame: Head bartender at LAB Bar, Soho, London. At the time, that was a pretty big deal in the industry. Along the way, served UK football stars, pop stars, and a myriad colourful characters. Also, invented the Belo Martinez (that was a damn good drink!).
CHOC A BLOC
What’s the one thing you can’t do/enjoy because you’re a tastemaker?
Mysore Pak! Too much fat and sugar! I’m not really a dairy fan either (forgive me, Bengal), so milky sweet things are out of the question. Also, crazy colourful syrup-filled drinks (booze or no booze).
If you had to make an Indian city your home, it would be…
I’ve been working on that for the past five years and her name is Mysore. I love Calcutta and Mumbai though, they both come in a close second for me. What I love about Mysore (besides the lack of traffic) is its warm people, greenery, and architecture and that it’s really an honest place. What you see is what you get with people. It’s very genuine and keeps you humble and grounded.
An Indian dessert chef you’ve been hearing any buzz about/want to tie up with
There are some chefs in other cities doing great work with our chocolate — chef Paul Kinny at 212 All Good Mumbai/ Pune and chef Gordon Galea at AnnaMaya Food Hall in Delhi.
The best classic chocolate combo is…
If you can pair the right dessert wine/port/Madeira (the latter is my ancestral island) with a good strong dark single-origin chocolate and the right cheese (I know I said no dairy, but for this I make an exception). Wow! It’s not easy, but wow! We recently paired smoked Bandel cheese with our 72% Keralan Single Origin Bar and a late harvest dessert wine and it was absolute heaven.
What is artisanal chocolate?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘artisan’ as a “worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand.” At Earth Loaf, our chocolate is harvested, sorted, tempered and wrapped by hand. This means a substantial reliance on skill which takes time to cultivate.
What are your favourites from Earth Loaf?
Our Gondhoraj & Apricot is a mainstay. I’ve been tweaking it for two years now, and I’m so happy with it. The floral tart flavour of the lemon just brushes up against the sweet and sour soft Ladakhi apricots, and then the chocolate jumps in to say hello. It’s a proper summer day affair. Our 72% Keralan is winning a lot of hearts. It’s vividly different from our Karnatakan Single Origin and is taking a lot of people by surprise, with hints of lemongrass, raspberry, light leather, tobacco, cedar and pepper. We just shipped out an order of 1,000 bars to London. Finally, our latest release: Mango, Red Capsicum & Chili; just try it!!
Where are the chocolates available?
Apart from some organic food retailers, they are sold at Gourmet West (Bangalore, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad), Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters (Mumbai and Delhi), Maalgadi Fashion Boutique (Chennai) and AnnaMaya Food Hall (Delhi). We’re talking with Spencer’s in Calcutta. Online, there’s Amazon and a myriad other great e-tailers.
What’s the pocket pinch?
The chocolate bars start from Rs 295 and the bonbons from Rs 220. We pay more than 150 per cent of the nationally set rate for cacao to promote organically certified practices and to encourage very high quality post-harvest processing techniques (really important for fine chocolate). Everything is done by hand, and we have an India-only sourcing policy — every rupee spent goes back to the community, to farmers, young chocolatiers, handmade paper makers, etc.
