TasWeekend: Chocolatier is simply full of beans
After 30 years in the business, top-end chocolatier Igor van Gerwen continues to uncover the industry’s far-flung secrets, including the purest cocoa in the world.
Taste Tasmania
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IT is donkey’s years since Igor Van Gerwen made his first truffles, but at the age of 53 the Latrobe chocolatier is more obsessed than ever by cocoa beans. He will go anywhere to source superior varieties for his famous House of Anvers range. For the love of fine chocolate, Igor has crossed a flooding Amazon source river by canoe, disappeared into a rainforest as strangers coaxed him deeper in with rare-bean promises, and slipped down a steep and muddy track with a burra, or donkey, laden with the day’s harvest.
Tomorrow he will share some of that love — and some of those adventure stories — with visitors to Latrobe’s annual Chocolate Winterfest.
The artisan maker has always been adventurous. It takes a certain spirit for a lad to go south across the seas from Belgium on a job tip-off. Igor was 20 years old when he farewelled his family in Antwerp and headed across the world to Tasmania, having heard a new bakery at Devonport was seeking European pastry chefs. Already the native Flemish speaker was fully qualified as both a patissier and chocolatier. Inspired by his weekend job at a local bakery, he attended a trade school from the age of 12 and had his trade ticket when he was still a teenager.
Igor baked by day in Devonport and made chocolates by night, launching his business in 1989 and naming it with the French spelling of Antwerp. At the time he was a curiosity; he estimates he was one of just a handful of artisan European chocolatiers working in Australia.
He found a ready market and was soon stocked at the prestigious David Jones Food Hall in Melbourne as well as several speciality stores in Tasmania.
When he won the best newcomer award at his first major food fair as exhibitor, it soothed the humiliation of having to wheel around his wares on a dicky little trolley that was cheaper than hiring his own space.
Decades later, his intrepid annual sourcing forays to South America yield both rare beans and inspiration for his work as he delves into ancient chocolate-making traditions.
The home of the House of Anvers is a Californian bungalow also known as Wyndarra Lodge off the Bass Highway at Latrobe in the state’s North-West.
It’s lunchtime when we arrive and an open fire is burning at the cosy cafe in the front rooms. Smiling waitresses circulate, delivering hearty hot meals and chocolate drinks. We pass a hallway museum of vintage chocolate packaging and tools of the trade, including antique moulds dating back to the 1830s, en route to the factory floor, where staff are stamping best-before stickers onto fudge bars.
Nearby, tempering wheels keep liquid chocolate on the move, and only the thought of that awful greedy boy Augustus Gloop tempers my desire to dip a finger into the silken couverture before we have a go at dipping and rolling truffles.
The log-shaped treats have been Igor’s bestseller from day one, and for our session he has prepared a tray of piped, fridge-set centres for us to dip into the couverture before coating them in melt-in-the-mouth flakes. Left to rest, the centre will soften as the couverture sets hard at room temperature.
“It must look rough from the outside, like a grown truffle, which is where the name comes from,” Igor says. “A truffle must have a soft creamy centre with a crunchy outer. When you bite into it is meant to snap and then go through to the cream.”
It is a reversal of the process he uses to make his glossy soft-centre pralines, when fillings are poured into a chocolate-lined mould and sealed with a base layer of chocolate.
We talk more over a ploughman’s lunch of pumpkin soup, house-baked bread rolls, cured meats and Ashgrove cheeses in a warm, atrium-style dining room generally reserved for big tour groups. He keeps bus tourists separate from regular cafe guests. These things matter, says the food tourism pioneer; the acoustics of a hungry horde of 50 off a coach can quite affect the ambience of an extended family lunch and he likes to keep his home crowd happy and coming back.
Though it seems quite busy, Igor says we have come on what is traditionally the quietest fortnight of the year. Tomorrow’s Winterfest will take care of that, bringing an estimated 10,000 extra guests to the town.
Taking in not only the House of Anvers but much of Latrobe, the annual event has plenty of light-hearted activities such as chocolate throwing and cupcake decoration, as well as sessions for connoisseurs including wine and chocolate matching and the art of praline design. If you see Oompa Loompas in purple riding by on bicycles, don’t worry, they are quite harmless.
Igor will lead a masterclass on truffle making and chocolate appreciation at House of Anvers.
High tea, morning and afternoon tea and hot drinks will be served in a big marquee in the rambling gardens.
Many hands will be on deck and there are plenty of them, with the various operations here — including the factory, cafe and adjoining chocolate-tasting centre — employing the equivalent of 28 full-time staff. Six are chocolatiers, formally trained on the job by Igor.
Each year, the team produces 60 tonnes of artisan chocolates and greets 80,000 visitors to the House of Anvers, 60 per cent of whom are from the local area.
“They are proud of the place, so when they have relatives over, it’s somewhere they like to take them,” Igor says.
Built 90 years ago for major district landowners, the grand farmhouse became a nursing home in the ’50s and ’60s, a function centre in the ’70s and ’80s, and even for a brief time a childcare centre. When Igor made a successful offer in 2002, the sale contract was held up over highway access issues. For a while it was touch and go, until local media mounted a campaign to support their favourite chocolatier.
Igor sees great potential for food tourism in the state. “People like to experience something,” he says. “They want to be able to tell the story as well.
“A lot of people do things that they don’t think other people would be interested in, but I believe strongly that if you grew potatoes up here near Sassafras, say, and set up a tourism attraction based around that, people would come.
“They want to see where the food comes from and relate to it that way.”
Though it still dominates, the House of Anvers no longer has the artisan chocolate space to itself, with small-batch producers including Nutpatch, Coal River Farm and Cat’s Tongue all making their mark from their southern Tasmanian strongholds.
It’s a great fit for the state where Cadbury’s Chocolate Factory was founded almost a hundred years ago. Generations of Tasmanians have grown up not only eating but feeling especially fond of locally made chocolates.
I wonder, though, if locals balked at Igor’s handcrafted price tags back in the late ’80s. He laughs. “I had my costings all wrong,” he says. “My business skills weren’t there, basically. The more we were making, the more we were losing.”
As he celebrates 30 years in business, Igor reveals he is actively seeking financial partners to grow all aspects of the business.
“You can’t sit still and just keep doing the same thing over and over,” he says. “We are looking for partners to expand both production and the tourism sides of the business.”
He has already bought neighbouring land for the new chocolate factory he plans to build. That will mean moving the existing production facility out of the big back rooms of the house, giving it over to tourism.
In coming years, he hopes to spend less time in the office and more time experimenting and expanding his range of pralines, fudge, truffles and other products, with a particular focus on single-origin flavours.
Tasmania is remarkable for the sheer variety of premium foods it grows, but the cocoa bean is not one of them. We live in the wrong latitude for cacao trees, which thrive in high-altitude equatorial climates.
What Anvers does have at hand is sweet creamy dairy milk from Ashgrove Farm’s Brown Swiss and Friesian herd down the road. After all these years, Igor is still in love with Tassie milk.
“In Belgium cows go into feeding lots in the winter, sometimes for six to eight months, where they are fed grain and even turnips – imagine a turnip-flavoured milk.It’s not good, not with chocolate, anyway.
“Here we can get fresh high-fat content cream all year around and the flavour is just fantastic.”
Anvers also has easy access to delectable soft filling ingredients, including Elizabeth Town’s Christmas Hills Raspberry Farm berries and whisky from Hellyers Road Distillery at Burnie.
Despite their quality and rich slow-grown flavours, Igor says it is not really the Tassie ingredients that give Anvers chocs that certain je ne sais quoi. It’s the cocoa beans from afar.
Most of the world’s cocoa is grown on the west coast of Africa, including Ghana, which Igor draws on for his signature range, and the Ivory Coast. It’s South America, though, where he is avidly following the trail of heirloom varieties today.
Like many foodstuffs subject to international commodity markets, cacao fruit has been hybridised to a perilous point of sameness in recent decades.
Tasteless tomatoes come to mind as he describes how fast-growing strains developed for mass production have come to dominate the market.
“Because of the commodity market, farmers grow whatever grows the biggest and fastest,” he says of the often poverty-stricken farmers in third-world countries. “You can’t blame them for it, but it’s meant that over the years chocolate has become less strong in flavour and less specific in characteristics.
“Everything has begun to taste the same. When I was at school a Swiss chocolate and a Belgian chocolate were totally different. Now you will struggle to do a comparison because most source the same cocoa.
“Imagine you went into a bottle shop and there was only shiraz. That’s what’s happening in the chocolate world. There’s only one variety out there, though thousands of cocoa varieties exist.”
Shunning uniformity, Igor goes in search of distinctive varieties. “That’s where the terroir comes in,” he says. “I started looking for stronger flavours and commissioned factories to make chocolate to my specifications.”
Igor is part of a loose affiliation of about 35 top-end chocolate hunters, including famous French chocolate sculptor Patrick Roger, which buys from remote farming communities.
He describes it as a win-win arrangement, benefiting chocolatiers, growers and the environment.
“Direct trade bypasses the commodity market and the rarer and more flavoursome the cocoa, the more desirable it is and the more a farmer can get for it,” he says.
“Hybrids grow fast and take a lot of nutrients compared with the heirloom varieties, so they need fertilisation, too. Worse, if the farmer can’t afford fertilisation, they will just move their farm into the forest, cutting down another piece of forest for it. We have seen a fair bit of that.”
The late TV chef and chocolate connoisseur Anthony Bourdain was part of the same exclusive group of choc hunters on a mission to source the best cocoa in the world.
They reached chocolated heaven just over a decade ago, when an old forastero gene variety thought to have been wiped out by disease in 1919 was discovered still to be growing in the Maranon Valley of Peru.
DNA-tested by the US Department of Agriculture, it was deemed to produce the purest cocoa in the world, at 68 per cent. Promising to keep the location secret, Bourdain featured farmer Don Fortunato and his rare, high-altitude crop in an episode of his travel and food show Parts Unknown.
Fortunato had been planning to pull out his pure nacional crop and replace it with a higher-yielding hybrid when its rare value was identified. Now, says Igor, more than 200 farmers in that northern pocket of Peru are growing pure nacional beans, with prices bringing an appreciable improvement in living standards to villagers.
Igor had heard on the grapevine about the pure nacional cocoa from Fortunato’s crop and was desperate to get his hands on the couverture made from it. But to do so, he had convince the supplier, Maranon, of his keenness. That meant getting on a plane and travelling to the source to convince US/Peruvian dual national Brian Horsley, the company’s chief operating officer, that he meant business.
Getting there was quite a hike, especially with the most precious beans growing at high altitudes where they produce fewer tannins and less bitterness.
“At that time the location was secret,” he says of his visit five years ago. “To get there you have to fly to Lima, take another flight to the northern city of Chiclayo, drive over the Andes [Mountains] to get to the upper Amazon, then travel another four hours to the township where the cocoa bean fermentation is done. And then you are only a day away from the farm by four-wheel drive.”
Usually river crossings across Manyon Canyon are made by barge, but on Igor’s trip the huge waterway was flooded and he was forced to travel across by motorised canoe. Another day, he had to pick his way back down a mountain leading a donkey carrying beans back to the fermentation station.
The beans inside the large, football-shaped cacao fruit are coated in a high-sugar mulch with which they are fermented at what are often primitive stations before being roasted at low temperatures. They are then transported, usually via Lima, to specialised factories that make the couverture that is delivered in bud form to chocolatiers such as Igor.
The coveted pure nacional beans are sent to Switzerland where chocolate makers transform it into trademarked Fortunato No4 couverture. Igor has sole rights to the product in Australia. “Try it,” he says breaking open a block of his Fortunato
No4 dark chocolate blend at our lunch table.
“Though it is 68 per cent cocoa, It has hardly any bitterness — good quality chocolate should not be bitter — and it almost resembles milk chocolate.”
Igor’s latest project is developing a couverture from Mexican cocoa. He also continue buy small amounts of cocoa from Uganda, Ecuador and Vietnam.
Typically, he makes his own couverture only when he is developing recipes for the chocolate-makers he commissions to produce couverture to his specifications.
“But that’s going to change,” he says. Igor plans to take Anvers on a bean to bar journey, as it’s called in the trade — that is, he plans to make all of his couverture from scratch.
He is particularly keen to develop more single-origin flavours. But he needs a more contemporary set-up to make enough to meet the current demand, let alone provide for growth. Hence the call for business partners.
After 40 years making chocolate, Igor says he is at peace eschewing trends and over-the-top fanciness in favour of going back to basics.
“I find the chocolate industry has gone elaborate trying to make chocolate taste like lollies,” he says. “Because the chocolate itself has no taste, they are trying to add flavours to it.
“For us, the chocolate is always going to be the hero.”
As he gets older, he finds chocolate history as rich as the food itself. And it’s no wonder, with the cocoa bean recognised as the world’s first currency, and honoured with its own Mayan deity, Ek Chuaj.
“I want to go back more to the origins,” he says. “My trip in March to Mexico was taking that a step further, by starting to learn more about how the descendants of the Maya people still use cocoa. And get ideas and inspiration for that.”
One of his biggest takeaways from that visit came from working side by side with indigenous highland cooks making traditional mole in a primitive workshop.
“It’s fantastic,” he promises of the slow-cooked chicken dish served in a dark chocolate sauce. But you be the judge — it will be on the Anvers cafe menu soon.
Chocolate Winterfest is on tomorrow, Sunday August 11, from 10.30am-3.30pm at Latrobe. The House of Anvers is at 9025 Bass Highway, Latrobe
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