By Suman Tarafdar

Dreams come in many shapes and, for those exposed to Roald Dahl’s incomparable Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at an early age, one of going to a chocolate factory was ranked on top. Well, unfortunately for most Indians, those chocolate factories were far away, in places such as Bruges or Cologne or Hershey. This situation has been rectified to a degree with the opening of Colocal, which offers, along with casual café dining, an actual chocolate factory on its oh-so-pretty premises in one of Delhi’s newly trendy addresses – Dhan Mill in Chhattarpur.

Spread over two levels, Colocal’s spacious interiors are designed to be a momentary escape to faraway Goa or Pondicherry. The upper level is dedicated to the factory. For anyone wishing to learn about the process of how chocolate is made from cocoa beans, this section is a must visit.

Sheetal Saxena, co-founder, Colocal, says the idea came to her as she and her husband Nishant, who owns the Roastery Coffee House India with outlets in Hyderabad and Kolkata, saw a video of cocoa (or cacao) getting roasted in Vietnam. “We got really excited and inquisitive about it,” she says. “We headed to Vietnam, realised that was how cocoa gets roasted and that’s how you make chocolate. We understood the whole bean-to-bar process and the world of craft chocolate. We also surveyed the Indian industry. There are at least 12 chocolate makers that I am aware of. We realised that if handled properly, cocoa behaves very much like coffee, so you can taste the notes in it and enhance the notes by fermentation and roasting.”

Roasting was a challenge. “Nobody roasts their cocoa in India,” says Saxena. “Probably because it’s expensive and there is an educational gap, which we too were not aware of.” The duo ordered a Giesen roaster – customised for cocoa. “The temperature for coffee and cocoa is different. If you use the same roaster, it will not give you a good profile. We want people to taste the notes that are beneath the chocolate.” Saxena says they ensure the vinegar and bitterness of the raw product is removed before roasting the beans.

Another unique step that Colocal has taken is conching their chocolate, by which a surface scraping mixer and agitator, known as a conche, evenly distributes cocoa butter within chocolate, evaporating the acid, and giving a smoother, palatable chocolate with an after-bitter taste. “As the acidity is removed, it mixes well with other ingredients. Baking chocolate needs to be without acidity. We want a macron size of 15-25 – more than that means it is too grainy for our level. We have a device to monitor this, ensuring that our chocolate falls in the desired macron size, and we can mould it anytime.”

‘What people eat is not chocolate’

Saxena estimates that the chocolate market in India today is where coffee was about a decade ago. “The specialty coffee scene in India at that time was small. But now, as people understand specialty coffee, the pie is getting larger. Citing the example of Blue Tokai, she says that, just as the brand introduced Indians to finer aspects of coffee, Colocal wants to do for chocolate. “We may have just a handful of people who do understand chocolate, but the idea of having the bean-to-bar process is to educate people on it, so that they understand what real chocolate is. And then we expand the market.”