We hear from Yatir Linden, a materials scientist and a pioneer of chocolate made without the high-sugar content of modern brands, and Aaron Torres, head roaster at Ue Coffee Roasters, a Witney-based company who handcraft specialist coffee to perfection, to discover the secrets of some of our favourite things to eat and drink.
Chocolate
Yatir Linden is a chocolate maker. Whereas a chocolatier takes readymade chocolate to create their designs, a chocolate maker builds the recipe and using a machine, grinds the ingredients themselves. This is the story of his Jericho-based micro-batch chocolate lab.
When I was in my early twenties I was involved in competitive endurance sport in which my performance really benefitted from a healthy lifestyle. I wished to eat well and even the chocolate in health shops contains 30-40% sugar. Butter, sugar and cream combined taste delicious but in large quantities aren’t necessarily good for you. Sugar for example is not only abundant, it’s addictive too. And although you can bake a cake from scratch at home and adapt the ingredients to make the end result healthier, it wasn’t really possible to make chocolate at home. And everyone loves a chocolate treat!
My wife and I began playing with the ingredients and in 2016 set up the Linden Chocolate Lab with the intention of more than halving the sugar content of chocolate and reducing the proportion of added sugar in the finished bar from the industry average of 30-50%. Even in 70% dark chocolate the average sugar content is usually 30%, and we have reduced this proportion in our chocolate to only 15-16%, even in white chocolate. It had never been done before.
Actually, when you reduce the sugar content, the natural flavour of the chocolate comes out more strongly, and now we combine the traditional batch-making methods of small artisan chocolatiers with the healthy ambition of the vegan and raw chocolate makers to create chocolate that is healthy and yet still tastes delicious.
I enjoy playing with flavours, and finding the perfect balance of spices is a real challenge. Our range includes both classic flavours like caramel and more unusual ones like pink peppercorn, which is sweet with a bit of kick. Some of our flavours such as chai masala and spiced coffee have multiple ingredients to get the taste just so, and I’m particularly proud of them as they’re hard to make.
You can join Yatir to hear more about chocolate making as part of IF Oxford, the science and ideas Festival (The surprising science of chocolate, Thursday 8 October).
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Yatir is offering OX readers a 12% Linden Chocolate Lab discount, both online and in-store! Just use the code: OXMAG
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Coffee
Aaron Torres, head roaster at Ue Coffee Roasters, grew up by a coffee expresso machine in Zaragoza, Spain, where his parents ran a café. Then having studied chemistry at university, he was keen to pull his two passions together. He trained to become a certified barista, before moving to Oxford in 2016 to both develop his language and put his roasting skills to good use for refined Oxfordshire palates.
A great cup of coffee is all about science. There are many chemical reactions throughout the whole process of roasting and brewing.
Of course, it all starts with the beans themselves, the seeds of coffee cherries, and even the soil in which the coffee plants are grown has an effect on the chemistry of the beans. We’ll roast each type of bean slightly differently to bring out the best taste. There are 100 different types of coffee bean but mostly only two of these are sold in supermarkets, Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta, and the prices of these are fixed globally. The other types are much more exclusive specialty coffees and that’s what we work with. There’s so much more variety!
Here in Witney we receive the raw agricultural material from these farms – green beans in jute sacks. The beans are 70% cellulose, a tough vegetable fibre that doesn’t dissolve, and first we roast the beans to break it down. It’s only then that we can release the flavour from the other 30% of the bean, a rich mix of sugars like fructose and glucose and acids, including citric acid. It’s the combination of these sugars and acids that makes coffee taste the way it does.
Then during the brewing process, we extract the sweetest part of the coffee. As with any chemical reaction, it is by measuring all the variables precisely – from the quantity of dried coffee and the amount of water, to the temperature of the water and the length of time it is brewed – that we achieve the sweetest and most balanced flavour in every cup. Under-extraction will make the finished drink rather sour, and extracting too much flavour makes the coffee bitter. And so, we find that perfect balance for a delicious coffee. We always use filtered water as a cup of coffee is 98% water after all, so the chemistry of the water will alter the coffee too.
We have three machines at Ue Coffee Roasters – the smallest of which roasts just 100g of green beans at a time. I enjoy experimenting with the different variables to work out how to get the best tasting coffee from each type of bean. South American beans tend to be mild with a chocolatey-sweet taste; African coffee has a complex and lively flavour with more fruity and floral aromas; whilst Asian varieties have spicy notes of cloves or tobacco, nuts or pepper.
You can hear more about the science of coffee, from the cultivation and harvesting of the coffee beans, through the selection and roasting processes, to the grinding, brewing and tasting experience in a digital event as part of IF Oxford, the science and ideas Festival (The art and science of coffee, Saturday 3 October).