Chocolatier Peter Edmunds knows his chocolate. He will offer you the most smooth and creamy, top notch chocolate, that not only tastes like heaven in your mouth, but could also offer you health benefits too. Sounds like my kind of guy…
Trained chef, Edmunds originally from Australia, moved to Cayenne, Normandy in France a few years ago and fell in love with two things; organic food and chocolate. What Edmunds really admired about the two was how the Europeans value quality.
“In Australia, a lot of people see good value as ‘it’s cheap and I get a big bucket of it’. Whereas the French classify best value in small quantities, but quality. So it might be a lot more expensive, but they go for the best.”
This concept is something Edmunds fell in love with and decided to take to Sydney. He looked for a niche in the market and could not find anyone else making organic, hand-made chocolate and that is how Lindsay & Edmunds Handmade Chocolate was born. Edmunds is a strong advocate of organic eating, seeing many benefits; no pesticides and fungicides, no artificial fertiziliers and no genetically modified products.
When Edmunds got down to it, he learnt that the cacao plant (what chocolate is made of) is one of the most highly sprayed plants on the earth. Considering how many people in the world love chocolate, Edmunds was shocked to learn just how many people would be ingesting these chemicals on a daily basis and made his business concept even stronger.
And if organic and hand-made isn’t enough for your conscience, there is also the Fair Trade aspect of his business. Products like cacao and coffee are mainly grown in third world countries and there is a terrible cycle of poverty for the farmers because they don’t get a fair price for their products. The Fair Trade Organisation allows farmers to use sustainable farming practices in their products and they can therefore afford to send their children to school who are getting an education rather than perpetuating that cycle of lack of education.
When Edmunds made his first ever batch of chocolate, he made semi-dried strawberries dipped in dark and white chocolate. He took them to the Mosman Markets in Sydney and they sold out within the hour.
He and his wife spent six months researching different products and ingredients and someone suggested they set up a stall at the Farmers Markets in Canberra. Four years ago, they did just that and have not looked back. They made the move to Canberra and set up the Lindsay & Edmunds shop front in Fairbairn.
They now have stockists all around Australia; Queensland, NSW, ACT, Victoria and around 80 places that supply wholesale. As well as wholesale, they also make a mean Single Origin Fair Trade coffee at their shop front and they do events such as the National Folk Festival, Floriade and the Hand-Made Markets.
Edmunds believes that his chocolate business is doing so well in Canberra because Canberra is a very educated market.
“There are a high percentage of tertiary educated people here, but they are also educated with food. They understand our chocolate is quite expensive, but it is high quality and they understand you get what you pay for.”
There are different types of chocolate. There is compound chocolate and coverture chocolate. Couverture chocolate is much better quality and it has to have a minimum amount of coco mass that is set by the European Union. Again, Lindsay & Edmunds chocolate is different to both types; it is Single Origin Chocolate. This means the chocolate is imported from Belgium and is all grown in the Dominican Republic from a Fair Trade Organisation there. It has a more distinct flavour and their white chocolate has 29 per cent coco butter, the milk chocolate has 37 per cent coco mass and the dark chocolate has 72 per cent coco mass, which is extremely high. All their chocolate is gluten free and there are no blended vegetable oils.
Something for all chocolate lovers to get excited about, especially those on diets, is the higher the coco mass, the more ‘healthy’ the chocolate. It means the chocolate has more antioxidants and less fat. But, as Edmunds advises, if you want pure health benefits of chocolate, eat a coco bean!
For those who wander into Lindsay & Edmunds Handmade Chocolate but are overwhelmed by the 30 individual chocolates and 15 chocolate slabs, Edmunds has a few recommendations.
“I always ask people what sort of chocolate they prefer, white, milk or dark and then depending on what they like, I run them through the combinations that I really like and that are our best sellers.”
When I ask what some of those favourites are he tells me
“my favourites would have to be the dark chocolate with ginger, the dark with orange or the nut cluster. I also love our roasted cacao and milk chocolate slabs, the liquers – Amaretto, coffee Kahlua and Calvados (an apple brandy from Normandy). Our signature chocolate is probably the Medjool date truffle; blend of Medjool dates, cognac, toasted coconut, roasted almonds all rolled into a ball and dipped into dark chocolate.”
