Willie Harcourt-Cooze

Willie Harcourt-Cooze is on a mission to produce the best chocolate in the world, from bean to bar and beyond. It is the culmination of a dream that started 12 years ago, when he bought a cocoa farm in the lush rainforest of Venezuela. Now, having lived in Venezuela for five years, and spent the last few years trying to start up a chocolate factory in Devon, the dream is about to become a reality. Willie is about to become one of the first Britons since Cadbury to grow and produce his own chocolate, and it promises to be a remarkable product.

The whole dramatic story of this extraordinary and unique project is told in the forthcoming four-part series Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory, complete with mouth-watering recipes and mountains of chocolate, though sadly lacking in Oompa Loompas. Here, Willie reveals how his taste buds developed in Ireland and led him to Venezuela before depositing him in a converted chicken shed in Devon. He also reveals why gravy isn’t gravy without a bit of chocolate, and why he’s most definitely not a man to be truffled with.

Where does your obsession with chocolate come from?
It originated when I was in Venezuela, and I was looking at the guide book, and I could see that the country was famous for chocolate. That day, I had a chance meeting with a guy who rented umbrellas out on the beach. We struck up a conversation, and he said he had a friend in the mountains who wanted to sell his chocolate farm. And we thought it would be a great adventure to explore away from the beach, so we went up there. Once we crossed over the river into the farm, in the shade of the trees where the cocoa was growing, it was mystic. And we ended up buying the farm. The whole thing was a package of paradise, chocolate and beauty. It was some form of perfection. And then I discovered how multi-faceted chocolate could be as well, as a drink, a confectionary, a savoury, it has so many uses.

Did you immediately start selling your chocolate?
I made a cylindrical-shaped chocolate bar, which is the same shape that I’m selling now. And we sold it in the village, and to any tourists or Venezuelans, and I quickly got a name for making the best chocolate bar. It was a particularly high quality chocolate, and I was also making loads of other chocolate dishes using our chocolate.

So did you already have a culinary background?
I grew up in Southern Ireland. My father bought an island, 150 acres, off the southwest coast of Ireland. We grew everything; we were the original Good Life family. We grew oats, wheat and barley, and milled it all on the back of a tractor. We had goats for milk, made yoghurt and cheese, we had bees for honey. Everything you could imagine, we made. We even cooked mackerel for the dog every day. The kind of food that’s very popular now, very simple, fresh produce, highlighted with herbs; that was what we were doing back then. That was just how I was brought up. And I travelled around the world, and picked up culinary tips as I went.

You must have had to teach yourself fairly quickly about farming and making chocolate.
Well, it’s trial and error. I’ve never read a book about how to make chocolate. I’m really self-taught. I learned it myself roasting the beans, shelling them by hand, grounding them three or flour times. Of course, there were influencing people, friends who helped out, but I would say I’m mostly self-taught.

You clearly love the life out in Venezuela. Why did you come back after eight years there?
Venezuela just got a little bit tricky, economically. There was a down-turn. We just weren’t making the money in the hacienda to survive, so we came back. I try to go back for the new crop every six months. This year I won’t go back, because I’m launching the chocolate here.

You’ve had the farm for 12 years. Why is it that you’re only opening your chocolate factory in England now?
The chocolate factory was obviously the dream right from the start. But it’s not very easy to find, second-hand, the kind of machinery I wanted. The chocolate industry is funny. The business is monopolised by a couple of companies, so the people who make the machinery either make small laboratory ones, for roasting two kilos an hour, or the very big ones, which roast a tonne an hour. And I want something that will do something in between, so I had to track down all of the machinery I needed. I started searching in 2001, all over the world. I had to just wait until some stuff came up that was small enough for me to use, and funnily enough, most of it turned out to be antique. It took literally years to find the kit, get the premises, and raise the money to get started.

Your mission is to make one of the best chocolates in the world. Now that you’ve started production, how is that going?
It’s going well. I think that my three 100 per cent cacao bars will be knockout. Chocolate’s all about different flavours. I call my three bars “the three kings”; they are three very distinct flavours, resulting from the use of three different cocoa beans. It’s all about preference - there’s a lot of snobbery about things like milk chocolate not being as good as dark chocolate, but we’ve all got to respect people’s tastes. I’d love to make a good milk chocolate. But I think that my product is very good. I’m in the middle of my order from Selfridges at the moment.

So people will be able to buy it from there?
They will, yes.

Anywhere else?
Well, you’ll have to watch the series to find out. I don’t want to spoil the story.

What will the chocolate be called?
The bars are going to be called “Venezuelan Black”. There are three types of Venezuelan Black: Carenero, Rio Caribe and El Tesoro. El Tesoro is the name of my farm, it means Treasure. El Tesoro is grown and made by me, the others two bars are named after the type of bean they’re made with, which I’ve carefully selected myself from other farms.

The show also features a lot of recipes featuring chocolate. How often in your day-to-day life do you feature chocolate in your dishes?
I put it in everything. It doesn’t go well directly on white fish. But if you’re making any gravy, you’d be a fool not to put a bit in. It’s an ingredient, chocolate, a flavour enhancer. Most people think of putting a stock cube in, but a little bit of chocolate enriches and thickens a sauce. You should put a little bit in a casserole or a Bolognese. I’m talking about small quantities here.

You made a gazpacho with chocolate too, didn’t you?
Well, I’ve got to say, the thing about tomatoes and chocolate, they were married at some point. You can make fantastic Bloody Marys with chocolate. Soak the vodka in chocolate first, it’s fantastic.

What’s been the high point of the whole adventure?
Well, if I go backwards, the other day getting all the machines working and seeing everything filled with chocolate and working in front of me; that was definitely a milestone for me. Walking into the premises that I’ve got, the chicken shed that I use as the factory; that was a milestone. Buying the first pieces of machinery was a milestone. Going back further, the success I had in selling my chocolate in Venezuela was great, that’s how we managed to keep going in Venezuela. And, to go right back to the beginning, the buying of the farm was massively important.

What have been the low points?
To go backwards again: I dropped a machine off the forklift truck a few days ago. It fell off, and there was a moment there when I thought I was in trouble. I lost a harvest once, completely. There was a little moth that laid its eggs in the cocoa pod, and so I had to bury the whole crop with lime on it. That was a climatic thing linked with El Niño; I had no cocoa that year at all. And of course there’s been trouble getting money from the bank, and lots of jeopardy, and fixing the machines was immensely difficult. As a boy I learned how to fix everything on the island with my dad, but this stuff was totally different. It was a much bigger task.

How good is your chocolate? Is it the best in the country?
I’ve certainly made the best 100 per cent. I don’t think there is a 100 per cent bar made with such fine quality beans in the world. I don’t think that’s any wild claim. For a start, 85 per cent of the world’s cocoa beans come from Africa, where they use a fast-growing hybrid. It doesn’t have the flavours that South American beans do. Venezuela is the source of the best beans in the world. And the beans I’ve used are wonderful beans.

And people can use your chocolate to make their choccie treats, such as truffles or brownies, can’t they?
Absolutely. They can mix in their own quantity of sugar; and not only that, their own type of sugar. Suddenly diabetics are going to have the three best chocolates in the world. They can add whatever sugar amount they can tolerate. But certainly, I think I can say without bragging that I am producing the three best 100 per cent bars in the world.

Do you ever just go and buy a bar of chocolate in the shops?
Yeah. I’m not a milk chocolate man. I enjoy dark chocolate; when I was a boy it was Black Magic and Bourneville. We weren’t great chocolate-and-sugar eaters. I don’t have a sweet tooth at all. But I’d buy the odd bar of Lindt if I was making truffles and wanted a coating on the outside. And I try lots of chocolates just to know where the market is. Valrhona do very good chocolate; they make it from fine beans. I’m going to be England’s answer to Valrhona. But I’m not a chocolatier. I don’t make chocolate, I make chocolat. What I make is the source of all chocolate products, whether they’re drinks, cakes or bars of chocolate, they all come from the 100 per cent stuff. If you were going to make a bar of chocolate that was 70 per cent, you’d simply add 30 per cent sugar to my product, and add a little cocoa butter.

So what you sell is an ingredient?
Yeah, and people can make their own truffles or whatever. And hopefully, after this programme, it’d be nice to think that people might put a little bit into their gravy for Sunday lunch. People have forgotten what chocolate is all about. It used to be a drink that had amazing qualities. The Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes once said “An army can march all day on one glass of chocolat.” It wasn’t until hundreds of years later that it was made into a bar, and we’ve just gone down that route. I’m taking it back to its roots. Sugar just masks the flavour of chocolate, and removes the properties that act as a pick-me-up and give you a feeling of well-being. That’s what I want to remind people about.

By Benjie Goodhart