The Journey
Chocolate @ Henry’s
It all started just after the turn of the millennium. I was given the gift of a ticket to attend a ’Chocolate and Wine Evening’ at 'Bean', a nearby chocolate shop and café in Tunbridge Wells.
The reason for the gift was plainly due to my love of both wine and chocolate… and, wow, did it change my life.
The evening was an eye-opener for me. Chatting to the chocolatier running the event, Phil Stas, proved a revelation. I enjoyed it so much that I returned to a second event some four weeks later. On this occasion, I pressed Phil for further information about this mystical process called ‘tempering’. He explained it and I tried it. It worked.
I came to the blinding realisation that chocolate was my creative medium. I bought some moulds and learnt to make truffles.
Initially, I gave the truffles away to friends and family members but, before long, I was asked to make some… for money! And so it was that Handmade by Henry became born. It is a name that remains in use to this day.
Over twenty-five years later, I’m still creating with over seven hundred products available and hundreds of bespoke projects successfully completed
The Mission
Chocolate… Pure and Simple
From the very start of my journey with chocolate, the purity and simplicity of the core ingredient was paramount.
Without the wherewithal to create my own chocolate from bean, I had to find a chocolate, or couverture, as it’s known, which I could countenance ethically and, vitally, a chocolate that I enjoyed.
During the autumn of 2001, there was a rather fun evening during which three of us sat in a kitchen with seventeen different makes, types and strengths of chocolate. White, milk and dark (ruby hadn’t been discovered at that time), we worked our way through them and settled on four. One white, one milk and two dark, 55% and 70%. To our surprise we all much agreed and, even more surprising, they all came from the same couverture manufacturer!
I still use the same white, milk and 70% dark couvertures in most of my creations.
The Vision
Chocolate… Pure and Simple
From the very first truffle until I make my very last piece of chocolate, I will hold to my original tenet... it's all about the chocolate.
I read many recipes and researched many methods of creating truffles and chocolates and finally came back to the principle that less is more. Any flavours added to my products should NOT be over-powering nor take away from the texture and pleasure that the base chocolate delivers. The only exception might be the Extreme Chilli which will afford you the luxury of tasting the chocolate as it seductively melts across your tongue, luring you into a sense of pure pleasure before it blows your head off!
There is much talk about how many companies are cutting costs by 'shrinkflation' (making smaller products at the same retail price) or reducing the quality of the chocolate by lowering the percentage of cocoa in their products. One of the most common and invidious is the introduction of vegetable oils into the chocolate. Check out the ingredients list of the product as you purchase it. Vegetable oil, very often palm oil, will be high in the ingredients when listed by percentage weight. This is entirely legal in the UK. Up to 5% of the product weight can be made up with these oils to replace the cocoa element of the product. Given the current national statistics, this equates to over 24 million kilograms of oils that are unnecessarily used... all to chase a profit regardless of the effect on the planet and our own health.
Handmade by Henry will always maintain the standard that it's all about the chocolate, ethics and quality.
