Soma

The small leaflet enclosed in box sums it up  - “travelling without moving”. What better way to travel than via the tastes of chocolate, especially during this month of love? While Toronto is cold and snowy and many are planning their winter escape, I’ll visit exotic places and warmer climes with a bite of chocolate. 

East of downtown Toronto is the site of old the Gooderham and Worts distillery, once the largest distillery in the world. The whisky has long gone, but the austere Victorian industrial architecture remains and in one of the former Tank houses you’ll find the Soma chocolate store.

It’s retail space that includes a café where you can taste hot chocolate, nibble on chocolates and cookies with a coffee, or enjoy gelato, and it’s more. In one corner are sacks of cacao beans, their exotic origins stamped on the bags, and behind glass walls are the chocolate “factory” and laboratory.  Here, beans from around the world are sorted, roasted, ground and turned into liquid chocolate.

The master of this cacao paradise is David Castellan, a man who lives and breathes chocolate. Now Castellan isn’t simply a chocolatier, unlike most stores and the small artisans he doesn’t buy his chocolate, he makes his own chocolate. Castellan has built his reputation and loyal following by turning cacao beans into small batch chocolate bars.

Just get him talking about the cacao beans, and you’ll discover that chocolate, like wine, has a language of its own, and its flavour of beans depends on variety and terroir of the bean.  Preferring organic and fair-trade growers, Castellan is always on the search for quality beans. He shows me a bag of prized, rare crillo beans that he has just managed to import from Chuao in Venezuela. This is of the most famous regions for cacao beans, think Romanée-Conti, and the beans from Chuao yield some of the best and most complex chocolate flavours in the world.

What makes me really like Castellan is his ability to think outside the box. He has a touch of mad scientist about him willing to match chocolate with unusual flavours. He tells me that when making chocolate you can smell the acetic acid being driven out, so he decided to add a little back and make a chocolate with an aged balsamic vinegar filling.

Currently he is playing with sour flavours, a man after my own heart and for the season of love he is thinking red. He has matched red sumac and crimson barberries, both popular flavours in the Middle East, with chocolate as well as more familiar cranberries and wild cherries.

We talk about other flavours with chocolate and when I propose pork fat he doesn’t even blink. He tells me that while sucking on a marrow bone recently he wondered about matching it with chocolate.  I’m hoping he pursues this idea, as bone marrow is one of my favourite fats.

A visit to Soma is a voyage through the world of chocolate. You’ll travel from Papua New Guinea to Costa Rica, Ghana to Ecuador, Tanzania to Peru and Madagascar to Venezuela, stopping off enroute in the Dominican Republic, all without needing a passport. Flavour adventurers can try Castellan’s “Old School Chocolate” chocolate in its purist form; the beans simply crushed to a paste with sugar and formed into bars with no further processing.

This month of love supplies the impetus to visit Soma but there are lots of good reasons to visit once it is over. In Sanskrit Soma means “food of the gods”, and don’t we all want to eat like a god once and awhile.

A Chocolate Love Rekindled - February Column by Jennifer Mclagan